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i 

65–113 2011

[H.A.S.C. No. 112–13] 

ARE WE READY? AN INDEPENDENT LOOK 

AT THE REQUIRED READINESS POSTURE OF U.S. FORCES 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

MARCH 3, 2011 
(II) 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS 

J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia, Chairman 

MIKE ROGERS, Alabama 

JOE HECK, Nevada 

AUSTIN SCOTT, Georgia 

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey 

CHRIS GIBSON, New York 

VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri 

BOBBY SCHILLING, Illinois 

JON RUNYAN, New Jersey 

TIM GRIFFIN, Arkansas 

STEVEN PALAZZO, Mississippi 

MARTHA ROBY, Alabama 

MADELEINE Z. BORDALLO, Guam 

SILVESTRE REYES, Texas 

JOE COURTNEY, Connecticut 

DAVE LOEBSACK, Iowa 

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona 

LARRY KISSELL, North Carolina 

BILL OWENS, New York 

TIM RYAN, Ohio 

COLLEEN HANABUSA, Hawaii 

LYNN WILLIAMS, Professional Staff Member 

VICKIE PLUNKETT, Professional Staff Member 

CHRISTINE WAGNER, Staff Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2011 

Page 

HEARING: 

Thursday, March 3, 2011, Are We Ready? An Independent Look at the Required Readiness Posture of U.S. Forces ........................................................... 1 

APPENDIX: 

Thursday, March 3, 2011 ........................................................................................ 37 

THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2011 

ARE WE READY? AN INDEPENDENT LOOK AT THE REQUIRED 

READINESS POSTURE OF U.S. FORCES 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Bordallo, Hon. Madeleine Z., a Representative from Guam, Ranking Member, 

Subcommittee on Readiness ................................................................................ 3 

Forbes, Hon. J. Randy, a Representative from Virginia, Chairman, Subcommittee on Readiness ...................................................................................... 1 

WITNESSES 

deLeon, Rudy, Senior Vice President for National Security and International 

Policy, Center for American Progress ................................................................. 5 

Donnelly, Thomas, Resident Fellow and Director, Center for Defense Studies, 

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ............................... 7 

Eaglen, Mackenzie, Research Fellow for National Security Studies, The Heritage Foundation ..................................................................................................... 11 

Mahnken, Dr. Thomas G., Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College ........ 13 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

deLeon, Rudy .................................................................................................... 42 

Donnelly, Thomas ............................................................................................. 50 

Eaglen, Mackenzie ............................................................................................ 65 

Forbes, Hon. J. Randy ...................................................................................... 41 

Mahnken, Dr. Thomas G. ................................................................................ 82 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

[There were no Documents submitted.] 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

Ms. Bordallo ...................................................................................................... 95 

Mrs. Hanabusa ................................................................................................. 99 

(1) 

ARE WE READY? AN INDEPENDENT LOOK AT THE 

REQUIRED READINESS POSTURE OF U.S. FORCES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS, Washington, DC, Thursday, March 3, 2011. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., in room 

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. J. Randy Forbes (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. J. RANDY FORBES, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE 

ON READINESS 

Mr. FORBES. Well, I want to start by welcoming this exceptional 

panel of witnesses that we have before the subcommittee and to 

thank you all for joining us today for what I believe is going to be 

an incredibly important hearing. 

Hopefully, our Members will be streaming in, because I think 

this is going to be a very important hearing to lay the foundation 

for what we are going to be doing for the rest of the next several 

months anyway. 

One of the things that we recognize is, nearly 12 years ago, this 

subcommittee met to hold a hearing on readiness regarding the 

Army AH–64 helicopter fleet. The spring and summer of 1999, we 

were involved in combat operations with NATO [North Atlantic 

Treaty Organization] allies in Kosovo. And you can see the helicopter up on the screen. 

Chairman Bateman and Ranking Member Ortiz held a hearing 

on the readiness of the Apache fleet, because an internal Army 

memo had been leaked to the press. That memo was written by 

then-Brigadier General Richard Cody, and it showed shortcomings, 

training failures, and readiness issues associated with the Apache 

fleet and specifically related to the deployment of the 24 AH–64s 

as part of the Task Force Hawk. 

In the reviews that followed, the GAO [Government Accountability Office] found 146 lessons learned, which ranged from insufficient training to the need for additional capabilities such as nightvision devices and improved command-and-control capabilities. 

However, interestingly, Congress had been told previously that 

the unit that was deployed was C–1, or fully combat-mission-capable. 

Today, we are here to talk about the readiness of the force, not 

just the readiness of today’s force, but the force we will need to 

deal with global challenges the next decade and beyond. 
2 

If you flip from the Apache helicopter we talked about there and 

look to today’s concern in the Pacific, something that I know is 

near and dear to the ranking member’s heart, it is clear that we 

can’t afford another Task Force Hawk situation, where we are told 

we are ready and we wake up to have hearings after that where 

we find out that we were very insufficient in our preparations and 

our preparedness. 

We have a constitutional responsibility that none of us take 

lightly, but we must be informed if we are to successfully provide 

for the defense of this Nation. We learn all too often about critical 

shortfalls not from the military, not from the DOD [Department of 

Defense], but from leaked press reports, whistleblowers, and generals after they have retired. 

Today we have a wonderful panel of witnesses to help us not only 

frame the challenges for the future but to also help this subcommittee ask the right questions and to get the answers we need 

to make critical resourcing decisions in extraordinarily challenging 

times. 

Joining us today are some individuals who served on a panel. 

And I want to commend to everybody’s reading, if you haven’t, the 

Quadrennial Defense Review [QDR] Independent Panel, the report 

that was published. This was an incredibly bipartisan effort. 

