SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
Page 1 TOP OF DOC
20–131
2005
[H.A.S.C. No. 108–36]
UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE REFORM
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
AUGUST 10, 2004
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Eighth Congress
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
Page 2 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD ''BUCK'' MCKEON, California
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico
KEN CALVERT, California
ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
EDWARD SCHROCK, Virginia
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
RANDY FORBES, Virginia
JEFF MILLER, Florida
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey
TOM COLE, Oklahoma
JEB BRADLEY, New Hampshire
Page 3 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
ROB BISHOP, Utah
MICHAEL TURNER, Ohio
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota
CANDICE MILLER, Michigan
PHIL GINGREY, Georgia
MIKE ROGERS, Alabama
TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
MIKE MCINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
Page 4 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
STEVE ISRAEL, New York
RICK LARSEN, Washington
JIM COOPER, Tennessee
JIM MARSHALL, Georgia
KENDRICK MEEK, Florida
MADELEINE BORDALLO, Guam
RODNEY ALEXANDER, Louisiana
VACANCY
Robert S. Rangel, Staff Director
Eric R. Sterner, Professional Staff Member
Justin Bernier, Research Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
2004
HEARING:
Tuesday, August 10, 2004, Denying Terrorist Sanctuaries: Policy and Operational Implications for the U.S. Military
Page 5 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
APPENDIX:
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2004
DENYING TERRORIST SANCTUARIES: POLICY AND OPERATIONAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE U.S. MILITARY
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
Wolfowitz, Hon. Paul D., Deputy Secretary of Defense
Pace, Gen. Peter, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Brown, Gen. Bryan D., USA, Commander, U.S. Special Oprations Command
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Page 6 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
[The prepared statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Skelton, Hon. Ike
Wolfowitz, Hon. Paul
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
DENYING TERRORIST SANCTUARIES: POLICY AND OPERATIONAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE U.S. MILITARY
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Tuesday, August 10, 2004.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 3:54 p.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Duncan Hunter (chairman of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. DUNCAN HUNTER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The committee will reconvene.
Page 7 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We are meeting for our second hearing today to discuss the 9/11 Commission's specific recommendations to deny terrorists sanctuary.
And our witnesses this afternoon are the Honorable Paul D. Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense; General Peter Pace, United States Marine Corps, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and General Bryan D. Brown, United States Army, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
So, gentlemen, thanks a lot for coming. We appreciate your appearance before the committee. And I think it is especially timely following the presentations by Governor Kean and Lee Hamilton.
The 9/11 Commission highlighted the need to keep terrorists on the run and deny them opportunities to establish bases, to train, to recruit and to plan. They further recommended identifying real and potential sanctuaries and making a long-term commitment to Pakistan and Afghanistan while reconfiguring our relationship with Saudi Arabia.
We can all agree on the importance of denying our enemy sanctuary; the trick is to make the recommendation real. The commission report is a little vague on that point. It does not tell us how to handle states that sponsor terrorist acts or harbor terrorist leaders, such as Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan or Libya.
They didn't recommend what to do in the Philippines or Indonesia where groups aligned with al Qaeda routinely commit murder and mayhem in the name of extremist Islam.
Page 8 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Governments struggle to crush violence, while learning how to respect democracy and individual rights.
And understanding that was the peripheral to the commission's main charter, it still obviously is a very important area. And it can be argued that this was to some degree beyond their charter, but nonetheless it is an area that is very, very important to us.
The good news is that the Administration, Congress and the commission agreed on the importance of eliminating terrorist sanctuaries. We have been doing just that since the 11th of September. Acting with a group of international partners and with the approval of Congress, our armed forces have eliminated the regimes the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, both of which sponsored and harbored international terrorists.
So, Mr. Secretary, thank you for being with us today.
And, General Pace, thank you and General Brown for being with us.
Because also a major part of the recommendations by the commission is the recommendation that paramilitary operations be carried on by special operators, not by the agency. And that is obviously a fundamental change from the status quo.
So these major questions with respect to sanctuary and the further questions with respect to operations, I think, are going to be very important to this committee.
Page 9 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So thank you for being with us. We had a good opportunity to chat during breakfast and try to lay down some of the divisions of labor between the other intelligence agencies and the ones that are harbored within the Department of Defense (DOD). But I think it is a good time for us to get into the substance of those divisions and for you to give your commentary on that aspect of this report.
So, Mr. Secretary, thank you for being with us.
And to all members, those members that didn't get a chance to ask questions of the first panel, we will take up after your opening statements with Ms. Miller of Michigan and we will go right down the line.
And before we go to our witnesses, let me ask Mr. Skelton to make any remarks he might want to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be viewed in the hard copy.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you again. And let me tell you we appreciate you calling these hearings, this series of hearings. And I join you in welcoming Secretary Wolfowitz, General Pace, General Brown.
Page 10 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Earlier this morning we had a very productive session with Chairman Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton. The commission that they headed wisely points out that the issue of denying terrorists sanctuaries must be part of any comprehensive strategy in dealing with terrorism.
The Department's Quadrennial Defense Review did deal with the issue, back in September 2001. The war on terror was just getting started then, and the Department and the military services have taken quite a few actions since that time to rout out sanctuaries.
But a comprehensive strategy that sets priorities is still needed, as the commission does point out. This committee has been waiting to receive the national military strategy, including its classified annexes, since it was due, back on February the 15th. This is not the first situation or the first time that documents that were required by law slipped.
Now, that document should deal more in detail with our strategy if we are denying terrorists sanctuary.
Mr. Secretary, I am told the document has been waiting for the Secretary's approval for some time. I wish you would discuss that when you have a chance.
Prioritizing our approach to terrorist sanctuaries is so critical. In my mind, a failure to prioritize it correctly is putting Afghanistan at risk of again descending into a viper's nest of terrorism.
By focusing our attention so much on Iraq, I think we have lost sight of the primary battleground among terrorist sanctuaries.
Page 11 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think we have overlooked the real war. Iraq has become a terrorist haven since the war there, and we must win it there, too. We have no choice.
We must renew our commitment to Afghanistan because the trends there are extremely dangerous. We are hunting al Qaeda in the south and southeast of the country, yet we are not dealing with some of the more long-term problems that are getting more entrenched all the time.
Warlords continue to hold considerable power. Narcotics trade is now estimated about half of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. Recent conservative estimates in the amount of drug money going into al Qaeda are in the millions of dollars. There is a clear linkage in Afghanistan between narcotic, warlords, al Qaeda and the future stability of Afghanistan.
We have to deal with the entire problem. And to do this, we need a comprehensive strategy. The strategy must have enough troops and enough financial resources for the long term.
This committee has committed to finding the extra end-strength, as you know, in our bill that will sustain this mission as well as the others that we need. If we don't, the successful Afghan elections that are scheduled for October won't matter because the country will sink back into terrorist snake pit over time.
So there we are, Mr. Secretary. We need your discussion and your serious attention to it.
Page 12 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
And, Mr. Secretary, welcome. And the floor is yours, sir.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be viewed in the hard copy.]
STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL D. WOLFOWITZ, DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify. Thank you for the very excellent discussion we had with a bipartisan group this morning over breakfast.
On behalf of my colleagues and everyone at the Department of Defense, I would like to begin by thanking this committee for your strong support for our men and women in uniform. They serve our country magnificently and bravely, and they deserve the kind of encouragement they get from knowing that their sacrifices are appreciated by Congress and by the American people. So let me thank you for your support.
I think they also would take encouragement from this large turnout here in the middle of August, in the middle of a fiercely fought election year. It is testimony to the seriousness with which the Congress, and this committee in particular, on a bipartisan basis are pursuing some issues that are central for our national security.
Page 13 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The purpose of today's hearing is to address the subject of denying sanctuary to terrorists, which forms one of the core recommendations of Chapter 12 of the commission's report. Tomorrow's hearing will address Chapter 13 and its recommendations on intelligence reform.
I have a longer statement, which I will submit for the record. I would like to just summarize some of the main points in it.
I was struck, in reading the report, and particularly Chapter 12, at a broad correspondence between some of the main recommendations of the commission and the lines of approach that the President laid out in the early weeks and months following September 11th.
The commission has emphasized that we are dealing with an enemy that means what it says; which is out to destroy us; and with whom negotiation, unfortunately, and bargaining is not possible.
The commission emphasizes the importance of integrating all elements of national power. We can't approach this struggle simply with one instrument, and certainly not with just the military instrument, even though that is our main focus in the Department of Defense and the main focus of this committee.
Third, the commission emphasized that this struggle is a global struggle, not confined to one particular theater, and that it will be a long one.
And that leads, fourth, to the important inclusion that constitutes the recommendations of section 12.2 of the report, that drawing up sanctuaries, wherever they may exist, has to be the linchpin of a successful strategy.
Page 14 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As I point out in my statement, and you can read it; I won't read every quote from the President, but the conclusions I have just summarized——
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, all the reports or all the written statements will be taken into the record.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Those four main conclusions were central features of a strategy the President outlined in the weeks and months following September 11th.
And I think it could be summarized in some respects as saying that the approach of the last 20 years or longer—dealing with terrorism as an evil, but a kind of an evil we had to live with, that we would deal with it by punishing terrorists after the fact, either in courts of law if we could catch them, or by punitive retaliation if they were countries.
But that approach doesn't work in an era when terrorists have the aims that they do today and when they have the means to inflict casualties of 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000. We need, as the President has pointed out, and as I think the commission report emphasizes, a strategy of prevention.
But if I can depart for just a few minutes from our main focus here, which will be on what the Defense Department can do, I think it is important to stress that prevention means more than killing or capturing terrorists.
Page 15 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Victory in the war on terror requires sowing the seeds of hope, particularly in the broader Middle East. And, in fact, in that early State of the Union message where the President spoke about the Axis of Evil, he also spoke at some length about what he called the forward strategy of freedom to deprive the terrorists and their organizations of the sanctuary they need.
As the President said, and I quote: ''America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.''
And the President took those ideas much further last fall in two very remarkable speeches, one at the National Endowment on Democracy, here, and the second one in London, where he spoke about the need for reform in the greater Middle East, the need to work with our partners in the greater Middle East and around the world to promote tolerance, the rule of law, political and economic openness, particularly for Muslims, but indeed more broadly.
And the 9/11 Commission report comes to a similar report conclusion on pages 362 and 363, where it talks about tolerance, the rule of law, political and economic openness, the extension of greater opportunities to women, saying that these cures must come from within Muslim societies themselves, but the United States must support such developments.
In short, it seems to me there is an agreement that terrorism needs to be eradicated and discarded, just as piracy and the slave trade were delegitimized and driven to the margins of civilized life in the past. The extremist ideology the terrorists espouse must be pushed to the margins of civilized society and replaced by a hopeful vision of freedom.
Page 16 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
That is an ambitious goal, but the threat we face is ambitious. Indeed, it is enormous and unprecedented.
Chairman, in thinking about our enemy it is striking to me that these are people who worship death more than they seem to worship anything else. And at least in that respect they remind you of the notorious Nazi groups like the SS that proudly wore the death's head as their symbol.
Our enemy's strength is their ability to kill innocent people, but I believe that is also their great weakness. We are fighting a cult of death, not life. Reducing the grievances that feed terrorism means offering a vision of life and hope to counter the terrorist vision of death and despair.
I can come now a little closer to earth here and talk about sanctuary. I would urge you to go back and read an excellent speech given by former Secretary of State George Schultz in January of 2002 just a few months after 9/11.
He said, and I quote, terrorists can't exist in any meaningful way unless they have a place where they can train, where they can plan, where they can gather their equipment together and do all the different kinds of things you have to do to make sustained, coordinated attacks.
That is the same conclusion the commission came to.
Page 17 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
That comment has in mind principally the kind of geographical sanctuary the terrorists enjoy when they are harbored by sympathetic regimes like Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iraq under Saddam Hussein. But geographical sanctuary is also found in the vast, ungoverned regions of the world, areas that are beyond governmental control. Typically they involved notoriously difficult terrain, often far-removed from population centers in countries with fragile or disabled governments.
And there is a third kind of geographical sanctuary, unfortunately right here in the United States and in other developed democracies. We know the 9/11 terrorists were able to create a kind of sanctuary inside this country and other democratic countries, exploiting the very freedom and openness that they were attacking in order to hide their evil plan.
But if you think about it, I think this concept of sanctuary is helpful beyond just geography. There is a kind of ideological sanctuary which our enemies enjoy when extremist clerics provide cover by sanctioning terrorism or by recruiting new adherents or by intimidating moderate clerics from speaking out against them.
And finally, I think we need to pay attention to what you might call cyber-sanctuary, the space that exists through communication networks made possible by modern technology.
These networks are wonderful things that enable all kinds of good things in the world. But they are also a tool that the terrorists use to conceal their identities, to move money, to encrypt messages, even to plan and conduct operations remotely.
Page 18 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Our goal overall should be to reduce the space in which terrorists find sanctuary to the maximum extent possible. It is going to take time. It is going to be difficult. Part of the difficult decision is about resource allocation. It requires maintaining careful balance among the different instruments of national power, between diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence, and military forces. And it requires protecting civil liberties, while at the same time we will reduce the ability of terrorists to operate in our midst.
This will be a long and difficult struggle, but I think we have made some important starts.
The commission, I think, properly highlights three key countries that are illustrations of the importance of denying sanctuary and that are important fronts in the war on terrorism: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
We can discuss them in more detail in the questions. Let me just say I think Afghanistan, to begin with, is an extraordinary example of the role of the U.S. military in denying sanctuary. And as Congressman Skelton correctly pointed out, the Quadrennial Defense Review, even before 9/11, in preparation it identified denying enemy sanctuary as one of the key transformational goals of the U.S. military.
I was enormously impressed by the changes that had taken place since the last time I was in the Department of Defense. Back during Desert Storm when the enemy had a kind of sanctuary in western Iraq from which they were firing Scud missiles at Israel trying to drag Israel into that war, a lot of brave pilots threw a lot of sorties over western Iraq and dropped a lot of bombs, but they didn't know how to find the targets. Some very brave Special Forces people went in on the ground and found the Scuds, but had very little way to connect to the people in the air.
Page 19 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And then that result of that campaign was a total of one Iraqi Scud launcher destroyed, and that turned out to be a decoy.
What a difference 10 years makes.
In Operation Enduring Freedom, we put Special Forces people into a country 7,000 miles from home where we had had only a few weeks to plan. They linked up with people they had never met before, thanks in part to the help of other government agencies.
