we remain committed to ensuring that our military men and women have the equipment funding and support for training and whatever is needed to carry out their mission and do so safely mr secretary you and your staff have described this budget as a reform budget and as we look at some of the major decisions of the germination of many troubled programs such as a presidential helicopter major parts of the army's future combat if you can consider the shift the funds from the middle to the base budget i'm not sure how much real progress we're going to be able to make especially as we look at other agencies and see double digit percentage increases for the first year of a new administration makes our job a little more difficult challenges the subcommittee will continue to work with you through bipartisan fashion to make sure that we have the necessary resources available to you to accomplish your mission further i appreciate your commitment to our men and women in uniform and your willingness to make the difficult decisions included in this request something that is not the concern that a lot of people have in congress about events in afghanistan and pakistan i think that virtually all of us understand the desir policy decisions that the administration is making that arena what i do have substantial doubt about is the capacity of the afghan government and the be members of the committee thank you for inviting us to discuss the details of the president's two thousand and ten defense budget there's a lot of material here and i know you have a lot of questions so i'll keep my opening remarks brief and focus on the strategy and thinking behind many of these recommendations as you suggested my submitted testimony has more detailed information on specific program mattick decisions first and foremost as mr young indicated this is a reform budget reflecting lessons learned in iraq and afghanistan yet also addressing the range of other potential threats around the world now and in the future i was recently in afghanistan as we increase our presence there and refocus our efforts with a new strategy i wanted to get a sense from the ground level of the challenges and needs so we can give our troops the equipment and support to be successful and to come home safely indeed listening to our troops and commanders on script has from the moment i took this job then the greatest single source of ideas on what the department needs to do both operationally and institutionally as i told a group of soldiers in afghanistan they have done their job and now it's time for us in washington to  do ours and they respect this budget bills on all the meetings i've had with troops and commanders and all that i've learned over the past two and a half years all underpinning this budget three principal objective first to reaffirm our commitment to take care of the all volunteer force which in my view america's greatest strategic asset as admiral mullen says if we don't get the people part of this business right none of the other decisions will matter to rebalance the department's programs in order to institutionalize and enhance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead while at the same time providing a hedge against other risks and contingencies and third in order to do this we must reform how and what we by making a fundamental overhaul of our approach to procurement acquisition and contracting from these priorities slow a number of strategic considerations more of which are included in my submitted testimony the includes one hundred thirty billion dollars to support overseas contingency operations principally in iraq and afghanistan i know that there has been discussion about whether this is in fact sufficient to maintain our defense posture especially during a time of war i believe that it is indeed i have warned in the past that our nation must not do what we have done after previous times of conflict on so many occasions and slash defense spending i can assure you that i will do everything in my power to prevent that from happening on my watch this budget is intended to help steer the department of defense toward an acquisition and procurement strategy that is sustainable over the long term that matches real requirements to needed and feasible capabilities as you know this year we have funded the cost of the wars through the regular budgeting process as opposed to emergency supplementals by presenting this budget together we hope to give a more accurate picture of the cost of the wars and also to create a more unified budget process to decrease some of the usually associated with funding for this department this budget aims to alter many programs and many of the fundamental ways that the department of defense runs its budgeting acquisition  process in this respect three points come to mind about the strategic thinking behind the decisions first sustainability by that i mean sustainability in light of current and potential constraints it is simply not reasonable to expect the defense budget to continue increasing at the same rate as has over the last number of years we should be able to secure our nation with a base budget of more than a half a trillion dollars and i believe this budget focuses money where it can more effectively do that i also mean sustainability of individual programs acquisition priorities have changed from defense secretary to defense secretary administration to administration and congress to congress eliminating waste and being requirements creep terminating programs that go too far outside the line and bringing annual costs for individual programs down to more reasonable levels will reduce friction balance we have to be prepared for the wars we are most likely to fight not just the ones we have traditionally