I want to commend all of you for your work on creating, one, a 

consensus that I know is very difficult in today’s world to reach, 

but, secondly, the thorough analysis in the job that you have done; 

and commend to each of our committee members, if you haven’t 

read this, I think it is good reading. And we have provided you 

with executive summaries that I think you will find useful. 

Today we have joining us Mr. Rudy deLeon, the senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for 

American Progress; Mr. Thomas Donnelly, the resident fellow and 

director of the Center for Defense Studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; Ms. Makenzie Eaglen, 

the research fellow for national security studies at The Heritage 

Foundation; and Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken, professor of strategy, 

U.S. Naval War College. 

I just gave you what they are now. You each have in your memos 

their biographies, which I suggest you look at because they are 

very telling on the expertise that we bring to this panel today. 

I also wanted to suggest that this is one of the most bipartisan 

panels—I am sorry—one of the most bipartisan subcommittees, 

probably, that we find in Congress. We hope to do some things this 

year that are out-of-the-box. We want to get to answers, and we 

don’t want to go through the formats. 

Historically, on our hearings, what we normally do is we bring 

in three generals and an admiral, and we spend the first few minutes telling them what a wonderful job they have done in serving 

the country. They next spend the next 10 minutes telling us what 

a great job we have done in supporting the men and women in uniform across the globe. Then everybody has a 5-minute window. Our 

witnesses oftentimes feel like they are in depositions where their 

goal is just to get out without saying anything. And we ask our 

questions in staccato. 
3 

We want to change that. It is my hope that we will have the support of the ranking member, at some point in time, so that, rather 

than be in those boxes, that we are bringing witnesses in here 

where we are not asking them for formal statements, we are not 

having just prepared statements, but we can really get at the answers that we need to make sure we have answered one crucial 

question: ‘‘Are we ready?’’ And we have to make sure that we are 

doing that. 

I want our Members to feel as free as possible, if you have followup questions, if you want to explore an issue, that we can do that, 

so that you don’t feel you are in those confines of normal structure. 

So, with that, I would like to now turn to my dear friend and colleague and somebody that I know that is very concerned about the 

readiness of this Nation, especially in the Pacific, and that is Madeleine Bordallo from Guam. 

Ms. Bordallo. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Forbes can be found in the Appendix on page 41.] 

STATEMENT OF HON. MADELEINE BORDALLO, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM GUAM, RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON 

READINESS 

Ms. BORDALLO. Mr. Chairman, thank you. And thank you for 

your leadership of this very important subcommittee. 

To all our witnesses, thank you for appearing before our subcommittee today. 

As the United States continues to be engaged in two wars in Iraq 

and Afghanistan, our military continues to experience significant 

readiness strains across the spectrum of capabilities. Further, larger fiscal matters in our Federal Government continue to squeeze 

the Department of Defense budget. Pentagon leadership is looking 

for places to find efficiencies, and, historically, the operation and 

the maintenance budget is a favorite target, given its size and 

availability. 

The QDR and the Global Defense Posture Report have outlined 

an ambitious, yet realistic, defense posture that will be needed over 

the coming years. So it is important that we find balance in equipping, training, and positioning our force to deal with emerging 

threats abroad, such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or the 

extremist disturbances in Indonesia or the southern Philippines, 

which is right next-door to Guam. However, as a nation, we must 

not lose focus of more traditional threats that face us, such as 

Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs or China’s nontransparent military buildup. 

Being a global power is not easy, nor can it be done cheaply. The 

QDR and the Global Defense Posture Review provided this Congress with a guideline for allocating resources over the coming 

years to deal with a multitude of threats. 

Every defense budget since the beginning of budgets has assumed a certain amount of risk. The Department has been cautious 

over the past few years in the amount of risk it has accepted, while 

trying to balance the needs of the ongoing wars with the other 

threats that exist to our country. 
4 

At the outset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I believe we 

took too much risk, and the consequence was an under-equipped 

and ill-trained force for the type of wars that we are now conducting. 

Even as we depended upon them more and more to provide critical, enabling capabilities, National Guard units across this country 

were left with paltry equipment levels. It took congressional action 

and oversight to provide them with the equipment they needed to 

train for the missions they would be performing in both Iraq and 

Afghanistan. 

I recognize that we are not always at 100 percent fill for equipment, but we have done our best to apply resources to address the 

levels of risk that exist in the budget. I think the key is providing 

enough flexibility so that as threats emerge, the military can adapt 

and respond quickly and posture itself to protect our interests. 

The military buildup on Guam is a perfect example of how defense and posture reviews can lead to net positive benefits for our 

strategic posture across the globe. Making our military capabilities 

on Guam more robust allows us to defend against North Korean 

aggression, as well as counter the secretive buildup of Chinese 

forces. The strategic location of forces on Guam sends a very clear 

signal to our allies in the Asia-Pacific region that we remain their 

partner and a power in the Asia region. 

Similarly, a buildup of forces on Guam also allows us to address 

threats that may arise in Indonesia or the southern Philippines, 

not to mention humanitarian assistance missions to our Pacific island partners and other hotspots in the region. 

The military buildup on Guam is not without its challenges, but 

it is the right thing for our Nation and the right thing for Guam. 

We just need to get it done right. 

And to that end, I do have some concerns about the reduction in 

operation and maintenance funding across all the services in fiscal 

year 2012, as compared to 2011 levels. We need to examine these 

funding levels through the lens of strategic documents like the 

QDR and the Global Defense Posture Report and not lose sight of 

our emerging capability needs across the globe. 

I would be interested to learn more from our witnesses today on 

what they think can be done to strengthen the QDR and the global 

posture review process. In some cases, these documents have been 

seen merely as budget drills. So what can Congress do to strengthen the process even further? I appreciate the work of the committee 

in creating a QDR review panel, but what other ideas should we 

consider in the future? 

Again, I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and look forward to the testimony from our witnesses. 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Ms. Bordallo. 