They took off on cavalry charges, most of them never having ridden horses in their lives. And before you knew it, they were calling in precision B–52 strikes with airplanes that had come from thousands of miles away.
That is what made it possible in less than two months to remove a dictatorship that had oppressed the Afghan people, terrorized the Afghan people and provided a sanctuary for the terrorists that attacked the United States.
But our job isn't done with the fall of the Taliban. I think we understand that. And the commission report emphasizes the importance of making sure that Afghanistan doesn't slip back into what it was in the past. I think a great deal of progress has been made in the less than three years we have been there.
Today Presidential elections are on track in Afghanistan, set for October, with parliamentary elections set for April of next year. President Karzai set a goal of registering 6 million Afghans for the Presidential election. The United Nations so far has already registered over nine million, and 40 percent of those nine million are women. That is remarkable progress for a country, any country in the Muslim world, in some respects. But for a country that has been through 25 years of invasion and civil war and tyranny, it is truly extraordinary, in my view.
Page 20 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But there is still a great deal of work to be done. Our mission in Afghanistan will go on for some time. But I think we need to understand, I think this committee understands, I think the American people understand, that the stakes are equally enormous.
Pakistan is also correctly pointed to as a key area of concern, a key front in this war. Our success in Afghanistan would not have been possible, in my view, remotely, without the extraordinarily courageous decision of President Musharraf to support us in this struggle against terrorism.
It is a decision that has cost him two near misses in people attempting to assassinate him. It is a decision that has taken enormous courage. But it is a decision that I believe also will bear fruit for him and for his country.
Our victory in Afghanistan has strengthened his hand in Pakistan. And his support in Pakistan, combined with our ability to take the sanctuary away from terrorists in Afghanistan, has contributed to some extraordinary successes by our intelligence and law enforcement people in capturing key al Qaeda terrorists, including some very recent arrests that have been important in capturing some terrorists who we believe are currently planning attacks against the United States.
Indeed, one can emphasize the global nature of this conflict by understanding that we have driven terrorists out of Afghanistan into Pakistan where they have been captured and led us to terrorists elsewhere in London and Chicago.
Page 21 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
This is truly a borderless conflict, and we need to be able to operate across borders.
Third, identified by the commission is Saudi Arabia, which has long been a key front in the war on terror. And, indeed, if you read bin Laden's statements, it is probably fair to say Saudi Arabia is his principal target. It is certainly one of the most important.
The attacks in Riyadh of May 12th of last year, perhaps the September 11th of Saudi Arabia, were a kind of wake-up call for the Saudis alerting them to the fact that terrorism was not something that was other people's problem, but was their own.
Fortunately, because of close U.S.-Saudi cooperation across various different government agencies, it has assisted the Saudis in killing or capturing more than 600 individuals during counterterrorism operations, including some very important names, al Qaeda figures that I mentioned in my testimony.
I believe it is also the case that Saudi counterterrorist efforts have benefited substantially from the fact that following the liberation of Iraq, the United States was able to remove most of our military presence from Saudi territory, eliminating what had been a 12 year substantial political burden on that government.
It is essential that we continue to do everything we can to support Saudi efforts to eliminate terrorism and its support structures, but it is also essential, I believe, as Saudi Arabia combats terrorism, that it pursue political development, which is the key to long-term stability.
Page 22 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But as important as those three countries are, we should not get fixated on them or on any one country. If this is a global war, many different agencies of this government are engaged in this effort around the world. The Department of Defense has elements actively engaged in the Philippines, in Georgia, in Bosnia, in Yemen, in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa, in West Africa and South America, among other places.
The terrorists see the world as borderless; a geographical strategy also requires us as seamlessly as possible across borders ourselves.
What can we do? Let me be specific. I think I have already referred to what we can do with direct military action, and no words actually will substitute for what the world has seen in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Our military has truly revolutionary capabilities to pursue terrorists wherever military force is appropriate. But, of course, one role of military force, perhaps our most important role since our preferences for diplomatic solutions were possible, is to create the environment in which diplomacy can succeed and I think Libya is a prime example of where that has happened.
But beyond the direct use of military force, and General Brown on my left is really an expert on this, our military has an enormous ability to strengthen local capacity to fight terrorists through training, through civil affairs programs, through forcing internal defense activities. Indeed, I think it is correct to say that our most important allies in the war on terrorism, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, those two countries, but elsewhere, will be Muslims who seek freedom and oppose extremism.
Page 23 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The U.S. and its allies must be able to work with these partners and potential partners and help to build their capacity to counter terrorism and insurgency within their own borders.
In that respect, Mr. Chairman, I would like to appeal to this committee and the Congress to help us get the flexibility that we in the Department of Defense need to have to ensure the strengthening of friendly forces. This is a subject that we have discussed a number of times over the last couple of years. I think we have made great progress.
I thank all the Members of Congress for the passage of the Fiscal Year 2005 Appropriations Bill. Overall, that was an enormous benefit to us to get it and to get it so quickly. But also for including in that authority for training and equipping Iraqi and Afghan army and authority for commanders' emergency reserve funds.
I hope that in the authorization bill, those authorities could be made permanent. But I also hope they could extend beyond just the Afghan and Iraqi army. It is as important for our people to be able to train Iraqi and Afghan police as to train armies in those countries.
While I think everyone's preference is to do it where possible on a long-term basis as part of the State Department appropriation, when you are particularly in the middle of a combat zone, it is important to be able to do it as fast as possible. And that means, I think, giving us funding flexibility.
Page 24 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think it is equally important to support our requests for the Global Peace Operations Initiative which would allow us to train foreign forces in peacekeeping operations that I think, successfully conducted, can ultimately reduce the strain on our forces by helping to prevent the development of these ungoverned areas.
In my testimony on page 11, I mention a number of other roles for the U.S. military. I think we particularly play an important role in our liaison with military institutions across a whole range of countries. It is a source of enormous influence for the United States. It is one that requires careful management. But I think it is very important that we not deprive ourselves of that tool.
But finally, although it goes beyond our mandate and it goes beyond this committee, I think it is important to keep in mind the military instrument is only one instrument. We need by other means, including other agencies of the U.S. Government, to find ways of strengthening moderate voices in the Muslim world. We need to find ways to develop educational opportunities in underdeveloped parts of the world. We need to figure out anything that we can do as the government or as a country to encourage support from American philanthropic institutions for individuals and organizations that offer genuine alternatives to extremism.
So stop and think about it for a minute: A quarter of a trillion dollars, I believe is the figure for American philanthropy. We are some of the most generous people of the world. Yet in this one area where our national security is affected, I would wager that we are outspent 100 to 1 or more by those people who fund extremists. We can do a lot by helping the people who want to fight the same fight as we.
Page 25 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. Chairman, let me just conclude, if I might, with a quote that came my way from an e-mail that one of the officers in the building got from somebody in Iraq. I think it is testimony to the power of freedom and democracy as a tool in this war.
Support for freedom and democracy is not some kind of Utopian idealism. I believe if we ignore that tool, we ignore one of our most powerful weapons. It is the weapon that won the Cold War, and it is the weapon that can win this war on terror. And it was expressed very eloquently in this e-mail that is at the end of this testimony. And I put it there with all the grammatical errors and misspellings. It is by an Iraqi Arab for whom English is not his native language.
Let me just edit it a little bit so there is no misunderstanding. He wrote after the recent fighting up in Mosul on August 4th, ''Yes sir, things in Mosul are tough, but every day Iraqi police get more and more power and experience, and they have great support from the U.S. Army. Just yesterday we had a battle between Iraqi police and the National Guard on the one hand, with the Ansar al-Islam terrorist organization on the other.
''Those bad guys thought that Iraqi police and National Guard would leave their position when they just heard the sound of shooting. But instead the police and National Guard fought them in the best way and killed 14 of them.
''As for your question, 'What can we do to make Iraq better?' the first thing that Americans and Iraqis need is to be patient and to work very hard. We know that freedom has cost much. For example, the freedom which we see right now in Europe and the United States did not come from a vacuum, but was paid for by rivers of blood. I hope we will not see any more blood in Iraq, but we will see the freedom in Iraq whether the enemies of freedom want that or not.''
Page 26 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Secretary Wolfowitz can be viewed in the hard copy.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much Mr. Secretary.
General Pace.
STATEMENT OF GEN. PETER PACE, USMC, VICE CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
General PACE. I would be remiss if I didn't at least, in front of you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Skelton and members of the committee, echo what the secretary said about our appreciation, our deep appreciation for the very strong bipartisan support that we always receive from the Congress of the United States. There is not a single mission that you have sent your armed forces on that you have not backed us up.
Equally important, we deeply appreciate the fact that many members take time to go visit the troops in the field. And it makes a difference when they see their representatives, their senators, and congressman visiting them in the field.
We thank you, sir.
Page 27 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I would like to thank the 9/11 Commission, as well. That commission's work has teed up for national debate some enormous issues and opportunities for us to change the way we do business and to get on about doing business in the future in a much more efficient and effective way. And we owe them a debt of gratitude for making it possible to focus in on the issues that they highlighted for us. I appreciate personally this opportunity to be part of that dialogue.
And we are talking about sanctuary. In the secretary's opening comments, he talked about the various types of sanctuaries. But there is also various areas in which there are sanctuaries. We have countries that are knowingly and willingly harboring terrorists. We have those that are fighting against terrorism to the best of their ability. We have those that would like to fight against, but don't have the capacity. And we have those who don't know the problem they have.
If you just take a lap around the world from Iraq, you have, in all those categories, various countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Paraguay, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and you are back to Iraq. And I am sure I missed a few.
The message there is that we are going to need all elements of our national power. We are going to need many friends.
And although our military will and can fight our battles, the ultimate solution here is going to be one of education and economics. Sir Thank you.
Page 28 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, General Pace.
General Brown? Thank you for being with us here.
General BROWN. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the opportunity.
I do have an oral statement that I, with your permission——
The CHAIRMAN. Listen, you go right ahead, and we will take your written statement into the record without objection.
STATEMENT OF GEN. BRYAN D. BROWN, USA, COMMANDER U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND
General BROWN. Okay, sir.
Mr. Chairman, Congressman Skelton, distinguished members of the committee, it is an honor to appear before you today to testify on our efforts to deny sanctuary to the terrorist forces who threaten the United States.
The number one priority of the United States Special Operations Command is (USSOCOM) the global war on terrorism. Our Special Operations Forces (SOF) have been decisive on the battlefield and continue to posture for success.
We appreciate the 9/11 Commission's efforts and their concern for the need to deny terrorists sanctuary.
Page 29 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In support of our geographic combatant commanders, we are working side by side with conventional military, interagency and our coalition partners to abolish terrorist safe havens.
Together our combined efforts will enable us to defeat terrorist groups far from America's shores. Success in the war on terrorism also hinges on building robust coalition partner capabilities. Special Operations forces are uniquely capable in working closely with our coalition partners to develop their indigenous fighting forces, enabling them to engage the enemy, defend their own borders and deny terrorists sanctuaries.
We are successfully executing all of our legislated core tasks globally in support of the geographic combatant commanders. In addition to executing our directed military actions against terrorists, USSOCOM is also aggressively engaged in civil affairs, foreign internal defense, psychological operations and unconventional warfare missions.
Strengthening coalition partners goes beyond just training and equipping military forces. Building partner-nation infrastructure through our civil affairs core tasks is a critical part of enabling host nations to fight terrorism within their borders.
Civil affairs forces working with conventional coalition and other government agencies in concert with a host nation government can improve their quality of life by building or reinforcing infrastructure. Examples include building roads, schools, hospitals and drilling wells. By improving the local population's education, health and welfare, civil affairs force actions bring legitimacy to local government and eliminate the seeds of discontent.
Page 30 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We also continue to exploit opportunities to aid other nations that are willing but not necessarily capable in the global war on terror.
We accomplish this through our foreign internal defense mission. An excellent example is our efforts to train the army in the Republic of Georgia. Special Forces soldiers went to Georgia in September of 2002. In December of 2003, we handed an established operation over to the U.S. Marines. And today, there are more than 2,600 trained Georgian troops. And they have begun their own combat operations in the Pankisi Gorge, a known safe haven for terrorist cells and support infrastructure.
Another important force multiplier for all of our core tasks is our psychological operations (PSYOP) capability. Dissemination of truthful information to foreign audiences in support of U.S. strategic objective is a vital SOF capability.
Our PSYOP forces employ nonviolent methods to convince the enemy and neutral forces to take actions favorable to the United States and its allies, and reject the agendas of agents of instability.
As we demonstrated in Afghanistan, USSOCOM's core task of unconventional warfare is sometimes the best course of action. Unconventional warfare is the process whereby Special Forces accomplishes our national objective through, by and with surrogate forces.
During the beginning of our operations there, we executed a classic unconventional warfare campaign with the Northern Alliance and anti-Taliban forces. A very small American ground force, taking advantage of local expertise and the experience of the Northern Alliance forces, built a relationship that lead to the overthrow of the Taliban and denial of a longtime terrorist sanctuary.
Page 31 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It is important to note that safe havens are not simply geographic areas. They go beyond terrain and political control.
Terrorist sanctuaries also exist within legal loopholes, financial networks, cyberspace and intelligence gaps. Additionally, terrorist take advantage of seams in policies, capabilities and authority.
To successfully deny terrorists sanctuary requires a range of operations tailored for a specific situational. A tremendous example of how Special Operations Forces executed missions across the spectrum of our capabilities is our success on the island of Basilan in the Philippines. Between March and July 2001, American Special Forces employed a combinations of efforts to rid the area of Abu Sayyaf terrorists.
Using unconventional warfare, American SOF worked with surrogate Filipino forces to hunt down terrorist safe havens in the island jungle and help them secure their own territory for the long-term.
At the same time, civil affairs forces coordinated the construction of critically needed infrastructure in the area, providing humanitarian relief to the poverty stricken region.
Our presence, alongside native Filipinos, enabled us to build a close relationship with the local population and earn their trust.
Page 32 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We also supported a Filipino-led psychological operations campaign. With U.S. assistance, the host nation developed positive themes that reinforced the military activities on the island.
As a result of the comprehensive approach, American Special Operations Forces, without firing a single shot, were able to help the Filipino soldiers drive Abu Sayyaf terrorists from Basilan Island.
The Philippines is a regional success story that also highlights that intelligence is the key. At the warfighter level, intelligence and operations are interdependent. The goal is immediate intelligence to the operators and the analysis quickly accomplished at the lowest level possible.