been best suited to fight for threats we can from potential adversaries who in the real world also have finite resources as i've said before even when considering challenges from nation states with modern military is the answer is not necessarily buying more technologically advanced versions of what we built on land and in the air to stop the soviets during the cold war and finally there are the lessons learned from the last eight years on the battlefield and perhaps just as importantly institutionally at the pentagon the responsibility of this program of this department first and foremost is to fight the nation's war and win the nation wars not just constantly prepare we have to do both in that respect the conflicts we are in have numerous problems that i am and working to improve and this budget makes headway in that respect at the end of the day this budget is less about numbers than it is about how the military thanks about the nature of war and prepares for the future about how we take care of our people and institutionalize support for the war fighter in the long term about the role of the services and how we can buy weapons as jointly as we fight about reforming our requirements and acquisition process and i know that some of you will take issue with individual decisions i would ask however that you look beyond specific  instead of the full range of what we're trying to do at the totality of the decisions and how they will change the way we prepare for and fight wars in the future as you consider this budget and specific programs i would caution that each program decision is a dollar spent for access capabilities access to our real needs is a dollar taken from capability that we do need often to sustain our men and women in combat and bring them home safely once again i thank you for your ongoing support of our men and women in uniform and we look forward to your question mr chairman mr young mr robey mr lewis distinguished members of this committee thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today let me start off by saying i fully support not only the president's fiscal year two thousand and ten budget submission for this department but more specifically the manner in which secretary gates developed he presided over a comprehensive and collaborative process the likes of which quite frankly i have not seen in more than a decade of doing this sort of work in the pentagon over the course of several months in a very long long series of meetings and every service and every combatant commander had a voice and every single one of them used to now normally budget proposals or work from the bottom up with each service making the case for specific programs and then fighting it out at the end to preserve those that are most important to them this proposal was done from the top down secretary gates gave us broad guidance is overall vision and then he gave us the opportunity to meet it everything was given a fresh look and everything had to be justified decisions to curtail or eliminate a program were based soley on its relevance and on it execution the same can be said for those we decided to keep and i can tell you this none of the final decisions were easy but all of them are vital to our future is been said that we are what we buy i really believe that and i also believe that the force we're asking you to help us by today is the right one both for the world we're living in and the world we may find ourselves living in twenty to thirty years down the road this submission before you is just as much a strategy as it is a budget and let me tell you why i believe that first it makes people our top strategic priority i said many times and remain convinced the best way to guarantee our future security is to support our troops and their needs and the needs of their families it is the recruit and retain choices of our members and their families and quite frankly the american citizens writ large that will make or break the all volunteer force they will be less inclined to make those decisions should we not be able to offer them viable career options adequate health care suitable housing advanced education and the promise of a prosperous life long after they've taken off the uniform this budget develops more than a third of the total request of what i would all the people i can with the great majority of that bigger nearly  hundred sixty four billion dollars going to military pay and health care when combined with what we plan to devote to upgrading and modernizing family housing and facilities the total comes to one hundred eighty seven billion dollars eleven billion dollars more than we asked for last year and almost all of that increase will go to family support programs i'm particularly proud of the funds we've dedicated to caring for our wounded there is in my view no higher duty for this nation or for those of us in leadership positions in to care for those who sacrificed so much and who must now face lives forever changed by wounds both seen and unseen i know you share that feeling and i thank you for the work you've done in this committee and throughout the congress to pay attention and support these needs and i would add to that the families of the fallen our commitment to them must be for the remainder of those lives that's why this budget allocates funds to complete the construction of additional wounded warrior complexes expands a pilot program designed to expedite the processing of injured troops through the disability evaluation system increases the number of mental health professionals assigned to deployed units and devote more resources to the study and treatment of post traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries after nearly eight years of war when the most capable and