And now we are going to hear from our witnesses. And we are 

going to go in alphabetical order, if that is okay with the witnesses. 

And we are going to start with Mr. deLeon. 

And thank you so much for being here today. 
5 

STATEMENT OF RUDY DELEON, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR 

NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS 

Mr. DELEON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee. I appreciate this chance to come and testify before the 

House Armed Services Committee [HASC] today. 

And, certainly, as many know, I have a long-time relationship 

with the committee, but I was staff director of the committee so 

long ago that Mr. Reyes is probably the only Member that remembers me from that tenure. But it was a remarkable time, the tenure of President Reagan and many other things. So I certainly welcome this opportunity to testify today. 

The four panelists, we are used to working with each other in a 

bipartisan way. We have different perspectives, and we will bring 

different views that I pledge will be interesting and, I think, informative to the committee. But I think what also—even where we 

disagree, we have a track record of finding the consensus, which 

I know is at the heart of what the Armed Services Committee does. 

I would just like to take a few minutes—we each have formal 

written statements, if we can just submit them—and I will just 

make a few opening comments, because, ultimately, we want the 

engagement back and forth. 

One, I think we all acknowledge Secretary Gates has really appropriately focused the Department on the ongoing combat in Afghanistan and in Iraq. That was a key decision made. His tenure 

began in late 2006. We have seen the impact of his leadership in 

the combat AOR [Area of Responsibility]. But, at the same time, 

when we look at these budgets, these budgets are driven by ongoing combat. 

And when the QDR independent review looked at the budget, it 

was our job to, sort of, look beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to that 

period that will follow on. And so, that was the bulk of our work. 

Also, the QDR tasking coming from the Congress was not to be 

constrained by budget issues but to look at the big policy questions 

there. 

So, very briefly, what I would like to just cover are four key 

points in my testimony. 

One, we all agree the Asia-Pacific is critical. That is the new avenue of global commerce. And so we need new emphasis and new 

resources for the Asia-Pacific. The transparency of China is a key 

issue, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army], and an element of our 

mil-to-mil dialogue. But Asia-Pacific is at the top of our list in 

terms of needing to focus strategically on that region, because the 

role of the United States in that region since the end of World War 

II has been absolutely critical. 

The rise of China, the balancing of historic tensions in Asia, the 

growth of their economies have all been made possible by the protection that the U.S. military, our diplomats, but particularly the 

men and women of our Armed Forces have given the region of Asia. 

It has been a unique period. And Asia, because of the American 

presence, has been divorced from many of the regional tensions 

which created conflict in the past. 

The second are what I will call new security concerns. That is 

cyber. That is homeland security; whole-of-government reforms to 
6 

assist our troops in the field with capabilities coming from other 

executive branch organizations. And then the importance of prolonged mil-to-mil relationships. The challenges in Egypt right 

now—the U.S.’s military ability to talk to the Egyptian military 

has proven to be just a crucial—a crucial set of skills. 

When the Soviet Union disbanded, it was the mil-to-mil relationship with some of the emerging democracies of the former Warsaw 

Pact—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary—that allowed for a 

solid democratic transition of those militaries that are now very capable NATO members. And the Prime Minister of Poland, who is 

now one of the leading spokespersons for NATO, was here in town 

to be acknowledged by the Atlantic Council this week. But, you 

know, this is a dramatic change from 1980 and the end of the Solidarity movement to the end of communism. But the mil-to-mil relationships are extremely important. 

The third issue that I have covered in detail in my opening statement is energy. 

Right now, you know, 50 percent of our energy exports come from 

this hemisphere, from Canada and Mexico at the top. As we go further south, some of the suppliers become more problematic—Venezuela. But 50 percent of our energy imports come from the Western Hemisphere, and that is a good thing. Slightly less than 20 

percent come from the Persian Gulf region, a higher percentage 

coming from Africa. 

But, from a military perspective, the supply line of fuel is pivotal 

to the mobility of our forces. I know that there are initiatives that 

this committee created in the last several years to focus on the energy requirement. That is a key component of logistics. It is what 

makes the United States military unique. 

We are in a tense period, in terms of the price of energy, but we 

still control our destiny. But figuring out our energy strategy, particularly for our troops that are deployed, is going to be a critical 

challenge for us. 

Last piece, the U.S. economy as a component of national security. 

Meeting the readiness challenges of the next 20 years is dependent 

upon our country, the Department of Defense, working with Congress to really get our economic house back in order. 

Now, during my tenure at Armed Services and then later my tenure at the Department of Defense, I lived continuously under balanced-budget rules. The challenge to go from high deficits to a balanced budget really started in 1987 with the Gramm-Rudman legislation that came from Senator Phil Gramm, Senator Warren Rudman. It was followed by an agreement in 1980 between President 

George Bush and negotiated largely with Congressman Gephardt 

here. 

But when you look at these in their conclusion, that 1990 agreement really started a foundation moving toward a balanced budget. 

We have the Clinton initiatives in 1993 and then the negotiations 

in 1995 and 1996, which really lock us into a trajectory of a balanced budget that we realize in 1999. It was a lot of work to get 

there. 

The challenge was to keep military readiness high. The Armed 

Services Committee, throughout that period of the 1990s, did a 

number of reports. Mr. Spence’s report to Secretary Perry in the 
7 

early 1990s on readiness—I think Mr. Donnelly may have actually 

been one of the authors on that—was an important piece of the debate and the discussion. 

But my key point is that we really do have to get our budgets 

and our economy in order; that throughout the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, there were a series of very clear rules that applied 

government-wide that had a big impact in terms of focusing on 

spending. 