Today at USSOCOM we have merged operations, intelligence and our interagency members all into a single directorate. By necessity, the relationship between Special Operations and our nation's intelligence agencies is the best it has ever been. We cannot let it go back. We have made great progress.
As the secretary alluded to earlier, a joint interagency effort to deny terrorists sanctuary is required. Direct military action alone is not sufficient to win the war. After all, in many respects, this is an ideological war, a war where ideas are the center of gravity.
In conclusion, I want to thank you, the members of the House Armed Services Committee, for your continued support in providing United States Special Operations Command the requisite authorities that enable us to maximize the use of our unique capabilities. The soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and great DOD civilians at Special Operations Command are more capable and lethal because of your efforts. I look forward to answering your questions.
Page 33 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. General, thank you very much for a very complete statement.
And thanks to all of our witnesses.
And since we didn't get a chance to have all the members ask questions of the last panel, we are going to start with those folks and go right down the line.
And Ms. Miller of Michigan is recognized.
Mrs. MILLER OF MICHIGAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I certainly appreciate all of the gentlemen coming today, And your testimony as well and certainly your service to our country.
And listening to General Pace go through all of the various countries of concern that we all are thinking about and the challenges ahead of us, it certainly is very sobering listening to you go through them like that. My gosh, what is left? They are, like, they are everywhere. And you do have that feeling sometimes.
I think we have to reflect a little bit on our successes as well. I certainly am a believer in the Bush doctrine. I heard of preemptive action—I heard someone once make and analogy, it was sort of like a rattle snake living in your basement.
Page 34 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
A nest of rattle snakes, you know they are down there. You know they live down there. You know they hate you. And I guess it is for you if you think you want to go down and get them out of there or wait and see if they come up and bite you.
And some people say, well, you don't want to get him going, because they are going to make them angry. It is going to be worse. And those are the kinds of challenges I think we have to think about. And we have had some remarkable successes.
When you think about Afghanistan, certainly formerly a state sponsor of terror and what is happening there now. I had the opportunity to be there in the early part of February.
Certainly turning Pakistan from a supporter of the Taliban regime into now really a key ally on the war on terror as well.
Also Gadhafi, Secretary Wolfowitz mentioned, that is something we don't talk about enough, I think. When you have a state like Libya voluntarily opening up their border to disarm their nuclear program, perhaps watching Saddam get drug out of Iraq all thinking this regime things is not all it is cracked up to be. We should take some of those things, certainly, to heart.
I live in Southeast Michigan where we have the largest Arabic population in the nation. And almost every day that I am home in my area, I hear from both Muslims and the Chaldeans about people who have literally fled from Iraq, because of the brutality of Saddam, and so many of them trying to make a new life for themselves and their families here now, and how they, obviously, have a lot of opinions on how important it was for us to go in initially, and what is happening now. They have some consternation that they are raising, of course. I know they have talked to many of you.
Page 35 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
My question is, as we look across the globe and again picking up on what General Pace said, I wonder if we are doing enough to identify and address some of the terrorism closer to home, specifically in South America, which we read more about, sort of, the secluded region between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Mrs. MILLER OF MICHIGAN. I mean, this is another area where they seem to have moved, and I wondered if you comment on that.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I think you are right that South America is an area of concern. General Pace was our Southern Command combatant commander before he took this job, so I think I will turn it to you, Peter.
General PACE. Ma'am, there are areas in South America, for sure. Two definitely are in Paraguay and the triborder area where Brazil and Argentina meet. In addition, there are the narcoterrorists in Colombia, who add to the wealth of the terrorist community in many, many ways.
My point, I think in enumerating all the locations that I did was that this is truly a global effort, it is not a one-nation effort, it is a global community effort. It requires more than just military; it is going to require all elements of our national power and other nation's national power. And that is why the 9/11 Commission's recommendations and your deliberations on how we can better arrange ourselves to face this threat in the future are so important.
Page 36 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mrs. MILLER OF MICHIGAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentlelady.
The gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Larson.
Mr. LARSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have two questions. My first question very directly, what the general pointed out, deals with ideas. It is directed at the administration, and rather straightforwardly. Has the neo-conservative, ideological reach of the administration exceeded our military's grasp?
As has been pointed out here, I think we are now deployed in about 120 countries overall.
And my second question deals specifically with something that Ambassador Jordan said to us when we were visiting Saudi Arabia. And I asked Ambassador Jordan, I said, ''It seems to me like you have a gathering storm here in Saudi Arabia with better than 35 percent unemployment, median income dropping from $28,000 to under $7,000.''
And he stopped and paused to correct me, and said, ''Congressman, you are from New England. This isn't a gathering storm. What we have here is all the makings of a perfect storm. And we ought to be careful.'' He said because if we were to preemptively strike and unilaterally invade Iraq and go after this toothless tiger, we will unwittingly accomplish what Osama bin Laden failed to do, and that is create a united Islamic jihad against us; similarly, to what George Herbert Walker Bush warned us that we would become an army of occupation in Iraq, and thereby taking our eyes off the prize, Osama bin Laden in this case, and the sanctuary where he remains in Pakistan. Ambassador Jordan, right?
Page 37 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. This was a global war before we discovered it was the global war. These terrorists have been building up this capacity for at least 10 years and arguably more like 20 or 30. And they didn't embed themselves in London, in Paris, in Riyadh and Jakarta because we attacked Iraq or after we attacked Iraq. They had been out there.
I think, in fact, if you go back and read Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwa of 1998, where he calls for killing Americans, his major cause of complaint was our containment policy and the fact that we had some 20,000, I don't know, probably thousands of Americans and American aircraft based on the holy territory of Saudi Arabia, bombing Iraq.
We could not, in my view, have continued the status quo of the last 10 years, the last 20 years and fought this war effectively.
And while, certainly there are some people who may be angry at us because Iraq or Afghanistan weren't angry before, it is also the case that some 50 million Afghans and Iraqis now have a prospect of freedom that they didn't have before. And ultimately, I think they will be very important allies in the Muslim world.
We have developed close relationships with a number of countries, including Indonesia, where I was ambassador for three years and Turkey where I have spent a lot of time, who are very strongly our allies in this war on terrorism, whether or not they like our policy in Iraq, whether or not they like our policy in Afghanistan.
But we could not, I believe, win this war if we were on defense.
Page 38 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. LARSON. Then how is it that we didn't garner the number of Arab allies that we were able to garner during the Gulf War, that are absent during this war?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Well, actually, we had the support of quite a few Arab countries, some of which preferred not to be named as such. And this was obviously a more controversial situation than the defense of Kuwait.
That doesn't mean that because it was controversial we should have continued waiting until the Russians or the French or whoever it is might have lifted their veto.
I think, in fact, if you look at how they voted with their actions, they were very strongly in support of getting rid of this man who, by the way, was an enormous threat to Saudi Arabia and to the other neighboring countries in the Gulf.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Akin.
Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is a pleasure to see you again after breakfast this morning.
And just a couple of thoughts. The first thing, you talked about denying sanctuary and all. And it reminds me of something I thought of when I first came on this committee because I had recalled my uncle that served in Korea, which was a no-win war, and that I just about went to Vietnam, which was a no-win war. I don't think no-win wars are a very smart idea.
Page 39 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
When we deny sanctuary, did you ever think that essentially what we are saying is we are preventing the war on terrorism from being a no-win war, because if you allow terrorists to hide everywhere, there is no way we can stop them. I don't really see that we have an alternative. So I am very strongly supportive of your policy.
Now, when you talk about sanctuary, I suppose that you might include drug money or madrassas schools, as well. And so some of those things, I suppose, we are going to have to deal with.
Now, the main question that I have had as we have been sort of focusing on this question of intelligence, you can organize companies on different basis. Some companies are organized based on financial things. So you collect a bunch of different businesses because there are financial things—or other companies are based on marketing.
You could say that each of us as congressmen need intelligence. Anybody who serves in the military needs some form of intelligence. Does that mean all of it is going to be centrally located in one place or doesn't indicate that, likewise, there has to be an intelligence component still maintained in the military?
We were in Iraq, and the soldiers were telling us, we want more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) at our immediate on-the-street level. We want that intelligence. And we want to be able to direct it and aim that camera where we want to use it.
I guess one of the concerns I had about the report is, is it suggesting, and are you suggesting that we would give up all of that capability to have it centralized somewhere? Or doesn't it make sense that we keep some of that intelligence capability immediately with our troops on the ground?
Page 40 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In fact, I guess I could ask the Marines: Wouldn't you want some UAVs just literally attached to the local units?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Let me let the military operators comment. But let me just say, first, I think what the commission is rightly focused on is the tendency of too much intelligence to be, if I can use our jargon term, stovepiped; that is the people who collect it are going to feel they own it, and not for bad reasons. I mean, they want to protect sources. The law enforcement, they have a lot of civil liberties concerns about sharing information.
But I think the commission correctly emphasized that we need to do a better job of sharing. But I think we will make a mistake, particularly in an age of information technology networking, if we think sharing information means pulling it all together in one central brain that then decides who gets to look at it.
I think networking and pushing information out horizontally, which I believe is what the private sector has learned to do in the last 10 years, is what government needs to do a better job of.
Mr. AKIN. Certainly, you have shown that in the military that you have done a good job of that, with the joint operations.
General PACE. Sir, we certainly do need to retain our capability to provide to the warfighter the kinds of intelligence that we have been able to provide them.
Page 41 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Intelligence is no longer a supporting arm. Intelligence is very much an intel operations arm. And as we do an operation, we uncover more intelligence that very quickly leads to another operation. So there are things that need to be done on the battlefield and for the battlefield that our agencies are doing for us.
Having said that, to echo what the Secretary said about stovepiping, there is certainly the need for better sharing of information and intelligence horizontally, and having a location where all intelligence can be collated and collected in an agency then that can make sure that all of those stovepipe organizations, so to speak, have, in fact, all of the information they need and a place that can identify the national requirements that are currently being gapped.
I think we need to be careful of two more things. One is that we retain competitive analysis so that, using your business analogy, you have profit centers that are your current agencies. You have a corporate headquarters that is orchestrating all of that. But you are benefiting from each organization having all of the facts, but also benefiting from the individual organizations to look at those facts in a little bit different light and give the leadership something different to look at.
Also, whatever changes we make should not be focused solely on the global war on terrorism. We have other threats out there, other enduring threats that we must make sure whatever we do to change our intel community, that we adhere to, not only what is right for global terrorism, but also our other needs.
Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Page 42 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentlelady from San Diego, Ms. Davis.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all of you for being here.
I want to follow up, actually, on my colleague's question. In our discussion that we had for about three hours with the commission, we didn't really touch on one of the areas of intelligence that I think is—maybe it is kind of the elephant in the room, I am not sure—but the Office of Special Plans that was developed within the Pentagon some time ago and was kind of reinvigorated, I guess you might say. Perhaps you can clarify that for me because I would appreciate your take on that. Where does that fit in your thinking in the work that we are doing now?
I know that we all have great concerns about the management of information. And I think that we all want to be very careful that that management of information gets to the warfighter. But the management of policy is, as has been stated earlier, a different issue.
Could you clarify the Office of Special Plans? Is that operative today? And for—what kind of information do you rely on them to present? And why do we need that or why had we utilized it in the past?
Page 43 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I mean, we are talking not about the elephant in the room, but the flea. I mean, we are talking about two people. Actually, you use this phrase ''Office of Special Plans.'' That was actually a phrase used to describe the office that was doing Iraq planning back in a period when we were trying to be relatively discreet about it.
What you are really referring to is the two individuals who were asked by Under Secretary Doug Feith to look at this mass of intelligence information on terrorism and see what patterns they could discern in it.
They didn't generate intelligence. They didn't do intelligence assessments. But they went mining information. And I would think, in fact, that hopefully we would see more ability of different organizations to look at the same body of information and, as General Pace said, to look at different ways of viewing it.
I think the 9/11 Commission actually correctly called for more competitive analysis and pointed out, I think their phrase is failure of imagination, that if you get everything going through a single needle head and only one view that is accepted, you are much more likely, I think, to have a sort of groupthink that looks at the information that is available to everybody, but looks at it through a single lens.
But the main point is that we are talking about two individuals who are simply looking at the intelligence collected by our huge intelligence community. And I think their role has been just enormously exaggerated. It is a kind of urban legend.
Page 44 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
It may be an urban legend, but I think there still are concerns about what we do to really protect the professionalism of our analysts. And whether or not that information that is coming forward is not so much, I think, connecting the dots as much as, perhaps, disregarding some of the dots, perhaps.
And I agree with you. I think we need a competition of ideas, and we need to ensure that that is available to whoever and whatever kind of organization has some overall entity that we are talking about here.
But I wanted to just have your response on that. I appreciate it.
One of the things as Members we know, with the jointness; and that is a great model, I think, in Goldwater-Nichols, that everyone has pointed to, I have to say that I haven't really seen a difference of opinion that comes to us when we have the Joint Chiefs here. And I assume that a lot of that is thrashed out together. But at the same time, if we are looking to an intelligence community that is going to act like the Joint Chiefs and is going to use that model, what problems; perhaps, General Pace, do you see with that? You know, what really should we be weary of as we use that as a model?
General PACE. Let me try answering your question, ma'am. The way that the Joint Chiefs operate is not to come to a consensus. The way we operate is to put our heads together and digest what we are getting from our subordinates, debate it, have dialogue with our civilian bosses, give our best military advice, understand that that best military advice is not always what is best for the nation, that there are other things that override what a pure military solution might be and should override that.
Page 45 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So I am very comfortable and very appreciative of my opportunity as a member of the Joint Chiefs to speak my mind forcefully and as loudly as I need to, to be heard, but also to understand that I am one voice in a process that allows our nation to hear diverse opinions, and for the leadership to make decisions.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Do you think it works for a new intelligence community?
General PACE. I think what I believe about the opportunity is that, just like a joint task force commander has Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and sometimes Coast Guard working for him, an intelligence hierarchy could have the various agencies working for him in a concerted way, in that just like if a joint task force commander asks his Marines to do something that that Marine commander doesn't think is correct, that Marine commander is going to go first to the joint force commander and tell him what he doesn't like.
And then if that doesn't sway the commander, it is incumbent on that subordinate commander to go to his Marine boss to bring into the commandant of the Marine Corps, who is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so he can bring it into the Joint Chiefs for discussion.