combat experience military we've ever been certainly without question the world's best counterinsurgency force for all the success we are pressed and still lack a proper balance between op tempo and home tempo when coin capabilities and conventional capabilities between writing us today and readiness tomorrow and that mr chairman is a second reason this budget of ours acts as a strategy for the future it seeks balance investing more heavily in critical enablers such as aviation special forces cyber operations civil affairs and language skills it really makes wanting the wars we are in our top operational priority by adjusting active army b c to grow to forty five it helps ensure our ability to impact the fight sooner increase dwell time and reduce overall demand on equipment and by authorizing secretary gates to transfer money to the secretary of state for reconstruction security or stabilization if it supports more civilian professionals alongside war fighters in more places like iraq and afghanistan having just returned from a trip to afghanistan i can attest to the critical need for more civilian capacity i was shocked to learn there are only thirteen u s civilian development experts in all of southern afghanistan where the taliban movement is strongest in the local economy is almost entirely dependent on opium production we have twice that many working in the relatively peaceful kurdish region of northern iraq i've said it before but it bears repeating more boots on the ground are important but they are not the complete answer we need people with slide rules and shovels and teaching degree bankers and farmers and law enforcement experts as we draw down responsibly in iraq and shift the main advert to afghanistan we need a more concerted effort to build up the capacity of our partners the same can be said of pakistan where boots on the ground aren't even an option where helping the pakistani forces help themselves is truly our best and only recourse some will argue this budget devotes too much money to these sorts of low intensity needs that entails dangerously away from conventional capabilities it does not a full thirty five percent of the submission is set aside for modernization and much of that will go to what we conventional requirements we know there are global risk they are not tied directly to the fight against al qaeda and other extremist groups and we're going to be ready for that in all this mr chairman we are also working hard to fix a flawed work and for all you do to support the men and women of the united states military and their famil a but i'm not going to ask any questions i just want to say about this presidential helicopter crew it's going to cost us five hundred fifty five million dollars which is five thousand man hours at one hundred thousand dollars a year i think we have to relook at the first phase of that and i hope we can work together in some form to come up with a helicopter to take care of the president to take care of that very vital vital  f the pole of poland the czech republic the russians and ourselves the reality is that radars located in russia supplementing those in the czech republic would give additional capability administration now i would i would just tell you that first of all those helicopters would be about a billion dollars apiece and  immediately sit down with the white house and look at the requirements and come up with a new program that will be reasonable and meet the requirements and i will tell you one of the one of the ideas that i heard this morning that single kind of aircraft in terms of protections and the number of passengers and so on and so forth is that you look at two different helicopters that you look at one that the president basically uses here in town to go to andrews and on regular trips here in the united states and things like that helicopter that has different kinds of capabilities and perhaps a modified kind of helicopter that we use now in combat so we're going to be looking at a lot of different ideas on how we can get this program back on track and get presidential helicopter program back into the budget and get the president and his they're asking for redirection of funding to pakistan to help stabilize that government the administration's direction i thought was appropriate the old can decisions made by this comm or the proposal that that we have put forward for this if you're speaking about the pakistan counterinsurgency fund which was four hundred million dollars in the nine supplemental in our request is for seven hundred million in the in the ten budget what we have proposed is that that that it be voted in the zero nine supplemental as a department of defense fund but obviously with the dual key what the secretary of state for ten we have proposed the basic problem here is that state lacks the authorities and the capacity to implement this program so what we've suggested because of concern in the house foreign affairs committee and elsewhere is that is that for f y ten the money be directed to the state department as a pass through to the department of the but at least the money would come through the state department our hope would be that it would come through without restrictions so we have maximum flexibility  agility as we do when we implement these programs and that it doesn't become subject to all of the restrictions and so on of the foreign assistance act and so on and so forth then and eleven we would hope  that the congress and the state department could work together to make sure the state department had the authorities and the capacity to implement this program but the idea would be that this program would increasingly be run through the state department  in partnership with us and we still anticipate that