Just a last point on that, and I don’t want to speak much longer 

here. Clearly, coming out of the—we have had very high defense 

budgets the last 10 years, but those budgets have been fundamentally different than the high defense budgets of the 1980s. The 

1980s defense budgets were largely investment budgets, and the 

budgets of the last decade have really been budgets to support military forces in the field and combat. And so they have been high on 

consumables. 

So you have been consuming a lot of personnel dollars, you have 

been consuming a lot of readiness dollars. The procurement numbers are coming up. But coming out of this period of significant defense spending, we need to acknowledge that these really have 

been budgets that have supported combat operations in the field 

and not the investment budgets of the 1980s. 

And then, finally, moving forward on the American economic 

challenge, you know, U.S. national security has long rested on the 

strength of our economy. If you go and read the NSC–68, which 

was the strategy early in the Truman presidency that really looked 

at the future, they had two big assumptions: an extremely capable 

military and a highly viable economy. 

And so the challenge, I think, in the readiness area, in addition 

to the line items of the budget, will be to move forward on the economic challenge of creating jobs, promoting competitiveness and innovation, while reducing the long-term budget deficits. 

That is a message that the rest of the world needs to know. This 

is a country that is capable of great things, that we are not in economic decline. And we need to send that message, because American national security leadership has been premised on our 

strength of global leadership, economically as well as from the national security perspective. 

So, Mr. Chairman, we appreciate—I do—this opportunity to testify. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. deLeon can be found in the Appendix on page 42.] 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. deLeon. 

Now Mr. Donnelly. 

STATEMENT OF THOMAS DONNELLY, RESIDENT FELLOW AND 

DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR DEFENSE STUDIES, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH 

Mr. DONNELLY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to the ranking 

member. 

I would echo what Rudy said about what a pleasure it is to return to our former place of employment. One may leave the committee staff, but emotionally and mentally it is hard to escape. 
8 

I am also going to end up agreeing a lot with Rudy. I think one 

of the most disturbing elements of the QDR panel for Rudy was 

that he found himself too often in agreement with me. I have always known Rudy to be a closet neoconservative or at least a Truman Democrat, but I think Rudy hadn’t faced that reality yet. 

But to turn to serious matters, I was impressed by both the 

opening statements because they went—both the question of Task 

Force Hawk and the question of the invasion of Iraq go directly to 

the questions that I hope you guys will consider when you are considering readiness. 

The most important question, and where we have fallen short so 

frequently in the post-cold war years, is when we ask the question, 

not are we ready by the metrics and the yardsticks that the Department produces, but are those yardsticks the right assessment 

of what our forces need to be able to do? The question is, what 

should we be ready for? And if we don’t answer that question adequately, the other metrics are interesting but not really the right 

ones that we should be using. 

Also, interestingly enough, the QDR panel found itself very much 

in similar circumstances as we did our work. After we got the initial briefings on the QDR itself, there was widespread dissatisfaction among the members—a very distinguished panel, as Rudy 

said, bipartisan, even nonpartisan in its direction from Secretary 

Perry—about what the QDR process had produced. 

We recognized that we did not have the time nor the staff capability to replay the entire QDR process, so we were looking around 

for a set of measurements to understand what the requirements for 

U.S. forces were. 

And, actually, there was very spirited debate but pretty quick 

agreement that U.S. security interests remain constant over time, 

that the issues, the capabilities, and the interests of the United 

States don’t change. Adversaries and enemies and allies and 

friends may change. Technological circumstances may change. But, 

certainly, in the post-World War II period, there is a remarkable 

consistency about what United States purposes have been. 

And we felt that was a pretty reasonable set of measurements for 

us to use about what our forces should be prepared to do. And my 

prepared testimony goes through that in some detail. 

I would also like to save—I have a good idea of what my colleagues are going to say, so I would like to just cherry-pick a few 

of the things, if I may, in my brief remarks here. 

We found four, sort of enduring U.S. interests: the defense of our 

homeland, which includes, as Rudy suggested, our neighborhood— 

think of the Monroe Doctrine, for example—but larger North America, if you will; the ability to freely access, both for commercial purposes and when necessary in wartime, what are lumped together 

as the ‘‘international commons.’’ 

Secretary John Lehman loathed that word and excised it from 

the panel report—basically, the freedom of the seas, the skies, of 

space, and now of cyberspace. That is where the life of the commercial trading system occurs, and those are the domains, if you will, 

that are essential not only for protection of the United States itself, 

but the means through which we project power abroad. If we can’t 

deploy our forces by sea, by air, watch them and talk to them and 
9 

provide them with intelligence and reconnaissance from space or 

communicate with them through the use of the Internet, then our 

ability to do what we have to do around the world is going to be 

severely constrained. 

And it was very much the conclusion of the panel that those commons, which have been the distinct American way of war, are now 

contested commons. And the more modern—as you, sort of, go 

through the progression from maritime to cyberspace, the more you 

go through that batting order, the more contested the domains are. 

We have also always worried about the balance of power in the 

vital regions of the world—in Europe, where we spent a century, 

two world wars, an immense amount of blood and treasure to 

produce what looks to be a durable peace and has allowed to us to 

draw down forces in recent years; and, obviously, in east Asia, as 

Rudy suggested and as others will comment; but also—and this is 

where I like to focus my remarks—on the greater Middle East, particularly now that we see the region actually—the peoples of the 

region, themselves, taking up the cause of individual freedom and 

liberty that so many Americans have sacrificed, including sacrificed 

their lives, for over the past generation, not just in the past 10 

years. 

The fact is, this has always been a volatile region. It is becoming 

more volatile now. Who knows how it is going to come out? But it 

will still be of critical interest to the United States and to the 

world. 

Rudy mentioned energy supplies. We are lucky in that a relatively small percentage of our oil actually physically comes from 

the Persian Gulf. But, of course, oil is a fungible commodity, it is 

a global market. And our most reliable allies, particularly in east 

Asia but also in Europe, depend on those energy supplies. And it 

is also critical to the developing economies of China and India. 