So I then would see this recommendation about working at the Joint Chiefs to be that the head of intelligence would have day to day the authority to direct certain actions, and that if, as is most times the case, that action made sense, the efficiency of the organization would improve drastically.
Page 46 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And for that two percent of one percent of the times where there is a disagreement, then that subordinate could go to either the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or to the Secretary of Defense, depending on who their other boss is and bring it to, in this case, the National Security Council to have an open dialogue and discussion about which way we should go.
So I am not exactly sure what you mean when you say, like the Joint Chiefs. But that is how I see so far what I believe would work in the intel community.
Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you.
General BROWN. Since we are talking about intel, could I reach back and answer Congressman Akin's questions or make some comments about it.
First of all, we are big fans of tactical UAVs. We are fielding them as fast as we can to all of our SOF teams and our SEAL teams as fast as we can get them.
But as a warfighter, as a combatant commander, my concern is getting intelligence directly down to the warfighter. In our case, that may be a 29-year-old captain, in Mazar-e-Sharif, or it may be a SEAL team in downtown Baghdad.
And so intelligence for those guys is, number one, mission success, and, number two, personal survival. It is very, very important that we keep all of the intel capability available to these folks on the battlefield.
Page 47 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And in my mind what that means is, because we are basically a consumer of intelligence, although we are a producer also of what I would call street intelligence, but we are a consumer for the most part is that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) that the ability to have them down there supporting us instantaneously so that we can hit a target and immediately move to a next target without going back and doing a lot of planning, doing that analysis at the very lowest levels I think is absolutely critical.
Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank the gentlelady.
The gentlelady from Virginia, Ms. Davis.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And let me just sort of try and follow up on both my colleagues, Mr. Akin and Ms. Davis from California. I think, General Pace, first, let me just say that I have been to Iraq and Afghanistan and visited the troops, and there are none finer. And I don't want to do anything to harm them, General Brown, at all.
I think, General Pace, that the Joint Chiefs illustration came from our previous panel. And I guess my concern is if you have the Joint Chiefs, it is still not going to be any better than the intelligence that is shared amongst the agencies.
Page 48 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In my opinion, that is what is wrong right now, and I think that is what we have heard, that there is just no communication between the intelligence agencies. And we don't have the technology out there. They are not using the same applications so they couldn't communicate, I don't think, even if they wanted to right now.
So I am not sure that bringing in a national intelligence director at (NID) this point is going to solve the problem until we get the culture of the different agencies where they are willing to share with one another. So I don't know if more chiefs is going to make any difference.
Let me just ask you, General Brown, what you just said on bringing the intelligence down to the street level, down to our military, do you get intelligence you need right now from the other—do you get cooperation from the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)? I don't know if I can ask that in this setting, but——
General BROWN. We get tremendous cooperation from the CIA and we have Joined Interagency coordination Centers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And the whole interagency team is there, as well as at my headquarter in Tampa, Florida. So we really do have a great working relationship. And they produce great intelligence.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Is your concern if we bring in an NID that you wouldn't have that intelligence as quickly as you need it? Is that——
General BROWN. I think my concern is that I want to make sure that as a warfighter that every piece of intelligence that is available is instantly available to my guy on the ground wherever he is or my guy in the air or out in a boat.
Page 49 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I would not want any impediment, whatever that would be, to restrict the intelligence flow to the lowest level as fast as you could get it there.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Do you see having another chief as being an impediment?
General BROWN. No, I don't see it as an impediment based on how the system—it would depend on how the system is set up. But currently, I don't see it as an impediment.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Anybody else want to answer?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I think it depends—my view—it depends very much on how you do it. And that is why I think it is important to work out the details thoughtfully and carefully. If done right, it will actually, I think, make more information available to the warfighter because it will break down some of the stovepipes that will produce, hopefully, more of a common culture.
Done wrong, it will sort of hoard everything into Washington. And somebody will have to decide at a high level who gets to look at it. And that would be a mistake.
General PACE. I appreciate having the opportunity to have a dialogue. Because I truly don't know what the Joint Chiefs model applied to intel is supposed to mean.
Page 50 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I can visualize the current agencies having an individual over them who ensures that there is a central repository of all information, that all of the information that is available is shared with all of those agencies, that gaps in our intelligence collection are identified, and that there is an efficient sharing of information amongst the agencies, and perhaps, perhaps, some tasking authority to be able to ask, and a directing agency to go out and get information to fill those.
But that is the kind of dialogue I think is very valuable. Because there is not a very straight analogy between what the intel guys are going to do and what you expect of your Joint Chief.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. I know. And, you know, it has been a high price in Afghanistan and Iraq. And to hear you, General Pace, list countries, and I think it is just so mindboggling to think that we might have to send our military into many, many more countries to not have a sanctuary for the terrorists.
And I guess I just have a real concern that we don't do this so fast that we really mess up and pay more of a price than we have already paid.
I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentlelady.
The gentleman from Rhodes Island, Mr. Langevin.
Page 51 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, gentlemen, welcome. Again, thank you for your testimony today and being here.
Mr. Secretary, good to see you again. I enjoyed our meeting out in the Pentagon, recently.
The commission begins its chapter 12 on what to do with a broad series of statements about the threat we face and the type of national strategy that we need.
And by the commission's explicit acknowledgement, the strategy needs a balanced use of all elements of national power. And, basically, our efforts to deny sanctuary to terrorist requires us to use a variety of tools.
One particular focus should be to prevent the continued growth of radical Islamist terrorism using military and nonmilitary tools, such as diplomacy, economic, education and cultural exchanges. And I have heard you talk about that here today.
As you may be aware, Dr. Joe Nye, former Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard and former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, has talked about the need to supplement our military might with what he calls soft power, basically efforts to win the hearts and minds of the world with our values and our culture.
Page 52 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What I would like to ask is: How does the Department of Defense conduct such activities now, as well as in the future? And, also, how do you cooperate with other agencies in the field?
Obviously, we acknowledge that hard power alone in the long run cannot win this war on terrorism. It is essential, obviously, in the short run with military power, the use of our police forces, both here in the United States, in cooperation with countries around the world, but it is not going to be the sole thing to win the war on terror in the long run. It is going to be more of a reliance on this soft power issue.
So that and also, do you have thought about who should coordinate such activities, such efforts?
Dr. Nye has recommended the creation of a deputy national security adviser for soft power issues like diplomacy, foreign aid and culture exchanges.
I guess, what are your views on establishing such a position?
And then, my final part of the question will be: Is the Department reassessing the Quadrennial Defense Review to see how the commission's findings might be adopted into DOD's strategic and other guidance?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Good question. I think that Professor Nye's views that you refer to, I think, I fundamentally agree with. And I tried to indicate in my statement that I think, as important as the military instrument is, we will make a huge mistake if we just focus on that, or, for that matter, if we just focus on military and intelligence and law enforcement. It is about more than killing and capturing terrorists.
Page 53 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think we do, as a Department, contribute something outside that area. Take the case of Pakistan. I think one of our problems in Pakistan today is that for too long we deprived ourselves of one of the most important instruments of influence in a country where the military is one of the most important institutions, and that is the contact between our military and their military.
Too often, I think, we treat that as a tool for rewarding or punishing countries or for promoting military reform, which certainly should be an objective.
But you don't promote military reform in a country like Pakistan by cutting off education for Pakistani military officers here and pushing them into the one alternative, which is the Islamic extremists. It is not as though if we leave them alone, nobody else will go out to recruit them.
But I think it is, I mean, I may say something surprising here, I think it is very important maybe outside the scope of this committee to make sure that the State Department funding requests are tended to in the same way that ours are. They are part of a national security budget.
It makes a huge difference, and the committee report correctly points to it, that our assistance to Afghanistan, our assistance to Pakistan has gone way up. I mean, they were down in the single digits back in the 1990's. And I think it is a sign of part of the trouble we got into.
Page 54 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So soft power is certainly a part of it. I don't know about a deputy national security adviser for soft power. I would want to think about that. I mean, too often, when you create a special function like that, it sort of instead of giving more attention to the issue, it allows people to say: ''Oh, Joe down the hall takes care of that.''
But Joe down the hall doesn't really get listened to. You need to make sure that these considerations are made a part of your policy toward every country, that they are made an integral part of your policy in fighting terrorism.
Mr. LANGEVIN. And the Quadrennial Defense Review?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. We are really just kind of getting started on it now. But I don't know if this fits in that range, but certainly the question of how we can assist in building indigenous capacity in countries that either have ungoverned areas, Pakistan's a prime example, countries where we can relieve a burden from ourselves or prevent a burden from arising by making sure that we have that capacity to build up what other people can do I thin is going to be an important part of what we look at.
Mr. LANGEVIN. General, any comment?
General BROWN. Sir, I think, arguably, before Goldwater-Nichols, you had the best Army in the world, the best Navy, the best Air Force, the best mare core, but very much stovepiped organizations that did not operate synergistically on the battlefield.
Page 55 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And, arguably, it took us about 18 years to get there. And, finally, I think history will show that the battle in Iraq was, in fact, fought the way that Goldwater-Nichols envisioned that your armed forces would fight.
We currently have a terrific Department of State and a great Department of Defense and a superb Treasury Department. And the question is: Is there some organization, some way to organize that would allow each of those departments to function more efficiently, even more collaboratively so that we can bring in a very effective, precise way all of the elements of national power to bear on whatever the particular problem happens to be?
Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you, gentlemen.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, Mr. Secretary, Generals.
I am just so grateful for our troops and the successes that we have had in the global war on terrorism, protecting American families.
And, General Brown, I appreciate you pointing out a fact that many people just don't know, the success in the Philippines, success in Colombia.
Page 56 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We of course are very familiar with the disarmament of Libya, the liberation of Afghanistan, the liberation of Iraq, the uncovering of the terrorist cell that was prepared to launch an attack on Amman, Jordan, with the intent of a chemical attack to kill 20,000 people just three months ago; and, of course, the success in the last 60 days of the killing of the al Qaeda leaders of Saudi Arabia and Algeria.
And this is again because of the bravery of American troops and the confidence of our military. I am very grateful.
The topic today, of course, is the 9/11 Commission and denying terrorists sanctuaries. And I was very impressed in the 9/11 Commission report that there was a very extensive description of the contacts between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda prior to 9/11.
And particularly, in chapter 2, pages 61 to 66, there were specific citings. Bin Laden was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq. The report says that Saddam Hussein's regime tolerated and may have even helped al Qaeda sponsor groups in northern Iraq, including Ansar al-Islam.
The report says that bin Laden himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995. The report says that bin Laden proposed cooperation to Saddam Hussein's regime in 1997, but was rebuffed. In mid 1998, the situation reversed. It was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative during a time of intensifying U.S. pressure.
The commission documents that in March 1998, there was a visit to Iraq by two al Qaeda members to meet with Iraqi intelligence. It also documents the July 1998 Iraqi delegation that traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden. Iraqi officials also offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq, according to the report, in 1999.
Page 57 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The connection between Iraq, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden and al Qaeda is well placed in the report that we have before us today. And specifically, too, it cites in the report that Saddam Hussein's regime tolerated and may have even helped Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda sponsor group in northern Iraq affiliated with the senior al Qaeda associate, Abu Zarqawi.
And of course, it is Abu Zarqawi, who now is leading the terrorist effort in Iraq. And the question that I have is: What is the status of our going after Zarqawi? What is the level of our effort and prospects of eliminating him as a terrorist threat?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Of course, Zarqawi was one of the principal subjects of Secretary Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February of 2003.
And I believe also among the things, you cited a lot that is in that report, I think the report also mentions the whole information, evidence, I don't know what word you want to use, connecting bin Laden and Iraq and the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan that was targeted in 1998 in response to the attack on our embassies in East Africa.
There is some room for debate about whether Zarqawi is a member of al Qaeda or an associate of al Qaeda. It seems to me that is the kind of debate that leads you down the wrong rabbit hole.
These terrorists may have their stovepipes, too. But they have managed to work across those stovepipes. Zarqawi was running a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan until we drove him out, and then he went to Iraq.
Page 58 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
He had some relationship with the old regime. It is not clear exactly what. But what is clear, unfortunately, is that he is a major terrorist in Iraq today. Maybe it is diverted him from some of his global plans, which he was engaged in before this war.
But he claims responsibility, And we think, with some validity, for some of the major bombings, including the bombing of the U.N. headquarters, the bombing of the mosque in Najaf that killed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.
He may not be the most numerous of our enemies. But he is certainly one of the most lethal. And we have captured some dozens of people in his network. We still haven't got him. But he is very, if not the top, certainly one of the top two on our target list.
General Pace, do you want to add anything?
General PACE. No, sir. I think what you said is exactly right. He is, in fact, the object of a great amount of intelligence focus and operational execution.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. And wouldn't it be fair to say that an authoritarian regime, a totalitarian regime, wouldn't allow a person to locate in their capital, like Baghdad, without the complicity of the regime?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I find it hard to imagine. And I think we have recognized when we talk about these subjects, it is not as though we know everything about these people. In fact, we know a fraction of what is there.
Page 59 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But certainly, there are a lot of indications that they knew he was there. They knew he was around. In fact, the Jordanians asked to have him to extradited because remember he was involved in the millennium plot in Jordan. He is also involved in the murder of our Agency for International Developement (AID) director in Jordan, Mr. Foley. When the Jordanians asked to have him extradited in the middle of 2002, he simply disappeared into another country for a little while.
So it would seem that he had been tipped off.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Again, thank you very much. And we are very, very grateful for your leadership and very, very grateful for our troops.
God bless you.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from New York, Mr. Israel.
Mr. ISRAEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have two questions. One of General Brown, and then I would like to reserve enough time to ask Secretary Wolfowitz about Saudi Arabia.
Page 60 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General Brown, perhaps you can help clarify something for me. In responding to Ms. Davis' question about NID, you stated that you wouldn't want any additional impediments getting in the way of good intelligence at the street level.
One of the 9/11 Commission recommendations is that Special Operations Command should assume responsibility for both covert and clandestine paramilitary operations and that the Central Intelligence Agency should no longer conduct such operations.
Now it seems to me, that is as streamlined and as expeditious as one can get. So does your review, in response to Ms. Davis' question, effectively endorse that 9/11 Commission recommendation?
General BROWN. What I would say about that is, first of all, we have a great working relationship with the CIA. I mean, it really is a good working relationship today.