a substantial part of the money would come because of the nature of the project but but this would allow for the state department to basically receive the money to the language that actually ends up being in conference regarding this matter i personally believe it is a defense matter and and state department as of this moment at least doesn't have the capacity to follow through so i grew your statement moving to one more question the kinetic energy interceptor you know the programs been terminated in the f y ten budget and the missile defense agency is moving fast to shut it down in fact to stop work order was issued on may eleventh  nine for the program i'm told that they will immediately begin the germination process in the program will be by july one in partnership with a department of defense congress has supported the requested budget in past years congress went beyond that and requested and provided department with additional dollars to accelerate this critical boost phase capability in total the department has expanded more than a billion dollars towards this effort toda in providing the nation with a technically viable solution to boost an ascent engagement of a ballistic missile target our country or at our troops six years of development and testing with most of the more than one billion dollars of funding spent today was to accommodate in the first flight in the fall of zero nine less than five months from now with the issuance of the stop work order department is walking away from this investment without benefit of knowing what the top technology has to offer itself last fall during the bush administration essentially lemonade the kinetic energy and interceptor from a f y ten pump and the reasons for that are as follows first of all this is a this was to have been a five year development program and it now looks like it's about a sixteen year development program as you suggest there's not been a single flight test there are a couple of more static tests that i understand that have to be taken have to take place before a test of the booster there's been little work on the third stage or the kill vehicle which are obviously critical but a big part of the problem with this program is that it needs to be close to the launch site to be able to be effective and so it has the only potential country where it could have a role with some confidence would be north korea it has poor capability against iran and virtually no capability against either russia or chinese launch facilities and so you have a very limited capability here at considerable cost the other problem that we have is we don't know what the put it on the missiles thirty eight or thirty nine feet long it weighs twelve tons there is no extant ship that we can put it on we would have to design a new ship to put it on and and as i say it would have to operate in close proximity to the territorial waters for all these  senators about this program and the fact is we have a very strong and very capable terminal phase missile defense and it's getting better in this budget devotes a lot of money to that program and to make it even more robust we have a strong ground based interceptor program in alaska and california midcourse intercept program and we're going to keep funding the development of that to improving that capability really the hardest and that's because we have to  get either have to have an extremely powerful being or you have to be fairly close to the source of the launch and frankly some of these programs and the airborne laser is another example where the terms of going for with the procurement program before we really had mastered the technology and so we have a number of programs one of the reasons i'm keeping the first prototype airborne laser is working the directed energy  estimate was out there we figure out a way to spend that money programs that were underfunded below the full cost estimate in order to put pressure on them and so that's to say for me there is no magic bullet here about just getting that i think that the basis for an administration review of these policies and development of a strategy will be the quadrennial defense review and the nuclear posture review these are being compressed in time because i want them available of the conclusions of a level to be able to help shape the f y eleven budget so i am hoping that by the end of the summer or very early in the fall we would have the information available to  in afghanistan i'd like to know where you think our involvement in afghanistan is going obviously we're going to be supportive of our of our troops the president's mission but how it's turned out and do we have the resources do we have enough soldiers to do the job and do they have the capacity with enough equipment to be successful in their mission is one w effectiveness so that we could evaluate over a period of time whether we were actually making progress or not and so we weren't rolling our goals in front of us and pretending that we were making progress when maybe we weren't so part of this process has been an interagency development of measures of fact and benchmarks whatever you want to call them to how we can measure progress my own view is that i think that there needs to be on the part of the administration at least an evaluation of where we are about next march or april to we have begun to change the momentum in some respects to see if we are making progress and i think future decisions in terms of troops and things like that should should depend on that i think that even if this goes well it is a multi year undertaking the the ultimate outcome really is the way we would see it evolving is in many respects the way it has evolved in iraq which is the iraqis increasingly taking more and more