The entire world, and certainly the commercial world, the economic world, benefits from having a stable oil pipeline writ large, 

or energy pipeline, to which the Middle East contributes the largest 

amount, globally speaking, and which is critical for the world’s economic progress and prosperity. We are obviously at a moment of 

fragile recovery, ourselves, here at home. We have seen gas prices 

spike in the last couple weeks. We can only imagine what an extended rise in gas prices and in energy prices would do. 

The notion that Iraq and Afghanistan are the final chapters of 

America’s involvement in the region seems unbelievable to me. 

There were many chapters before 9/11. We put up with Saddam 

Hussein for 15 years and he made our lives miserable long before 

the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 

The same is true of Iran, which, as Rudy suggested, is on the 

verge, who can say exactly when, of acquiring a nuclear capability 

that would plunge the Gulf into even greater turmoil. And we see 

in places like Egypt, where luckily we have contacts, levers to ensure that the transition that comes is something that we can 

shape. 

But that is almost an exception that proves the rule. There is 

very little that we could do in Libya that wouldn’t involve, again, 

a use of military force. And, again, whether that is wise or the 
10 

right thing to do is not my point. The question is, we can see that 

it is already a question for our President. 

So, again, as we look forward and try to say what should we be 

ready for, the idea that we are not going to be somehow, someplace, 

in some way involved in the Middle East seems to me to be just 

a faulty planning assumption. 

And the one thing that we have seen since 9/11 is that we have 

not had that traditional two-war capacity to do many things at the 

same time. We had to essentially get to a point of culmination in 

Iraq before we could again focus adequate resources in Afghanistan. And let’s hope those turn out to be durable successes in both 

cases. But, to go back to Rudy’s tenure in the Pentagon and before, 

it is an expression of the win-hold-win force-sizing strategy. 

Just to go back and to conclude by referring to your opening remarks, Mr. Chairman, Task Force Hawk is a perfect example of 

what I am trying to get at. Those Apaches were probably perfectly 

ready to destroy the Soviet tanks in the Second Echelon that they 

had spent their entire lives in Germany preparing to do. But when 

they were asked to pick up and deploy in support of the Kosovo 

war or in support of Bosnia, they didn’t have the logistics or the 

transportation or all the other support structures that they needed 

to survive in the muck and mire or to get there. 

Likewise, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was as classic an example 

of mobile armored warfare as we will see in our lifetimes. Three 

weeks from crossing the line of departure to knocking down the 

Saddam statues in Baghdad is a remarkable accomplishment, probably moving faster than George Patton ever moved across France. 

But that wasn’t the end of the story because it wasn’t, obviously, 

the end of the war. 

So the problem in assessing readiness, really, in a strategic 

sense, is much less, are we meeting the benchmarks, the formal, 

narrowly defined benchmarks, that are currently being employed, 

but have we captured in our assessments and in our readiness 

metrics those things that really, truly reflect the tasks that we are 

almost certain to ask our forces to do, that flow directly from this 

assessment of our interests and add up in sum to a global set of 

challenges? 

And we have learned, again, much to our sorrow and pain, that 

what happens in the Middle East, although strategically connected 

to what happens in east Asia, may require an entirely different 

kind of force and will have to be things the U.S. military does simultaneously rather than sequentially. 

So, as you guys look at the question of the readiness of our 

forces, I urge you to take that one step back and ask, are the 

benchmarks, themselves, the right ones? 

Thank you for your time. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Donnelly can be found in the Appendix on page 50.] 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. Donnelly. 

Ms. Eaglen. 
11 

STATEMENT OF MACKENZIE EAGLEN, RESEARCH FELLOW 

FOR NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION 

Ms. EAGLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and to the ranking member, for your unconventional approach to your first hearing of the 

year. I think it is just an outstanding way to take a step back, take 

a look at the big picture outside of the, you know, defense witness 

‘‘hearing in a box’’ and really talk about things to think about for 

the future. 

I want to again thank Rudy for his leadership last summer on 

the QDR Independent Panel as our esteemed chairman on the 

Force Structure and Personnel Subcommittee, where we gained a 

lot of knowledge and experience into helping you answer these 

questions. 

I think Task Force Hawk is a powerful way to open this hearing, 

because the two primary findings from GAO, which is insufficient 

training and the need for additional capabilities, is exactly where 

we are in almost every, sort of, major area across the services 

today. And I am very concerned, like you, that the likelihood of this 

happening again is high and is getting higher. 

So Rudy and Tom very sufficiently laid out a snapshot of the 

world as it is, and I want to provide an overview of the state of 

our hard power capabilities, in particular our military to carry out 

a lot of things that might be asked of them. 

I was told by a senior Special Forces official recently that if you 

look at a view of the world from space and America assesses the 

50 most important nation-states on the planet Earth relative to the 

war on terror, whatever term you want to use there, they all have 

their lights out, for the most part. And we are talking countries 

very much like Afghanistan, which has, you know, very little infrastructure to begin with, but it goes much further beyond Iraq and 

Afghanistan. And it is something that, again, as Tom just said, you 

know, our efforts and interests around the world are not going to 

go away as we wind down in Iraq and we, hopefully, eventually 

wind down in Afghanistan. 

What have we been seeing across the force lately? As most of you 

know, we have a pretty old and geriatric and rusting force structure on the equipment side. And we have a grand experiment occurring on the personnel side, employing an All-Volunteer Force for 

over 10 years in continuous operations, which has never been done 

since we stood it up in the early 1970s. 

On the equipment side, not accounting for new systems like, for 

example, some helicopter rotary-wing platforms and some drones in 

particular, and leaving out some ISR [intelligence, surveillance, 

and reconnaissance] and coms [communications] capabilities, just 

looking at the major systems that we use to facilitate operations 

everywhere else around the world, our Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps tactical aircraft are averaging 50 to 25 years old, depending on which service we are talking about. 