We believe that in the Special Operations Command, we have capabilities that can do those kind of operations. But we also think there are some things that the CIA ought to continue to do. And so I think the bottom line is it is a very complex issue.
We need to go through all of the second-and third-order effects of what exactly it means if, in fact, we were to pick up those kind of operations, and then make a good solid decision to ensure that we are maximizing both the capability of USSOCOM and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Page 61 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. At this point then, is it fair to say that you don't necessarily endorse or oppose that particular recommendation?
General BROWN. I think, sir, it is fair to say that I just think we need more study on it.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Okay, thank you, General.
Secretary Wolfowitz, with respect to Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 Commission specifically mentioned Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. You alluded to it in your testimony.
The Saudi regime, not long ago, held up a Barbie doll as an example of a Jewish, Zionist conspiracy that was undermining Saudi values. The regimes continues to fund evangelical madrassas that teach the Koran, but without any view of modernity: the most virulent strain that instructs its followers that there is no alternative, that the destruction of the United States, no alternative to the destruction of Israel.
You in your testimony talk about the fact, you acknowledge the fact that the Saudis need to make progress on democratization, pluralism, empowerment. How do we measure that progress? And at what point do we make a determination that there is insufficient progress? And then what strategies do we use in order to facilitate progress on those issues?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I wish there was a simple answer. I think there is no question that the issues you raise are very real ones. I think also we can go back and say that the Saudis turned a relatively blind eye to a lot of activities that they thought might bother other people, but wouldn't end up biting them.
Page 62 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And, as I said in my opening statement, I think May 12th was a wake-up call for them. But it also is a reminder to us that the terrorists would like nothing better than to bring down that government and replace it with something that would make that government look like the Golden Age.
I think we have had a record over many years of engaging with governments that we have had the challenge, South Korea is a good example, of trying to protect them from a threat that was far worse than anything they might be doing, and at the same time, push them and encourage them to reform.
And I think we have been successful in a great many places in doing that. And I think that is part of the key in Saudi Arabia.
It is calling attention to the kind of statement you just made. Embarrassment is one way to move people. It is developing the kinds of relationships with the Saudi military that I think our people have been developing over 20 years. And I don't mean that everything is perfect or that I like every Saudi general. But I think our influence on them is a positive influence.
And then I suppose you have to be grateful for the wake-up call they got on May 12th, because if it had waited much longer, I think we could have seen something much worse in Saudi Arabia.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. General Pace.
Page 63 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General PACE. Sir, may I add to what General Brown said, which is that, in my opinion, the missions that the CIA does in a paramilitary way can certainly be done by his superb soldiers, sailors in the Special Operations Command.
The question is: Does this nation want its military to conduct those missions? And I would recommend we, as a leadership, that we take a look at a type mission that might be executed as a result of a finding of the United States and determine whether or not it would make sense or if you would want your military to do that type of mission for you.
Mr. WILSON OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Thank you, sir. And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentlemen.
General Brown, a number of your operations are a combination of agency folks and USSOCOM personnel, are they not?
General BROWN. We do run some operations in concert with the CIA——
The CHAIRMAN. You do partner up——
General BROWN. Right.
Page 64 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
The gentleman from New Hampshire, Mr. Bradley.
Mr. BRADLEY. Thank you both, all three of you very much for being here today.
Two somewhat different questions. We haven't focused at all on Iran today. There has been some level of cooperation with regard to nuclear weapons in Iran, the possibility of some further diplomatic initiatives, but also rumors of covert activity.
Congressman Hamilton, when he testified before us, said that the largest threat that he saw was the threat of a terrorist organization having nuclear weapons. So perhaps you could comment on Iran and terrorism and the nuclear issue.
And also, I don't know that I have heard any of the three of you comment specifically on the NID and the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission on this director having budget authority and the authority to hire and fire. So those are my questions.
Thank you.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. On the subject of Iran, I mean, it is clearly a country that poses both kinds of problems, both its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its use of terrorism as an instrument of national policy.
Page 65 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think maybe because I have watched what has taken place to their east and to their west in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have become more cautious at least, I think, in their support for terrorism recently, which doesn't mean that they have abandoned it, which doesn't mean that problem has gone away.
Even with respect to al Qaeda, they play at best a kind of ambiguous role. They certainly could be doing more to help. That is an understatement.
And, as you know, the International Atomic Energy Agency has recently found them in significant departure from their commitments in their nonproliferation treaty.
The best hope I think for real change in Iran, I mean, we have to keep up the pressure, the international community has to keep up the pressure on the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) issues, in particular.
There is a great deal of ferment inside Iran. It is surprising for a country that is as repressive as that one is that there is a relatively large amount of openly expressed dissatisfaction, and some ability, I think, for the Iranian people to exert some influence on their government.
But it is clearly something we are going to have to keep in mind. It is part of this issue. And it has to be addressed over time. We can't do everything at once.
On the question about budget and personnel authority for a national intelligence director, these are very important issues that I think we need to think through. I don't think there is a simple yes or no answer.
Page 66 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think if you look at the success of Goldwater-Nichols and contributions of members of this committee, in that regard, I think one of the most important changes was putting some requirements into the personnel system that forced people to have joint careers and to develop a kind of common culture.
I think that was done without—Congressman Skelton is more of an expert on this than I am—I think it was done without creating a central personnel director, but creating certain requirements for people to advance.
It seems to me that is at least a kind of model worth thinking about. Because I think the commission has correctly identified the need for more of a common culture among the different intelligence communities, and I would say particularly between domestic and foreign intelligence.
And General Brown has testified, and any of us could in detail, that there really has been an enormous amount of progress made in over the last 10 years and especially over the last two years in sharing intelligence between the Department of Defense, and CIA in particular, in terms of battlefield tactical coordination. It is not perfect. But I would say it is pretty good.
The biggest challenge comes between domestic an foreign intelligence. And it is not just bureaucratic or turf. It is also because you run into these very fundamental issues about protection of civil liberties, and we have to think it through very carefully.
Page 67 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But I think the more you can get people to understand how the other guy thinks, and maybe by having worked in a job where they have to think that way for a few years, I think you have a real chance of breaking down these stovepipes.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Larsen of Washington.
Mr. LARSEN. Thank you all for taking some time with us this afternoon and, of course, this morning as well.
Just back to this morning, I think I have heard some things reflected that you said this morning, basically along the lines, General Pace and then General Brown said it as well, that the proposal of an NID does not necessarily preclude the warfighter on the ground from getting the information that they need so long as that model, as we walk through that, as long as that model lets you do your jobs.
Is that basically the case, depending on what the model looks like. An agreement, nodding the heads yes. That is great.
I just wonder; I am a state Norwegian, I am not too good at rants and self-righteous indignation, so bear with me on this. The only reason we are here in August, although with the shades drawn and the lights on, it could be February and it could be December. We don't really know what time it is out there.
Page 68 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But the only reason we are here in August is because of this commission report, because of 15 months of work, because of the 9/11 families, because of a lot of witnesses have put a lot of time in it, because of the bipartisan, I would even say nonpartisan, results that came out of the commission.
And if this book didn't mean anything, chapter 12 would be what to do—nothing. And chapter 13 would to do also—nothing.
But they came up with some very strong recommendations based on a lot of work. And I say that because we are talking about what it means to you and it is important obviously what it means to the warfighter on the ground and the issues that we deal with in this committee.
But something went wrong that resulted in September 11th, that the commission concluded we need it fixed. And somebody didn't get the information that they needed to do their job for any number of reasons outlined in the commission report.
So I certainly am respectful of you getting the information that you need and the warfighters getting their information. I am also respectful of everybody who is involved in making sure this country is safer in the future and gets the information they need as well.
General Pace, on this issue of denying sanctuary, if you could just relate to the committee something that we discussed this morning. This has to do with Afghanistan, where folks from the Department were here a few months back and said it would 10 years to train up 70,000 for the Afghan National Army. But previous testimony for Iraq indicated it is either 40,000 new Iraqi army and 35,000 national guard or visa versa would be trained up by late fall of this year at the earliest. At the latest, mid-year next year.
Page 69 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So anywhere from 4.5 months to 10 months in Iraq to get the 75,000, but it is taking us 7 years to get the 70,000 trained army in Afghanistan.
Can you talk about what we are doing differently in Iraq that makes us successful and what we are not doing in Afghanistan that we need to change?
Again, this is important for the denying sanctuary to have an indigenous force on the ground. And I think it is more than flexibility. There is plenty of flexibility, which I think is important. But it is more than that.
Can you explain why there is such a difference in getting people trained up and what we are doing to change that?
General PACE. Yes, sir.
I think we are learning from Afghanistan and Iraq, and we are learning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The more rapid stand-up in Iraq is, one, because we did learn that we should move more quickly in standing up the new Iraqi army. Second, because—I did not say this here this morning, but I have had a chance to think about it a little bit more, sir.
Mr. LARSEN. Sure.
General PACE. There is also that there was a large, 400,000-man standing army in Iraq, that although it dissipated very quickly on the battlefield, still had the basic rudimentary training, knew how to operate in fire teams and squads and platoons and the like.
Page 70 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So putting them together and retraining them to the battalion level is a little easier because they were a standing army.
In Afghanistan, we were training about 10,000 a year. That is not fast enough. The Secretary has told us that is not fast enough. And we are taking the lessons we have learned in Iraq now, transporting them back to Afghanistan and working with Lieutenant General Barno and his team there to come up with a faster fielding plan for the Afghan Army.
So it is a matter of what the objective was and then learning that the objectives should have been set higher in Afghanistan, sir.
Mr. LARSEN. I don't want to send you mixed messages. You and I have also had a conversation before that if you had to train quickly, versus train the capability, you should err on the side of training the capability and making sure that folks are doing to do the job right.
And just, you know, assure me that you are looking at that as well in Afghanistan, that although you find a way to train more quickly, you are still getting capability. You will get the capability that you need.
General PACE. Sir, let me thank you for the opportunity to correct. We will not train the individual soldier in Afghanistan more quickly. We will train more soldiers at the same time so that we get to the end state quicker.
Page 71 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. LARSEN. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Simmons.
Mr. SIMMONS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, in particular, for holding these hearings today and tomorrow.
I represent a district that lost people on September 11th. The issues relative to this report are of great interest to my constituency, and I appreciate the fact that this committee is conducting this hearing today.
Secretary Wolfowitz, in your testimony you quoted the President, who said, we will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.
I would like to focus on the issues of the tools of intelligence.
And I note for the record that a new, open-source agency is being recommended by the 9/11 report—open-source intelligence.
I also note for the record that the staff statement number 11 refers to open sources as a bedrock source of information for intelligence, but a capability that was dramatically diminished in the 1990's, for whatever reasons.
Page 72 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It is also my understanding that the USSOCOM has an open-source cell that was established, General, by your predecessor, and that that provides a substantial amount of all-source intelligence at a relatively low cost. I have not been down to see that; I do not know whether that is the case.
But my question goes to the issue of open sources of intelligence. We know that open sources of intelligence are useful. We know that they are not just newspaper clippings or the translation of radio broadcasts.
And as an example, I would like to show this chart, which is the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility in Iran, 2002, before 2004, after they buried the uranium-enrichment facility.
I used to work down at the National Photographic Interpretation Center. These things were covered with classified stats and statements and caveats. This is produced by the Space Imaging Eurasia. This is open-source. This is unclassified.
And the amazing thing about some of these open-source capabilities that we have today is, you can deploy troops with these images in their possession. They are not secret. They are not top secret. They are Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals (NOFORN). And so they are very transportable.
And you can bring in other people from around the world, liaison military. They are not NOFORN. I mean we can all stand around and look at them and study them.
Page 73 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So for me the open-source capabilities are tremendously important. And yet the Army intelligence devotes one line to open source, and basically says it is not an intelligence discipline, it is not an intelligence discipline. It is a category of information, which I disagree with completely.
So my question, General Brown, is from the experience of your command in using open source, what lessons can we learn from that? How can we better incorporate this category or this tool of intelligence into the war on terrorism into the nine sanctuaries, et cetera?
And my question to you, Mr. Secretary, is, as a matter of policy, will the Defense Department incorporate open-source intelligence as the discipline to further enhance our capabilities to conduct the war on terrorism?
General BROWN. Sir, I think it is an important tool. And we look at open-source data. And it is part of the process down at Special Operations Command and our joint intelligence center.
And I would just say, I think you are exactly right. We do think it is one of the tools for analysis. It is very useful information. And we do that.
Mr. SIMMONS. Is it cost-effective, General?
General BROWN. I would think it is very cost effective, sir.
Page 74 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SIMMONS. And is it not correct that if you were to be deploying forces on a very short notice to go after a terrorist target that the open-source intelligence does not provide all of the burdensome security regulations and sharing and transporting this information, that it is exportable on an almost immediate basis, which has certain operational advantages?
General BROWN. Open-source data is much more usable. Obviously, it is not detailed or in a lot of cases does not have the fidelity that some classified sources would have. But open-source data is very usable, very user friendly. And we do use it.
Mr. SIMMONS. Thank you.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. And I would say sometimes it is even more reliable. And I risk getting myself in trouble here.
Mr. SIMMONS. Just keep talking.
[Laughter.]
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. You know, I would prefer to read a State Department cable that said we had a conversation with gentleman X who told us the following things. And you can find out who gentleman X is and you can find out why he might be telling you those things and whether he is deceiving you or not. It is the reliable source, someone whose information has previously been corroborated.
Page 75 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I am not saying you can avoid that, but I am saying it is a mistake to assume that because something is super-secret and we paid somebody for the information, and we polygraphed them and all of that, that it is therefore necessarily more reliable that something that it is a little more out in the open and therefore checkable.
I think all sources of information are part of understanding the problem. And if someone says it is not part of the intelligence discipline, it seems to me they are sort of defining themselves as a kind of medical specialist might. I mean, I do not go to a surgeon to get treatments for dermatological problems. But I want an intelligence community that can look at the whole subject matter.
And I had not heard that phrase before, but I will look into it. You might ask Secretary Cambone when he is here tomorrow.
Mr. SIMMONS. I would be happy to do that. I do also have a letter to General Schoomaker on that subject, because I think that again, at a time when we are trying to look at the total picture of what happened on 9/11 and at a time when we are trying to resolve some of the weaknesses that we have in our intelligence community, the failure to use open-source intelligence, I think, is a huge failure.
And that is why I ask for the record if this was the policy of the Defense Department to use this capability. I know it is being used very successfully by the Special Operations Command.