responsibility for security and are taking a narrower and narrower view until finally we leave and that's the same thing would happen in afghanistan which is one of the reasons there is money in this budget for for supporting expansion of the afghan army i would tell you i think our troops have the afghanistan in the one nine hundred eighty s where the soviets one hundred ten hundred twenty thousand troops didn't care about civilian casualties and they still lost and so in a country like afghanistan i think each of these countries has to be  taken one of the time in terms of what the traffic will bear and at what point at what level of foreign troops do we become instead of partners and allies do we become seen as occupiers by the afghan people so personally i'm going to take some convincing in terms of going beyond the troop levels going significantly be on the troop levels the president's already approved but i think that these troops are flowing in now i think we will see them make a difference and and  violence to start to turn this around and i think that's doable with the troops the president has supported so it's ironic that we are depending on the russians for two supply routes the other route being the that we have a greater degree of reliability because obviously to supply our troops that those overland routes are pretty pretty vital to well and we have developed some alternatives  well i think one should not underestimate russia's concern about afghanistan being taken over again by the taliban and being a refuge for extremists violent extremist and this budget shows that turned out to be the case the cost to implement brac increased to over thirty two billion dollars up from the original estimate of about twenty billion and the the thirty six billion that was originally asked and there are two hundred thirty locations scheduled to be completed only within the last two weeks of the statutory deadline it's not going to happen and yet we continue to budget under the assumption that it will this includes and this is why i'm particularly sensitive to this more than six thousand washington service employees who were to move to alexandria again they say it's going to be complain the last two weeks of two thousand and eight thousand five hundred employees to the new n g a facility at fort belvoir and the  reed these decisions relocated twenty thousand workers away from trance and accessible locations to sites where there is no public transportation and as a result the army corps of engineers estimates that the traffic around these new facilities primarily at the belvoir three ninety five area is going to result in the next three to four hours of delay in each direction when these employees are trying to get to work and leave work given that the estimates that we now  know far more accurate than a rosy projections back four years ago do you have any intent to reconsider the september fifteenth two thousand  simultaneously is probably not very likely but we did look at a number of options including a lot of flights from facilities in the middle east in kuwait and elsewhere certainly the cost goes  one of the program that concerns me is in the airborne laser if you look at the current situation in iran with their most recent launch with launches from north korea it seems that the greatest deterrent would be the ability to  fall so i'm concerned that we're shortchanging this program that has a great need today and even greater need in the future and i'd also like to thirty five hasn't completed its testing we are moving forward at twenty seven forty seven billion and a half dollars apiece and a hundred million dollars a year to operate and there's nobody uniform that i know who believes that this is a workable concept i have kept the first  economy and our military on foreign sources of oil and imported petroleum to meet our national economic needs and our military needs are we five percent dependent twenty percent dependent fifty percent dependent or eighty country are you aware that we import about eighty percent of our oil well that seems to be a serious vulnerability let me ask you how important iraq's oil fields in terms of global oil reserves are they not important are they somewhat important or very important i think they're they're very important who is guarding the oil facilities in iraq at this juncture the u s military or through contractors  thousand we expect them to be down to about one hundred thirty eight thousand by the end of this year and about ninety thousand at the end of two thousand and ten and could you provide for the record as well in terms of security forces what happens to those as numbers come down are you removing cook or are you removing contract security i think it's across the board but we'll get it or i thank you very much in afghanistan the bulk of the taliban are pash tonight are we fighting the past two now secretary  i think you're fighting several different the taliban are clearly the principal force now and in afghanistan but you also have the hakani network you have a variety of different groups including pakistani insurgents al qaida foreign fighters and so on are they under central command and control structure i would say loosely they're loosely who's the commander well move all our still alive and to the extent that any want to over oversees the whole operation that would be is bin laden an objective of the war  but i would say secondary what is the platform of the moderate taliban and is it something we can live with well i think we have to figure out who the moderate taliban are first right now in terms of potential reconciliation i think that the odds are against us i think that as long as the taliban think that they have the upper hand it's going to get going to be