The Army’s armored personnel carriers are almost 30 years old. 

Bradley Fighting Vehicles are approaching 20 years old. Our cargo 

helicopters that we use heavily in Afghanistan are almost 20 years 

old; some have been upgraded, of course. Our helis are 35. Our 

cruisers are 20 years old. Our ORION long-range aircraft that we 
12 

use for ISR capabilities are 25 years old. Our bombers—our newest 

ones are 20, but our oldest ones are almost 50 years old. 

I actually heard a story just yesterday that some of the bomber 

pilots in the Dakotas—actually, their grandfather literally flew 

same plane. 

Our transport aircraft, our wide-body cargo aircraft are over 40 

years old. And, as you well know, the tankers are almost 50 years 

old. 

What we are seeing across the services is the cross-leveling of not 

just equipment, which is also known as the cannibalization, but of 

people, as well, to reorient for various missions and needs and to 

really scramble to match requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

And this has a direct impact on the Reserve Component and on the 

National Guard and Reserves in each of your States and districts. 

As the ranking member noted in her opening statement, over the 

past 5 years, on average, most States in the country have had less 

than 40 percent of their Guard equipment on hand, available to respond to everything else that the military does, including hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and more. And there is a direct effect on 

the health of the Active Force and, of course, the Reserve Component. 

When you are cross-leveling people and equipment, everything 

from, you know, weapons systems like machine guns and handguns, to vehicles, tracked and wheeled, to helicopters, what that 

basically means is everything is upended in the readiness cycle as 

a result of this. And then you are having the units that are about 

to deploy, they are not able to actually train on their actual weapons systems in live-fire exercises as often as they need to be. 

In the last 4 years, we have seen less than half of all Air Force 

units that were fully mission-capable. The Navy, a couple years 

ago, discovered that two surface combatant ships were unfit for 

combat and had to hold what they called a ‘‘strategic pause,’’ where 

we basically halted the entire worldwide fleet of all of our surface 

combatants to assess their readiness levels, in the case that they 

were going to prove unready in a very embarrassing incident. 

We are also seeing the effects on training. You know, obviously 

our forces have been very heavily emphasized in counterinsurgency 

capabilities, and it is coming at the expense of most others, as well, 

including combined arms and jungle warfare and amphibious capabilities and operations, as well. 

The former chief of staff of the Air Force actually used the term 

‘‘ancillary training creep’’ and I think that is actually effective for 

services like the Navy and the Air Force, in particular, that have 

to do things beyond supporting counterinsurgency operations. Their 

ability to prepare for other conflicts has been significantly degraded. 

Quickly, I will just close out by talking—using the Special Forces 

again, going back to them as a snapshot. I referenced the Air Force 

in my testimony as a case study in readiness and how unready we 

actually really are for, again, things much beyond Afghanistan, including, for example, a no-fly zone over Libya, which would greatly 

challenge the military to undertake. 

Currently, we have more than 80 percent of our Special Forces 

deployed in one region, in Central Command. And they have been 
13 

deployed at unsustainable rates since 2001. And what that means 

is it is coming at the expense of their jobs, for example, in Latin 

America and elsewhere around the world. Post-9/11, our Special 

Operations Forces are twice the size, they have three times the 

budget that they had before 9/11, but they have more than quadruple the demand that was on them previously. 

Take, for example, the 7 Special Forces Group in Latin America, 

where they are supposed to be working right now. They have been 

carrying almost half the load in Afghanistan for 7 years. So we are 

leaving behind all of these other areas of the world, which are not 

becoming any more safe and the areas of risks and challenges are 

not growing any less steep over time. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Eaglen can be found in the Appendix on page 65.] 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Ms. Eaglen. 

Dr. Mahnken. 

STATEMENT OF DR. THOMAS G. MAHNKEN, PROFESSOR OF 

STRATEGY, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE 

Dr. MAHNKEN. Great. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me here to 

testify this morning. 

Mr. Chairman, in line with your intent, I would like to keep my 

opening remarks brief and to submit my written statement to the 

record. 

In the brief time I have, I would like to cover four topics: just 

a few words about maybe how we should think about readiness 

from a strategic perspective; then to zoom in and focus on one particular contingency, the need to deal with China’s military modernization and development of anti-access capabilities; third, to 

talk about our readiness to counter China’s anti-access capabilities; 

and then, hopefully, to end on somewhat of a note of opportunity 

for us. 

So, on readiness, as someone who has spent a career studying, 

teaching, and practicing strategy, I am certainly sympathetic to 

those who face the challenging task of trying to ensure that U.S. 

Armed Forces are ready to face the full spectrum of challenges that 

we do face. 

And I certainly applaud Secretary of Defense Gates’ call to 

achieve a balanced defense capability, even as I acknowledge that 

achieving balance is extremely challenging. It requires us to balance the certainty that American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are in combat today and will be in combat tomorrow against 

the possibility of other contingencies, including great-power conflict, contingencies that may be of lower probability than the certainty of today’s combat but would have extremely high consequence. 

And, finally, I think we need to acknowledge that readiness involves not only preparing for and fighting today’s wars but also reassuring our allies and deterring aggressors in order to prevent 

war. And back to Tom Donnelly’s comments, I think, you know, 

these are some of the criteria we should use to assess our readiness. 
14 

Certainly, the strategic environment that we face today further 

complicates the task. We face challenges all the way from nonstate 

terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaeda and its associated movements, up to regional rogues, such as Iran and North Korea, up to 

China’s military modernization. 

Let me focus on one of those challenges, I think a particularly 

stressing challenge: that posed by China’s development of anti-access capabilities. As Rudy mentioned, the QDR Independent Panel 

identified a number of challenges that we face; it also identified a 

number of shortfalls in U.S. force structure. I want to focus on Chinese anti-access capabilities. 