Page 76 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But I am puzzled as to why it is excluded from the Army's intelligence Field Manual (FM) as being anything of any value.
And I thank you for your answer.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Cooper.
Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have nothing but praise for our military, but I am increasingly worried about the Pentagon civilian leadership. I would like to ask in plain English—because I have listened now for several hours today—whether the Pentagon is going to put its weight behind the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Because I am very worried. We are hearing a lot of sweet talking and slow walking here that could result in this window of opportunity for fundamental reform and long-overdue reform and much needed reform of our intelligence institutions to take place.
I hope that is not the case. But after the breakfast this morning, and after a lot of back and forth today, I am very worried that you all politely have a kill in for the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.
I hope I am wrong, and I want to give you the opportunity to correct the impression I received.
Page 77 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I am not sure what gave you that impression. I think, and I think I have said it here, I believe the 9/11 commission has correctly identified some important areas where can we do a lot better when it comes to intelligence and some changes that need to be made.
Saying taking a little bit of time to think through those changes so that we make them the right way should not be interpreted as changing slowly. I think if you look at the kinds of failures to share intelligence that clearly contributed to a failure on 9/11, you cannot say that is something you want to overcome slowly. You need to overcome it quickly.
A lot of effort actually has gone into already dealing within, I think, the recommendations of the commission.
Mr. COOPER. Mr. Secretary, the Pentagon can act quickly when it wants to. Have Pentagon lawyers been tasked to draft provisions that could be in legislation that this committee could look at and vote on in debate? Have Pentagon lawyers been engaged to begin that process?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. The process is being led, I think as it should be, by the National Security Council staff. And we are participating in that. And General Pace and I were in a meeting just yesterday talking——
Mr. COOPER. Is that a yes or a no? Are Pentagon lawyers working on legislative provisions to implement the 9/11 Commission right now?
Page 78 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. As part of an agency process, yes.
Mr. COOPER. They are working on it right now.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Yes.
Mr. COOPER. When can we look forward to seeing their work product?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I cannot tell you that. I do not know.
Mr. COOPER. There is no timetable. There is no expectation. .
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I know people are trying to produce something that can be looked at—they are on a short time fuse, not a long one.
Mr. COOPER. And short means——
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. This is not a Pentagon responsibility. This is an inter-agency responsibility in which we are participating.
Mr. COOPER. But you raised some specific concerns, very valid concerns about tactical and strategic intelligence and usefulness to troops. We all support our warfighters. Can we work out these difference?
Page 79 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
If you listened to the earlier panel, they showed great, good faith and willingness to compromise and work out any possible glitch going, for example, line by line through the JMIP funding to make sure that the needs of the warfighter were taken care of.
Is the Pentagon willing to show a similar good faith in this negotiation?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Absolutely. I think these are problems we can work our way through.
Mr. COOPER. When?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Sooner, rather than later, I hope.
Mr. COOPER. This year? This month?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Congressman Cooper, I cannot determine when it happens.
Mr. COOPER. You are the boss, or one of the bosses.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. No, I am not. This is a decision that has to go to the President. We are talking about legislation that affects the entire government.
We are putting our shoulder to the wheel and trying to make this move as fast as possible. And I think as fast as possible means in this session of Congress. But it is not up to me to decide.
Page 80 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. COOPER. I hope as fast as possible is fast enough because the commission on a bipartisan unanimous basis said this is urgent for our national security if the American people are going to be safe.
Let me ask a specific question: This is yesterday's Washington Times. This is the headline having to do with your buddy, Chalabi.
Now, you have denied that he is a personal favorite. But this newspaper continues to identify him as a Pentagon favorite. They issued an arrest warrant for him on counterfeiting charges and an arrest warrant for his nephew on murder charges.
And the man wanted on counterfeiting charges was apparently contacted on vacation in Tehran. This is the gentleman the Pentagon apparently allowed to sit next to the first lady of the United States at this year's State of the Union message. What is going on here? Is this an example of——
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Mr. Cooper, he is not a Pentagon favorite. We did not decide where he sat in the——
Mr. COOPER. Why does the Washington Times say so?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. You have to ask them. We have tried, as a government and as a Department over many years, including in the last Administration, to deal with anybody who supported the goal of liberation of Iraq, which I would remind you was the product of bipartisan legislation in this Congress.
Page 81 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It was a policy supported by the Clinton Administration as well as this Administration. It has meant dealing with Mr. Chalabi. It has meant dealing with Mr. Talibani. It has meant dealing with Mr. Barzani. It has meant dealing with Mr. Pachachi. It has meant dealing with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.
Mr. COOPER. You trust this man?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I do not think in that part of the world you should trust anybody. I think President Reagan——
Mr. COOPER. Should we have paid him $400 million, as apparently we have done?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I do not know where you got that number from. I am not aware of it.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman has reached his five minutes.
And the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Forbes.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, may I follow through the question at this point?
The CHAIRMAN. Yes, go ahead.
Page 82 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Secretary, are you familiar with the testimony of General Jack Keene, who testified here I think about three weeks ago? When we asked that question about why we went into Iraq, and he said this is as nearly a quote as I can get: That we were seduced by Iraqi exiles.
Are you familiar with that?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. No, I am not.
Mr. SKELTON. Do you agree with him?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. No, I do not think we were seduced.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman, the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Forbes.
Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you, Mr. Secretary, Generals.
I want to echo what Congressman Wilson said earlier, and that is to thank you for the many successes that you have had. One of the things that seems certain from all of the testimony that we had heard is that the resources you have are limited and that the threats out there are unlimited. So I think as many times as you have come here, we could find some other threat that you have not covered, something that we could badger you with.
Page 83 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
One of things that you always get when you come before a committee like this is you get legislation, you try to put it through with no hearings, we hear people screaming: You are rushing this through; we are not having hearings.
If you have the hearings then you hear people say: You are not moving fast enough.
One of the things that we saw in the commission report, for example, was a recommendation that we had standards for birth certificates and sources of identification for drivers' licenses. But in 1996, we tried to get the illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act, which would have done just that, many of the people that are now screaming that we put all of these reforms in, fought against this and got those things taken out of there. And certainly that is something that is important to several of us because seven out of the 19 hijackers obtained false drivers' licenses in Virginia.
But Mr. Secretary, what I would like to ask you about today, in addition to thanking you for what you have done, is a technology question. And if you don't have the answer today, if you could get back with it, that would be fine. But as I mentioned earlier, one of the things we heard from the previous panel, one of the things that I know that you have stated before, is that your resources are limited, and yet the threat is out there, of the sanctuaries almost unlimited, of where we are trying to deal with.
Every time I hear about joint training and I hear about transformation and joint operational training, it seems like one of the best opportunities we have out there, and perhaps one of the best-kept secrets we have, is our ability to do modeling, simulation and visualization.
Page 84 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And my question for you is: How are we utilizing that great technology, which I think we are just on the tip of the iceberg in doing that. How are we using that in our war against terror?
And is there more that we, as Congress, can do to help further that technology so that it can be more useful? Because I firmly believe it will save lives, it will save time, it will save money, it will help us make those intelligent choices that we need to make.
Are we doing enough?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I think it is one of the strong reasons for having a national intelligence director.
I think you can talk about the danger of overcentralization, but I think if you want to have information shared, you need to have some degree of common information systems.
I think military would tell you that the effect of Goldwater-Nichols and the whole development of the joint arena has greatly improved our ability to communicate between different services. It is not perfect yet, but it is enormous progress over 10 years.
I think a similar kind of common information technology within the intelligence community is something that is badly needed.
Page 85 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And I think; I am not sure of the right terminology here, you want a kind of open architecture, which requires some degree of a centralization of standards. That does not mean that all the information gets sucked into the center; in fact, it gets pushed out to the edges more.
We have enormous possibilities in this whole area of intelligence sharing because of what technology makes possible. And you no longer have to think about intelligence fusion created by having six individuals from six different agencies occupying a common office in Washington, D.C., or anywhere physically in the world. You can share information across thousands of miles of difference because of what you can do with information technology. And you can have it sitting there, so that when someone has a question that nobody thought of before, instead of having to go back and create an intelligence tasking, the first thing they can do is do a data-mining effort. And they may discover that somebody collected that information for them already without having been tasked.
So I think information technology is hugely important here. I think it ought to be one of the major missions of the NID, is to achieve more seamless movement of information, at least so that we are not dealing with technological barriers that are from the industrial age any longer.
General PACE. If I might add, sir, not only is technology and information use very powerful in planning the attack, it is also very powerful in analyzing your own vulnerabilities.
Page 86 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And when the Nation begins discussing domestic intelligence and the commission's recommendations with regard to that, I think technology can help us a great deal in that arena, as well.
Mr. FORBES. Mr. Chairman, if I could just ask, Mr. Secretary, you do not need to respond to this, but if you could perhaps even look into—we are doing it great with the Joint Forces Command and the technology there. But what the modeling and the simulation and visualization is allowing us to do now is to take all the data that we have and actually look into the future of what will happen with different scenarios.
It gives us a great opportunity to forecast, a great opportunity to predict where our risks are going to be. And I believe, with a little more bump, that technology can save tremendous lives and really help us to pinpoint where we want to focus our resources.
So I just think that is a great opportunity for us to explore and look at in the future.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
And Mr. Marshall is going to ask the next question, but I would just advise the committee that, since you have all been working through lunch and dinner, we do have sandwiches outside in the anteroom for anybody who wants to get them. And I have it on good information that Mr. Chalabi did not provide these sandwiches——
[Laughter.]
Page 87 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN [continuing]. To the Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Marshall, you are recognized.
Mr. MARSHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Actually, Mr. Cooper asked the question that I was going to ask, and it had to do with how the Pentagon—I was not necessarily going to ask it as Mr. Cooper asked it——
[Laughter.]
Mr. MARSHALL [continuing]. But how the Pentagon was going to respond to the 9/11 report.
At the earlier panel's presentation, Mr. Weldon went into some detail concerning efforts to reform our intelligence community in the past, and very passionately explained that an awful lot of the 9/11 recommendations are recommendations that have been on the table for years, and nothing has been done. Sort of, death by a thousand cuts, as we analyze these things and nothing gets done.
And in my view, we are going to get hit. It is not a matter of whether we are. We are going to get hit. The question is simply when, where, how, how hard.
Page 88 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I mean, at that point, I suspect people will be pointing to whether it is the 9/11 Commission's recommendations or other recommendations. They will be pointing to recommendations that were made, not enacted, because we delayed and possibly recommendations that had they been acted upon, were recommendations that could have resulted in maybe a different outcome.
So, you know, if we do not get to it fairly soon, I suspect we are going to be getting to it after the next crisis. And I think that is a shame. I think we need to get to this before we have another crisis.
I will not ask that question.
Transformation of DOD, the military generally, here we are talking about how we can best deny sanctuary to terrorists. And it seems to me in the transformation process, as I have understood that process so far and heard descriptions of what we plan to do, an awful lot of it is just DOD-centered. Some of it is just service-centered, and most of it is conventional.
And yet here we have a threat facing us that is pretty clearly unconventional, goes well beyond DOD. In fact, I think it goes well beyond our abilities as Americans to effectively address without having very good relations, very effective relations, with allies across the world. People complain about the schools of America, I frankly think we have to have more rather than less where those kinds of things are concerned.
A lot of people think that we should be growing our Army. I frankly think that the security situation in Iraq may even be better if we had a smaller number of troops deployed and use some of the resources that would be saved differently.
Page 89 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And so, I just make the observation that I am concerned about the direction transformation is taking right now. It seems to be as the intelligence community seems to be wed in the process of the past when we are facing a new threat of the future.
One specific question. Army transformation; well pardon me, back up, increasing the size of the force in the current defense authorization bill, I understand there is not just authorization increasing the size of the force, but a direction that that be done. I hope that is not the case. I hope that gets changed before it comes out of conference. I hope you all are working on that.
I would like to see authorization. And I would, frankly, like to see any increase paid for by supplemental funds rather than regular budget funds, given the problems that will occur down the road if we increase the size of our force and we are wed to it in a current budget.
I would be happy to have any comments.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I will just comment briefly, and maybe if the generals want to. The Army, I think, has a very thoughtful, well-considered plan to basically increase it combat capability by some 50 percent with only a temporary increase in personnel.
They do need that temporary increase. But as you say it can be funded out of supplementals.
Page 90 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think it is an example of what you can do when you think out of the box and you think about changing organizational structures. In the case of the Army, looking at separate brigade combat teams is the core organizing principles, so they go from 33 today to 43 or possibly as many as 48 with only a modest increase in personnel requirements.
And that is because they have an eye too on the problem you elude to, which is if you simple increase personnel when you do not need them, you are incurring a huge additional cost for the future that will come at the expense of other things the Army needs.
Mr. MARSHALL. I will make one more observation, since I have just a little bit more time. There are so many countries that in this kind of combat have a comparative advantage over us. They are more familiar with terrorism. Gosh, I mean, it gets to the point where we have potential allies out there who can actually drink the water in Iraq, where our soldier cannot.
And it just seems to me that thinking along those lines is critically important for us if we are going to be successful in denying sanctuary to terrorists in the long run.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I agree with that.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentlelady from New Mexico, Mrs. Wilson.
Page 91 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mrs. WILSON OF NEW MEXICO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to start out by saying that I, like many of my colleagues, found this report to be a very valuable contribution, particularly in two respects. One, of course, was global strategy. I think it probably is the best encapsulation in one place that we have seen for some time, and also focusing on the issue of sharing of information.
Of course there are some issues that are not addressed in this report that are addressed in others, some from this committee, some from the Senate, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report, which focuses on groupthink, issues of continuity of government, the collection of intelligence, the focus on HUMINT, which are not part of this report.
They think all of us on this committee realize that we are probably only going to have one shot at getting legislation to reorganize the intelligence community to look at and address all of these different problems.
And the reality is that sometimes if you come up with a recommendation to focus on one problem, you may exacerbate others and that there are often tensions between these.
That particularly concerns me with the issue of sharing of information or going toward unified operations or jointness and the contrary problem of group-think, because I think there is some tension there and that the 9/11 report does not really address that problem of how do you institutionalize imagination or is that just an oxymoron or how can you empower iconoclasts? There is really no mentioning in the report of things like red teams or competitive analysis or those kinds of structures which organizationally might be very different from unified command, if you will.