difficult to to get them to to reconcile at least on the terms that are acceptable to the afghan government we do believe that a significant number of the taliban fighters are are doing it mainly for money and but there will be a certain hard core that will be totally irreconcilable the how do we know when we've won in afghanistan when our troops are out after they've ach and where the additional army brigade combat teams will go my understanding as of this morning is that the army has not yet made that decision and but the one thing that i would explain is t o make clear is that one of the reasons we're doing this is that is that had the army gone to forty brigade combat teams they were doing so with the same number of people that they had regardless and so we would have had a fanning out in the brigade and it would have helped it would have hindered our effort to get rid of stop loss so there's more robust so they're more fully staffed manned if you will in afghanistan but are not going to be isolated to those countries they're already around in other nations and people are more familiar with them but could start taking place in you know  entire army the army already is looking at a new only well the part of the of the future combat system where i said we need to start over is the vehicle part and the reason for that there are couple of reasons for that one is that we were applying a lot of band aids trying to figure out what this system was going to look like the and because we were having trouble  absorbing the lessons of war so this program which began nine years ago for example began with an eighteen and a half ton vehicle so it would fit into a c one thirty then in two thousand and six the weight went twenty six tons in two thousand and seven it went to twenty seven tons it has now gone to thirty tons and it's probably headed toward thirty five tons so we were putting band aids on as people were trying to figure out how to  accommodate these vehicles to the lessons of war and for example they had identified a couple of years ago that the infantry fighting vehicle had a flat bottom and was going to be eighteen inches off the  contained none of the defenses against that we've just been talking about the plan also had no place in it because it had not because i am wraps didn't exist in when the program was first initiated the program had no place in it for the twenty six billion dollars the taxpayers have invested in the m raps for a role there and frankly we had a we did not negotiate a very good contract  hundred fifty billion dollars it seemed to me important to get it right in some places and we just don't know because it hasn't been long secondly when i was there about three weeks ago three or four weeks ago general kiani who's the chief of staff of the army took me through took me to me at the field with two of his division are doing counterinsurgency training training that he's put in place over the last twelve to eighteen months for his entire army these two battalions that i was that i was observing were actually battalions preparing to go west upwards of one or two years in the west and when i say they were doing training they built the training ranges they looked at best practices here and other countries to build these training ranges and done it very rapidly so y challenge which they increasingly recognize it's just going to take some time and and and our patients level with them to establish the long term relationship white house several times when secretary rumsfeld and secretary rice would clash over the state department wasn't playing in iraq and you talked about this a little bit earlier but do you think there she needs more people and more dollars cumbersome take a lot of time the secretary has actually asked the department to go look at ways now to make this much more flexible because of the world that we're living in and it was originally designed to be slow  projects we're working on right now is an interim solution for m wraps in afghanistan to give them more off road capability and until we can get a new vehicle out there which  the request of which is in the budget the all terrain vehicle where looking at a program that is working for the marines which is changing out the suspension on the cougars and it costs about a tenth as much as the vehicle as a new vehicle and gives you about eighty percent of the capability and we are looking at how we can accelerate that over the period of the next months to provide more protection  to the region including our number one ally in the region the state of israel but also many arab nations in the region it probably would start a nuclear arms race in the region as such a weapons capability would threaten our allies in europe and would also threaten the national security interests of the united states of america i know that the president is and i'm glad to see the president will begin a new diplomatic conversations with iran directly or indirectly in the coming weeks and months and has said he will give it to the end of the year and then to reassess how iran is doing with regards to reversing its position on acquiring nuclear weapons capability but we're in the business on this subcommittee of contingency planning and if as the president and others have described a nuclear weapons capable or and are accurate and i believe they are and that it would be an unacceptable threat to u s national security  do you feel that this present budget and our present military capabilities can fully accommodate a worst case scenario where iran would not to step down from its efforts to acquire nuclear weapon and military action was necessary let me just say an open session here that i believe we have the resources in the proposed budget that would allow us to