This is a matter of some urgency since China is, for the first 

time, close to achieving a military capability to deny the U.S. and 

allied forces access to much of the Western Pacific Rim. China’s 

military modernization calls into question a number of assumptions 

upon which the United States has based its defense planning since 

World War II. 

Specifically, the assumption that the United States will enjoy an 

operational sanctuary in space is now in question due to China’s 

development of anti-satellite and other capabilities—capabilities 

that are adequately documented in a series of DOD reports to Congress on Chinese military power over the years. 

Second, the assumption that U.S. bases in Guam and Japan and 

elsewhere will be secure from attack is also increasingly open to 

question, due to China’s development of ballistic and cruise missile 

systems and other capabilities. 

Third, the assumption that U.S. naval surface vessels can operate with impunity in all parts of the western Pacific—also open to 

question, due to the development of a range of capabilities on the 

part of China. 

And then, finally, the assumption that in a crisis U.S. information networks will remain secure—also open to question, given China’s cyber capabilities. 

These developments have profound implications for U.S. national 

security. We have, since the end of World War II, based our defense strategy on the combination of forward-based forces to deter 

adversaries and reassure our friends and the projection of power 

from those bases and the continental United States to defeat foes 

in wartime. The spread of anti-access capabilities calls that formula into question. 

Well, in response to these developments, the QDR Independent 

Panel argued that the U.S. force structure needs to be increased in 

a number of areas to counter anti-access challenges. Specifically, 

the panel called for an expansion of the U.S. surface fleet, the acquisition of additional attack submarines, replacement for the Ohio 

class cruise missile submarines, an increase in our bomber force, 

and an expansion of our long-range precision-strike capabilities. 

Those were among the recommendations of the panel. 

With the time I have left, let me just outline very briefly some 

opportunities in addition to the panel’s recommendations. Because 

I think the United States has opportunities to work with our all 

allies and our friends to ensure security in the Asia-Pacific region. 

First, are opportunities that would come from developing a coalition intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance network in the 
15 

western Pacific to help reassure our allies and friends and generate 

collective responses to crisis and aggression. 

The second is the need to harden and diversify our network of 

bases in the Pacific. I believe we need to harden our facilities on 

Guam, we need to harden our facilities at Kadena in Japan. And 

we also need to be looking at a much broader and more diverse set 

of bases in the region. 

Third and finally, I think we need to look for ways to bolster our 

submarine force and to work to link together our submarine force 

with those of our allies and our friends in the region. Undersea 

warfare is a comparative advantage for the United States and for 

many of our allies and one that is likely to be of increasing relevance in the future. And we need to think about creative ways 

that we can work with our allies to bolster our undersea capabilities. 

In closing, I would like to go back to something that Mr. deLeon 

said about the deficit and about spending. None of the moves that 

I have outlined in my remarks would be free, but some of them 

could be undertaken with modest cost. And I believe that we need 

to think about the cost of recapitalizing our military, but, in doing 

so, we also need to consider the price for not recapitalizing. And, 

in the long run, that cost is likely to be much greater. 

Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Mahnken can be found in the Appendix on page 82.] 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you all. 

And I am going to defer most of my questions until the end, so 

we can let other Members ask questions. 

But I just wanted to get started with—we have the QDR, which 

is our major defense lay-down and strategy. And, of course, Congress, I think very wisely, set up the independent, bipartisan panel 

to look at the QDR and say, are we on the right track or the wrong 

track? There are three statements that came out of that panel that 

I would like to just read for you and ask your comments on. 

I want to start at the end, where you said this statement. You 

said, ‘‘The panel’s assessment is that the budget process and current operational requirements, driven by the staff process and service priorities, most likely shape the QDR far more than the QDR 

will now shape processes and drive future budgets and program 

agendas.’’ 

I want to overlay that on one that got my attention right off the 

bat, when you said, ‘‘The aging of the inventories and equipment 

used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating 

personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the 

growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in 

the areas of personnel, acquisition, and force structure.’’ 

I would like your comments on those two statements, if you 

would. And compare that with—yesterday, the Secretary of the 

Navy was here, and I asked him about that statement. And he said 

that the only difference between the numbers the Navy has for 

ships and the number the panel had for ships was the way they 

counted the ships, and there really wasn’t any difference. 

Can you just give me your thoughts on those statements? 
16 

Mr. DELEON. Well, yes. One, on the QDR process itself, I think 

the members of the commission felt that there were times where 

there had been dramatic strategic reviews—Reagan Administration 

in 1981, the base force of Secretary of Defense Cheney and General 

Powell in 1991, the Bottom-Up Review in 1993. And then, in the 

other times, the QDR process had been process-driven more than 

strategically driven. 

So I think one of the points was that the QDR may come too 

early in a new Administration. When we go through a transition 

from one Administration to the next, the legal requirement is for 

the QDR to come in year one. The challenge of staffing up a new 

Administration in the key Pentagon jobs and the speed with which 

the other body occasionally acts on the confirmation process means 

too many things just happen in that first year. So validating when 

the QDR needs to occur, it needs to be strategic. So that is point 

one. 

I think point two, we were concerned that, in terms of the number of ships—we chose our words very carefully. Steve Hadley, the 

former national security advisor, and I wrote that section, ‘‘access 

to all of the international areas of the Pacific.’’ And so that is a 

presence issue. It is probably maritime, because those are highly 

effective mobile platforms. 

And so, you know, I think what we were emphasizing was you 

need to make sure you have the force structure for the Pacific, and 

you need to make sure that you have the strategy for the Pacific. 