Page 92 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And I wonder, particularly Paul, if you have given some thought to this and what kinds of mechanisms could we put in place to create an environment within whatever structure it is, stovepipes or unified command or a horizontal sharing of information, that will create the culture that we want of constant questioning.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. It is an important thing to aim at in principal. I mean, I don't think it is driven mainly by organization. I mean, you could imagine a national intelligence director who institutionalizes group-think if you like. You could imagine a NID who forces people to put their differences up on the table. I think it is personality-driven and culture-driven.
And to a considerable extent, it is driven by consumers. If consumers want uncertainty that the intelligence world can't produce, they will tend to get it. If they get impatient with people saying, ''We are not sure what the answer is here, it could be A or it could be B,'' I mean, obviously you will go crazy if you get too much of that. But if you say, ''Go home and come up with an agreement,'' you will get an agreement, and it will tend toward group-think.
So I guess I would put it this way: I think the commission has made a strong case for having somebody with the authority to break down the stovepipes, somebody with the authority to create common information technology. And I actually think having that should improve the ability to do competitive analysis if people ask for it, because everybody will know what the FBI knows about anthrax, let's say, and everybody will know what National Security Agency (NSA) knows about the communications someone has engaged in.
Page 93 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I shouldn't say everybody. I mean, if this stuff weren't highly sensitive, you wouldn't have the problems arising in the first place. But at least across those stovepipes, people will have an ability to take the information someone else has to develop a competitive analysis.
I think you will do a lot better that way. But it is going to require direction to push that up. And it is going to require consumers who demand it rather than who say, ''Tell me the answer,'' as though there is a single answer.
I think one of the things that is generally poorly understood about this whole business is that it is not science. I mean, we get mesmerized by the fact that we can read license plate numbers from space, and it is pretty impressive. But the amount that we don't know is enormous. And I think it was the Senate Select Committee on Inteligence report that pointed out part of our problem in Iraq was we didn't have any human intelligence at all. Part of our problem in al Qaeda is we don't have any human intelligence at all.
How many times do you want to get briefed on al Qaeda and be reminded we don't have any human sources so we are making some guesses here? But you need to keep being reminded of what we don't know as well as what we do know.
Mrs. WILSON OF NEW MEXICO. I will ask a follow-up on that issue of who the customers are. And it seems to me there are, kind of, generally for intelligence two groups of customers: There are the policy-makers and there are the warfighters. And different organizational structures or guidelines can emphasize one group over the other with respect to resources.
Page 94 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And one of the things that I want to make sure is, you know, all of us up here want to know everything all the time. But I think it is this committee in particular that needs to make sure that General Brown's guys have the information they need when they need it and particularly when that has to do with tasking of assets that are currently under DOD's control.
How would you envision under this recommended change a conflict would get resolved when a national intelligence director directs an asset currently within DOD's structure to do one thing and the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence or the warfighter needs something else? And the Undersecretary for Intelligence, what does he do? He has got two masters. How does that get resolved?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Of course, we have that issue today. I mean, we have very important assets that we depend on that, in fact, belong to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).
I am going to ask General Brown or General Pace to comment here, but, I mean, I think there is not a formula. There needs to be a great deal of communication so that ultimately people understand what those relative priorities are. And then on the tough calls, there are going to have to be decisions made. And I think that is, in part, also what that national intelligence director needs to do.
General PACE. I think there is an opportunity here as well as a problem. The opportunity is that, the way I envision the proposal, is that the national intelligence director would have the responsibility to ensure that, take an example, a specific intelligence fact that has tactical value, operational value and strategic value, which many of them do today, that his system collects that and disseminates it to each of the current organizations that are responsible.
Page 95 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And so, that the organization, DIA, for example, is responsible to make sure that PFC Pace has that data at the same time that the organization, CIA, that is responsible to the National Security Council, has the data so that the facts are the same, the analysis may be different, but the feed to the proper consumer is done quickly and efficiently.
Where the problem comes in is, as you mentioned, if there is, in fact, a time when you have more need than capacity and if the subordinate organization believes that they are being improperly tasked, in my opinion, the proper place to take that then is to the National Security Council for the principals to determine what is correct and what is not.
But that would be my guess two, five percent of the time. Ninety-five percent of the time or better the individual at the NID responsible would be controlling an organization that would be much more efficient.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentlelady.
The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Meek.
Mr. MEEK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary, good to have you before the committee again.
General Pace, always good to see you.
Page 96 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And, General Brown, it is a pleasure seeing you again, sir. Thank you for your hospitality down in Tampa.
There are a couple of things. Mr. Secretary, I took a look at your testimony, and I was actually watching it. I was in the back there. And then I read it. And I noted Mr. Cooper asked a number of pointed questions on timelines on how serious the Administration may be. And so, since you are the highest ranking appointed individual sitting at the table in the Defense Department, is there a real effort on adopting the 9/11 Commission recommendations?
And I tell you the reason why there is some interest in saying, ''Well, maybe that is not the case.'' There are not a lot of top-line Cabinet secretaries running to the Hill trying to meet with Members of Congress saying, ''We have to move this report.'' The President didn't call us down, the committees who have met before us or this committee that is meeting this week. I am on the House Homeland Security Select Committee; they haven't called us and said, ''Hey, we need to talk about this because we need to get to moving on this report.''
And I think that, as we look at history as it relates to intelligence, as it relates to some of the report that was displayed by one of our other members when the chair and the co-chair were here and the panel before you about how many reports and revamping our intelligence across the board and how they were ignored, all the way from 1995 to this point, it was almost, in so many words, ''What makes this different?'' There was some reference of the bureaucracy of the intelligence community and what role they play in really trying to lead the Congress in that direction.
Page 97 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I am concerned, and I think the American people need to be also concerned about this, because, unlike those reports, the 9/11 Commission actually has been around for some 18 months. There are Members of Congress that fought for its creation. There are some members that fought against it. The President had some sharp words against it at one point. But I am glad that he is now recognizing their work.
But they had testimony from firefighters, from victim families, from actual victims that were injured in 9/11, from intelligence, FBI, CIA, past Presidents, past CIA directors, what have you. Some of it was very embarrassing for this country to see how we are open-chested on many of these issues.
The fact that we drove into this Capitol, I don't know if it happened for you as you were driving in, you know, two or three checkpoints before you could even make it to this hearing room by vehicle. And for us not to have a sense or urgency from the administration is concerning to me and also, I am pretty sure, to many Members of the Congress.
Also, I feel that the message should be delivered to Secretary Rumsfeld; I am sorry that he couldn't be here. And I don't know the reason why or if we didn't invite him, what have you. That is another issue, that if we don't act, and those of us that are dealing with defense issues and national security issues, others will act for us. When I say others, I am saying other committees that may not cover the Department of Defense on an everyday basis.
So if we are going to, if our lawyers, like Mr. Cooper said, are not taking a front seat, need it be whoever is spearheading it outside of the National Security Council or what have you, we are going to find ourselves in the dust. And I think we all in this room hold the troops, the men and women that are in the field, paramount, their security, their safety. And taken from page four of your testimony, when you speak of the axis of evil and then you go and you say, ''We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror,'' that feeds into what the 9/11 report is talking about and it embodies it.
Page 98 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In your written testimony, you speak very flowerly about their report and how they have exposed a lot of things that need to be addressed. But the whole issue is the timeline. So I am hoping and also praying that we can come together as professionals in this process and try to push this 9/11 Commission report and probably push aside some of the arguments that we are hearing now.
Because I also heard it. I have been around. And thank you for being here earlier today. I thank everyone for being around and supplying the information. But I believe that the American people don't have to sit and watch another terror event take place and then someone looks at page whatever it may be of the 9/11 report and says, ''It was right here in black and white, Members of Congress had it, senior officials had it, and they didn't move with a sense of urgency.''
So I just wanted to just share that with you, Mr. Secretary, saying that that is important. And hopefully you can take that back to the Pentagon and also to the administration that some of us, you know, here on the Hill want to move as soon as possible.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Congressman Meek, I appreciate your sense of urgency. I hope you appreciate ours. We think this is an urgent matter. In fact, there has been an awful lot of change that has been undertaken over the last two and a half years. We didn't just wait for a report to change things. If anything, Secretary Rumsfeld's reputation is perhaps occasionally changing a little bit too much. I wouldn't agree with that characterization. But he is certainly not known as a patient man.
Page 99 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The President has already decided that the central recommendation of having a national intelligence director is something he wants to do and people have been called back, frankly, from vacation and leave to work on how to do that.
I think he also decided, and I would agree with him even if he weren't my boss, that it is not a good idea to have that position located in the White House. So not every detail of what the commission recommended should be adopted lock, stock and barrel.
But that it should be approached with a sense of urgency, I absolutely agree with you.
And if I might, Mr. Chairman, too, since I may have said something to be misinterpreted in answering Mr. Cooper earlier, I didn't imply there is no one in that part of the world that is trustworthy. I did mean to say that nobody should be trusted blindly and that we make a big mistake if we think we can simply decide who we are going to work with based on who we like.
And we need to recognize it is a tough environment, people have multiple interests, multiple agendas. Most of the people that we are dealing with had to survive in one way or another, whether inside Iraq or outside Iraq in the face of one of the most ruthless dictators in the world.
So it is a more complicated environment, I think, than anything we would be used to, even the most rough and tumble American politics. But I certainly don't mean to cast aspersions on people's character in a broad sense. I just think we need to have our eyes open. And I think we do.
Page 100 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
And the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Lobiondo.
Mr. LOBIONDO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, General Pace, General Brown, thank you for being here. In your assessment or in your opinion, what are the outstanding terrorist threats that maybe we haven't dealt with and/or sanctuaries that we haven't dealt with? And is the DOD likely to take any action? Or is there something we can expect in this area?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. There is certainly a lot that we are dealing with that we haven't dealt with in the sense of completing the job.
There is the whole problem, the whole challenge of sleeper cells in the United States and in a number of European countries. Where we find them, we go after them. But we should be under no illusion that we have them all.
Another major challenge, which I referred to in my testimony, is that ungoverned, semi-governed area in Northwestern Pakistan. It is truly wild country. Control of the government up there is fairly limited. And we think that possibly Osama bin Laden himself could be hiding up there. So we can't say we have dealt with it. And I think we have a strategy for dealing with it.
Page 101 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
That strategy includes everything from an enormous increase in our foreign assistance for Pakistan. I was just noticing, I think, in the year 2000, we had dropped our foreign assistance to Pakistan down to $ 4 million a year. And our request for this year is $700 million.
That is part of a strategy for dealing with that ungoverned area in Pakistan. But it is only part. Working with the Pakistani military in a cooperative way is part. Sharing intelligence is part.
This is going to be a very long, tough struggle against an enemy that has dug itself in all over the world over a considerable period of time. So there are a lot of problems that are going to take time to deal with.
Mr. LOBIONDO. Are you continuing to be pleased with the level of cooperation from Pakistan?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Yes. If I had to give a short answer, the answer is yes. Is it perfect? No.
And I think there is a lesson there, too. And I don't want to excuse every mistake of theirs, but I think by cutting off the Pakistani military as we did for a long period of time we made it more difficult to work with them. And I think that ought to be lesson as we think about how we deal with other countries where the relationships are imperfect, like Uzbekistan, for example.
Page 102 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I think I referred to it earlier: We had this challenge during the Cold War in dealing with the government in Korea that left a lot to be desired. But it was very important to work with that government, not only so that the North Koreans didn't take over, but I think in the long run by working with that government, we were able to bring about positive change. And I think that is the way in which you have to work with a country like Pakistan.
Mr. LOBIONDO. And how would you categorize our relationship with Turkey as it relates to dealing with these specific problems with terrorists and their level of cooperation?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I think the relationship with Turkey in that respect and many other respects is very good. They are people that take the terrorism threat very seriously.
As you may remember, I think it was as recently as this past spring, the terrorists attacked. In Istanbul, they attacked some Jewish synagogues and some British diplomatic installations. And I think they probably hoped that they would create splits within Turkish society. And they had exactly the opposite effect. The Turks are tough people, and they rallied around and pulled together. And they are very good allies in this war.
Mr. LOBIONDO. Do we have military-to-military exchanges with Turkey and Pakistan?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Very close ones with Turkey and developing ones with Pakistan.
Page 103 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. LOBIONDO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Spratt.
Mr. SPRATT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And to our three witnesses, thank you very much, not only for your testimony, but for your perseverance. We appreciate it.
The three of you seemed to stress primarily what we have accomplished. I can understand that: put the best face on how far we have come and what we have done. But you do that at the risk of understating the gravity of what lies ahead of us.
I want to read to you just briefly some excerpts from the commission's report in dealing with Afghanistan, which is the original sanctuary. In fact, they call it an incubator as opposed to a sanctuary.
They acknowledge, however, that there is reason for hope for the people of Afghanistan. But they go on to say, ''grave concerns remain. Taliban and al Qaeda fighters have regrouped in the south and southeast, warlords control much of the country beyond Kabul and the land is awash in weapons. Economic development remains a distant hope. The narcotics trade, long a massive sector of the Afghan economy, is again booming. Even the most hardened aid workers refuse to operate in many regions and some warn that Afghanistan is on the brink of chaos.''
Page 104 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What are we doing? This is their assessment: ''The United States has largely stayed out of the central government's struggle with dissident warlords and has largely avoided confronting the related problem of narco-trafficking.''
It makes the recommendation that we make a long-term, substantial commitment to Afghanistan. And then it acknowledged, ''This is an ambitious recommendation.'' It acknowledges that National Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the U.S. have committed ourselves to the region. But it raises the questions whether or not we are up to the task, saying, ''The institutional commitments of NATO and the United Nations to these enterprises, civil military teams engaged in development, are weak. NATO member states are not following through. Some of the other states around the world that have pledged assistance to Afghanistan are not fulfilling their pledges.
''The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is oriented overwhelmingly toward military and security work. The State Department presence is woefully understaffed. The military mission is narrowly focused on al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the north and southeast.''
Then with respect to Pakistan, which is next door in the same turf in many respects, they note, ''The endemic poverty, widespread corruption and often ineffective government create opportunities for Islamic recruitment.'' And they go on to say that, ''The country's vast unpoliced regions make Pakistan attractive to extremists seeking refuge.'' And they take Karachi as an example and say that: ''Our presence here is extremely overstretched.'' The consulate in Karachi they describe as, ''a makeshift fortress reflecting the gravity of the situation surrounding this area.''
Page 105 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
You know all this, I am certain. I am just saying when you read this, it didn't sound nearly, granted, everything we have accomplished is substantial. And I commend our troops and commend you for your leadership in doing it. But we have a lot of work that lies ahead of us.