deal with all possible contingencies thank you gentlemen on the other issue and i know others have one and want a chance to ask questions as well so i'll limit myself to one other additional question regarding nuclear weapons now in position of pakistan it has been discussed that one threat to u s national security and the region's security in and around pakistan would be if god forbid those designed terrorists and those designed on the deaths of americans and innocents were to get hold of pakistan's nuclear weapons are you confident that our present capability and the resources asked you are asking for in the two thousand and ten fiscal year defense budget are adequate to assure guarantee that those nuclear weapons possessed by pakistan are secure and will be safe from interception by terrorists which was when when we started the when the president decided to implement the surge in iraq he moved forward by not much but a change of commander significant success i was very concerned about changing commanders midway through a few months or seven or eight months into this strategy and having somebody brand new come in in effect in the middle of the stream and so one of the considerations for me was having a commander who was there from the beginning of the implementation of this new i also think that with the new forces coming in i think that with the sixty eight thousand troops that the president has has approved and i go back to my comments earlier about my concern about a significantly higher number of troops in afghanistan i wanted fresh eyes in terms of are we are we using the troops that we have there in the most effective possible way and are there other ways in which we can make better use of them i think another piece of this is is the fact that we're sending a team in both the general rodriguez and general mcchrystal have a broad range of experience not just  counterinsurgency and and general rodriguez when he was the commander and regional command east was very successful when he was commander of the eighty second airborne there and so it is this combination of talents between mcchrystal and my in my position as chairman i spend a lot of time trying to figure out who should go to what jobs and in this case long before the decision was made or even on the table to change leadership in afghanistan to the best individuals would be for the future and general mcchrystal and rodriguez have come out of the top out at the top of the army list and lots of other people as well for the last eighteen months that i've been in this job and obviously and before that as well they're the best we have right now and i'm greatly dependent on on great leadership they are great leaders and i think they will change the calculus and in the east we just put in a couple of another and additional brigade in january we are putting more troops in the south but it's not just the military got to be the civilian side it's got to be the the putting that the iraqi is to begin in a fairly dramatic way replacing contractors and management services and management support and personnel professional services to replace contractors and those in those areas with full time civil service employees our goal is to replace thirteen is to hire thirteen thousand new civil service employees and  and over all through the next five years to hire thirty three thousand our goal is to take the percentage of contractors in those areas from the current thirty nine percent of the workforce back to information that it really makes perfect sense for us to continue that that project for a variety of first of all for the safety and security of the president the helicopter that he's using now that system was security of it is diminishing that is a vehicle which is becoming weaker and weaker and in some cases it seems to be falling apart the need for a new i think very very obvious and project  is stronger than was a valuation of it came out eroni earlier and that the service life is much longer service life being approximately anticipated to be absolutely thirty existing one of the fact that it doesn't affect all of these things and more and much of the more is classified and can't really be talked about in this particular context all of that and more makes it clear that well first of all i would say that there is no question about the fact that the current helicopters that the president is flying in are safe and secure the navy has confidence in that and i don't think the secret service would allow the president to get on it if that wasn't complete confidence and the reality is that it may be that the airframe on some of these helicopters is thirty or thirty five years old but virtually everything else has been replaced for example they're replacing the rotors right now so there is life extension if you're talking about going with the whole system if you're going with both increments wanted to seventy one helicopter th about increment one not about a bill that's still under the navy navy's estimates would be a nine point four billion dollar program we have at current currently have spent three point two billion on and it does not have it has fifty five percent of the range of the current helicopter the president flying in the increment one it does not meet a lot of the requirements in terms of other protections whether it's chemical biological nuclear communications and some of the other things we would even if we bought increment one we would have to then initiate a new presidential helicopter program anyway to get to the some of the capabilities  really doesn't that's what our problem is and we have work with the house and our hope is that with the armed services committee in the house and also we're working with the senate to try and get the restrictions