And when I read this report, I think of the resources that it is going to require. And I ask myself, ''How do we redeploy these resources?'' because we are reaching the limits of what we can afford as a budget, given a deficit of $400 billion to $500 billion a year. Sooner or later, that has to be dealt with.
How do we redeploy the assets just to deal with these two countries, which clearly are the critical sanctuary countries that must be dealt with before we can realistically talk about major efforts anywhere else? Where do the resources come from to do this?
For example, under Pakistan, they go so far as to say we need to increase military assistance and even help them build a public educational system because the madrassa schools are themselves sources of Islamic extremism and even poisonous instruction about Western values.
How do we begin to tackle this problems without a far more significant commitment of resources, manpower and money than we have made thus far?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. The problems are big. And I think I have tried to emphasize that they are. And I think when the President talks about this being a long and global struggle, he is comparing it to something like the Cold War.
Page 106 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We are a country at war. We are a country that has been attacked. These challenges are huge.
I think one also should be realistic, particularly in a country like Afghanistan, as to how fast progress can be made. A lot has happened. A lot has changed. A lot more needs to be done. But it is not going to happen overnight, even if you poured 50,000 troops and billions and billions of dollars.
In fact, General Franks was the first one to caution, and I think correctly, against the dangers of becoming an occupying army in Afghanistan and having exactly the opposite effect of what we want to achieve.
We can talk about the glass partly full, we can talk about the glass partly empty and argue about how much it is. But the glass is filling up. There are many more resources going into those two countries than we had two or three years ago, vastly more. I think I mentioned the figure of $4 million in aid to Pakistan in the year 2000 and it is a $700 million request today.
I think other countries do have an obligation to step up and do more. And that includes the wealthy Arab countries of the Gulf. It also includes our European partners, who often are a bit more ready to say things sometimes than to do things. Although many of them are contributing. Little New Zealand is actually running a provincial reconstruction team in a remote city in Afghanistan.
Page 107 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So there is a lot going on. Has it solved the problems of drug lords? Absolutely not. Is it going to solve it tomorrow or next year? No.
But is Afghanistan on the right course? I think it is. Is Pakistan on the right course? It is actually a little more precarious because the problems in Pakistan are bigger.
Mr. SPRATT. This is what the report says. This means, and I take this to be present tense, ''redoubled effort to secure the country, disarm militias and curtail the warlord rule.'' I didn't hear that in anybody's testimony today. I mean, I didn't hear you calling us to step up to that level of action. Redouble our commitment.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I am not sure what redouble means exactly.
Mr. SPRATT. It means——
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. General Pace referred to the fact that when Secretary Rumsfeld was presented with this plan for building up 70,000 Afghan national army in seven years, he has said that is not fast enough. And he wants to look at how it can be done faster. And we are looking at how it can be done faster. And if it needs more resources, where we can find the resources.
So nobody is sitting on their hands or going slow.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
Page 108 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And I thank the panel.
We have three more people that need to ask their questions.
Mr. Ryan.
Mr. RYAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Skelton, too, for calling this hearing. I think this is one of the major roles and major responsibilities that we have, especially sitting on this committee.
Mr. Spratt brought up, Mr. Secretary, a little bit about Afghanistan and some of the narcotics issues. Do you believe that the narcotics issue is a major component to the war on terror, at least those that are coming out of Afghanistan?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Certainly in Afghanistan, we are very concerned that narcotics can become a source of funding, both for terrorists and for——
Mr. RYAN. Do you think it is now?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. It is now, yes.
Mr. RYAN. So it is a major component of our war on terror or should be?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Eliminating those sources of funding to terrorists and warlords is a significant part of our Afghanistan strategy. That is right.
Page 109 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It is an issue where, by agreement, the United Kingdom has the lead. But we are supporting them strongly, and we are looking at ways in which we can support them more strongly.
Mr. RYAN. I think those comments are consistent. President Bush said, and you cited it in your testimony, that, ''We will starve terrorists of funding'', which I think drugs would be a major component of that, ''we need a strategy of prevention'', which I think that would be a major component of that, ''and then in the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.'' Those are all quotes from the President and I agree.
But we know what the reality is and that is that the poppy crop for this year has been harvested right under our noses. Twenty-eight out of the 32 provinces are now growing. There are millions of dollars going to the terrorists. I think there must be a communication problem because one of the top American commanders, and I will give you a quote here, said that, ''A no-holds-barred drug war led by the U.S. military would distract his troops from their primary mission, the war on terror.''
He goes on to say, ''We share intelligence with the Afghans, and we destroy drugs and laboratories if we encounter them. But I don't see coalition military forces as being the solution. Our primary focus is terrorism.''
Now, I asked you if narcotics and the drug money coming from Afghanistan was a primary component of the war on terror and the top commander in Afghanistan is saying that the drugs are not. So there is obviously a communication problem in here and I just want to know how the civilian side in their rhetoric reconciles what is actually going on on the ground.
Page 110 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I am not familiar with the quote or which general you are quoting. But if the idea is——
Mr. RYAN. General Barno.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ [continuing]. A no-holds barred war on drugs that would say we go around and our primary mission is to destroy drugs, we are not going to defeat drugs in Afghanistan, not with 10,000 troops or 20,000 troops or 100,000 troops.
The key to defeating drugs in Afghanistan is, I believe, primarily assisting the central government to develop an economy that provides alternatives to farmers; is secondarily, but quite importantly, building up the capability of Afghan police and the Afghan army to deal with this problem themselves so that we don't become a hated occupier that goes around destroying farmers' poppy fields. And it does mean, as General Barno said, going after laboratories and traffickers where we can find them. And we look at how we can improve that effort.
But once again, if you set a mark on the wall that we, the United States military by itself, is going to eliminate drugs in Afghanistan in a year or two, it can't be done.
Mr. RYAN. Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, I am not saying eliminate all the drugs. I am just saying try. I mean, we are not even trying.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. No, we are trying. We are trying in what we think is an intelligent way.
Page 111 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. RYAN. How can we be trying if the crop is harvested right under our nose? The whole year's worth of crop, General Myers told me when he was here last time. And either we don't have enough troops, or we don't care.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Do you know how big Afghanistan is? Do you know what the terrain is like? Do you think we should have troops covering the whole country so that we can eradicate the poppy crops? It is not a practical or wise course of action.
Mr. RYAN. Why did you say it was a primary component of the war on terror?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. It is, and we are not going to be completely successful at it this year or next year.
I think we have a strategy to build up Afghan capacity, to build up economic alternatives. And I think that is the only thing that has a chance of working.
Mr. RYAN. All a lot of us are saying, Mr. Secretary, is that we are spending close to $200 billion, we have 130,000 troops in Iraq, we broke Afghanistan, and we are having trouble——
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Congressman, we didn't break Afghanistan. The Soviets broke Afghanistan. The Taliban broke Afghanistan. I would say, considering how short a time we have been there, we have done an amazingly good job at helping the Afghans begin to put it back together.
Page 112 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. RYAN. Mr. Secretary, we have done nothing with the drug issue. We have done nothing. $2.5 billion, half of their gross domestic product (GDP) : How can you say we are doing something with the drug problem in Afghanistan? And it is going to the drug lords and then al Qaeda, millions of dollars.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Congressman, if you think you can solve the problems of Afghanistan that are created after 25 years of invasion and civil war in a year or two, then I don't think you know the country very well.
Mr. RYAN. I am not saying I could solve the problem. All I am saying is we should be trying.
The CHAIRMAN. I want to thank the gentleman for his question. We have a couple folks left. And I would just remind him that we are not able to eradicate the drug crops in our own national forests and we have a pretty sizable military operation that undertakes for that.
The gentleman from Illinois.
Mr. RYAN. All I am saying, Mr. Chairman, is that we should be trying. It is half the GDP there, and I don't think we are making the effort necessary.
The CHAIRMAN. We will get for the gentleman a written description of what has been done this year and what is blueprinted for next year.
Page 113 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Evans.
Mr. EVANS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to point out to my colleagues that one of the problems we face is, as we did in Iran, we had very few people in the State Department or the DOD that were fluent in Farsi or other Arabic languages. It means that we don't have the military intelligence that we need to make our case. But it means that we can't make the case for going out and meeting people, fighting for this language requirement.
I think the Marine Corps now has 200 people, I am told, General?
General PACE. Yes, sir.
Mr. EVANS. Could you describe that program?
General PACE. Sir, I cannot speak for the Marine Corps. And I know they have a program ongoing, but I am not embedded in the Marine Corps right now.
But I would like to endorse what you are saying, which is that we must, inside the military and inside our other government organizations like the Department of State, foster, encourage, promote based on area knowledge and language capability.
We are going to be at this war on terrorism for decades. We know the types of languages right now that we do not have enough of, and we need to start cultivating our youngsters today. As our lieutenants and privates are graduating from their basic training, we need to start putting a portion of them onto tracks that will get them to the point where 10 years from now we have the number of requisite linguists that are missing today.
Page 114 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. EVANS. All right.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General BROWN. Could I add that in Special Operations Command, especially in our special forces units, no one graduates from the course until they are language-capable. We run an open language system where we pick the languages we want our Green Berets, our SOF soldiers to learn. And you will not graduate from the course until you can speak a foreign language.
So while we are a very small force, we think language is critically important, as you do. And so we are pressing very hard on our language requirement for our Green Berets.
We have just recently started that also with our SEALs, giving them the opportunity but not making it a requirement yet.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
And now the gentleman who traveled from China for this hearing, the gentleman from Texas, the very distinguished Mr. Ortiz.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am proud that I have been able to stay awake this long.
Page 115 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
[Laughter.]
Mr. Secretary, thank you.
General Pace, General Brown.
The CHAIRMAN. Well, I think Mr. Cooper's cross-examination was pretty exciting. That should have livened you up a little bit.
Mr. ORTIZ. No, it is not their problem. It is my problem.
But let me ask, Mr. Secretary, the administration's preemption policy that is laid out in September 2002, the national security strategy lists three actions we will take to support a decision to act preemptively. And one of them was: ''building better, more integrated intelligence capabilities to provide timely, accurate information on threats wherever they may emerge; coordinating closely with allies to form a common assessment of the most dangerous threats; and three, to continue to transform our military forces to ensure our ability to conduct rapid and precise operations to achieve desired results.''
Now, this preemption strategy requires good intelligence as its basis. My question is, has the Administration revised the preemptive policy to deal with the lessons of Iraq, particularly in light of the flaws in intelligence structure and substance pointed out by the 9/11 Commission? Do you feel a necessity to go back and revisit the policies that were laid down September 2002? Or do you feel very confident that they are working?
Page 116 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I guess I would say I think that word ''preemptive,'' which puts the focus on military action, I think is too narrow. And I think, as I said in my statement and as the commission says in its report, I think that what we are really talking about is a strategy of prevention.
And prevention is much broader than the military. The military can play a role. And, in fact, I mean, without being used, I think in the case of Libya, the military played a very important role in producing a very important diplomatic gain in getting Gadhafi to give up his illegal weapons.
But I think we are dealing with something that is not primarily dealt with by military means. And as I said in my opening statement, as the commission says very clearly, I think the long-term means of prevention is, in fact, by creating some real hope in that part of the world to counter what is the message of the terrorists, which is, ''There is no hope and you might as well become a martyr.''
In fact, it is striking if you read some of their terrorist literature, they say, ''If democracy succeeds in the Muslim world or succeeds in Iraq or Afghanistan, people will come to love life too much and fear death and be unwilling to commit jihad.'' It is a bizarre and horrible expression of the way they think, but I think it says something about where our strength is and where our success can be.
Mr. ORTIZ. I see that my time is up. Thank you very much for being with us today.
Page 117 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you, Secretary.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Well, Mr. Ortiz, thank you. And thank you for making that extra effort to be here.
And our witnesses would like to leave at 6:30, so we will make the last question here with the Ranking Member, the gentleman from Missouri.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Secretary, did you not used to teach, college, university?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Yes, a long time ago.
Mr. SKELTON. And what would you do to a student who got his or her report to you 6 months late that was due on a given date?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Probably——
Mr. SKELTON. February 15, Mr. Secretary, the national military strategy document was to be sent to us. That document hopefully has something in it regarding sanctuaries, failed states and the like. And I think it would have helped our hearing a great deal if we had had that document by now some six months late.
Page 118 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me end with this, if I may. Mr. Secretary, Iraq was not a major haven for terrorists before the war but it risks becoming one now. The commission's report warns that if Iraq becomes a failed state, it will go to the top of the list of places that are breeding grounds for attacks against Americans at home.
How many foreign, al Qaeda or other anti-U.S. terrorists have entered Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. There is a lot of debate about numbers here and it is hard to get precise numbers.
We know that some hundreds of foreign fighters, and that doesn't mean al Qaeda; it means non-Iraqi, usually Arabs—have come into the country primarily through Syria. Some of them may be al Qaeda, but I think very few that we have actually identified as being actually al Qaeda. But some hundreds of foreign terrorists.
Mr. SKELTON. The last question: If we are unsuccessful in creating a stable, representative Iraq, what risks does it pose to American national security?
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I agree with what the commission says: It is very important we succeed in Iraq so that it doesn't become a sanctuary for terrorists.
It was that. It was a state that supported terrorists. It was a state that had ungoverned territories where al Qaeda-related and al Qaeda terrorists were harbored in Northern Iraq. It was a serious problem in that regard. It could become more serious if we fail. It is very important that we succeed.
Page 119 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you so much.
The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. Mr. Skelton, I will look into why the delay on getting an answer.
Mr. SKELTON. I don't think an F on your report card would look very good, Mr. Wolfowitz.
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. I try to get it up to at least a C minus.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
Mr. LARSON. Would the ranking member yield for five seconds?
Mr. SKELTON. You bet. You bet.
Mr. LARSON. I also taught college and sometimes you would file an incomplete. [Laughter.]
Secretary WOLFOWITZ. We would like to get a passing grade.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Secretary and General Brown, General Pace, thank you for bearing with us here.
Page 120 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And we are going to wrap up. We are going to start our tele-committee at 9 tomorrow morning. We will have Deputy Secretary for Intelligence Cambone; General Odierno, who a lot of us met with in Iraq when he was head of the 4th Division; and Admiral Jacoby, head of DIA. So that is our line up for manana.
Thanks for sticking with us. We appreciate it.
And the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 6:41 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]