We did not get into a bean-counting on the number of ships. Our 

concern was that, again, not that the cost of the ships may be as 

much a constraint as the budget that is available for the ships, but 

that, clearly, if we were trying to prioritize, we would say the Pacific is the area where you have to prioritize. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Donnelly. 

Mr. DONNELLY. To take the questions in reverse order, I would 

stand by the panel’s ship number, which was thoroughly scrubbed 

by John Lehman, who knows how to count ships. That is one thing 

he knows extraordinarily well. I think that this has been a Pentagon talking point and critique of the panel report since it was released. And I think, as a matter of analysis, we were right and 

they weren’t. But to walk through all the details would be mindnumbing. 

I want to just also totally agree with Rudy in terms of the panel’s 

analysis of the QDR process. I was on the committee staff when the 

QDR legislation was written, and, in many ways, our model was 

the Les Aspin Bottom-Up Review that Rudy knows inside and out. 

And the, kind of, anomalous point of that was that Mr. Aspin 

uniquely, when he became Secretary of Defense, had been thinking 

about these issues, preparing for them and holding hearings when 

he was chairman of the full Armed Services Committee. So he 

came into office with that strategic set of viewpoints that Rudy references. 

There is a recommendation in the panel report, if I recall rightly, 

for setting up sort of a senior advisory group that would be available to a new Administration to sort of help them get their strategic sea legs as they came into office and prepared to do an appropriate defense review. 
17 

But I think it was, as Rudy says, kind of a consensus view that 

the current process was not working, and the absence of a genuine 

strategic understanding and guidance had reduced the process to 

a budget drill. 

Mr. DELEON. Just two quick points. One is that the review process has not been working for a while, throughout the last decade. 

And I think counting ships, I think your description may have been 

a bit simplistic, Tom. So I think there is an area for discussion that 

the committee needs to probe in terms of how many of the ships 

in the pipeline are combatants, how many are support ships? 

But in terms of the critical presence issue, again it is a reorientation. It is a focus that across the Pacific, that is the new lines of 

commerce globally. That is where the critical issues are. And so 

you have got to look where are the resources going. We have also 

got to ask where are the resources going when our allies in Europe 

are significantly ratcheting their budgets down? So how much of 

our responsibility for their security do we continue to maintain? We 

have got this growing issue of access to the international areas of 

the Pacific at a time when we still have considerable resources 

aimed toward Europe, and our European allies are reducing their 

expenditures. 

Mr. FORBES. Ms. Eaglen. 

Ms. EAGLEN. Yes, I agree, of course, with the findings. What we 

have seen in the last 10 years largely is a shift in funding and priorities within the Department to focus on prevailing and current 

operations, which is commendable, and clearly common sense. The 

problem is that it is coming at the expense of preparing for the future. And I would argue that in many ways the future is now. It 

always seems like it is so far out, and a lot of the challenges that 

we are seeing come on line from the capabilities around the world 

that friends and foes alike are building presents it now. 

But I do want to talk about just again the snapshot of the armed 

services. We have the smallest Navy that we have ever had since 

1916, and we are asking it to do about 400 percent more than it 

has ever done in the past. We have the oldest Air Force in the history of the country since its inception in 1947, all of its fighters, 

cargoes, bombers, tankers, trainers. The Army has skipped three 

generations of modernization, and the last one which was canceled, 

the FCS [Future Combat Systems], even though there is a potential 

replacement hopefully coming online soon, was the only ground vehicle improvement that the Army has had in 60 years. 

So I don’t want to overstate the challenges, but that is the reality. We can’t talk about the world as it is and what is required 

unless we actually talk about also the state of the military. 

Now, the QDR Independent Panel—if I can speak for them, Rudy 

might jump in—used the rough metric of the Bottom-Up Review as 

a good assessment of a starting point specifically because that was 

what we thought, what they—leaders, policymakers thought was 

needed at a time when we expected the world to be a much more 

peaceful place. How could we need anything less than that today 

is really what the message that we are trying to send. 

And to the CNO’s [Chief of Naval Operations’] point, which actually the 2012 budget came in pretty strong for shipbuilding. I am 

thrilled about that. I think there is an understanding that there is 
18 

a true bipartisan consensus to grow shipbuilding and a genuine 

need to do that. 

But analysis across the board from the CBO [Congressional 

Budget Office] to CRS [Congressional Research Service] and the 

Center for Naval Analysis will find that while our battle force fleet 

is about high 270s, low 280s in terms of ship numbers, we are really on a glide path to building a 220-ship Navy when you add it up 

and you project it forward. So I would not even focus on the 346. 

I would focus on what we are buying today, and if you carry out 

linearly, just where does that get you? We are in danger of a 220- 

ship Navy. 

And I would close with just some thoughts on the process, on the 

QDR process. The HASC took real leadership in standing up the 

independent panel. The National Defense Panel was sort of a 

model for this, which you had done one time in the 1997 QDR process. And I think it is wise to consider making a standing national 

defense panel a permanent entity. It can shift in terms of its membership and all of that sort of thing, but one that actually informs 

the QDR process before the Department gets under way so that 

you can get out of some of that group think. 

Mr. FORBES. Dr. Mahnken. 

Dr. MAHNKEN. I would echo what my colleagues have said about 

the panel’s recommendation of 346 ships versus the programmed or 

the planned 313. I think, as Mackenzie said, we did look back to 

the Bottom-Up Review as a blank-sheet look at U.S. requirements 

for a more peaceful era than we see today. I think there was a general sense that the current force structure is likely to be insufficient given the challenges that we face. 

As to the QDR process, I am in the unique position of having 

played a minor role in the 2006 QDR, run the office that did a lot 

of the preparation for the 2010 QDR, and then being on the QDR 

Independent Panel. My general observations are two. First, Quadrennial Defense Reviews, their success is directly proportional to 

the amount of time and effort the most senior leadership of the Department is willing to commit. And I think that goes back to Mr. 

deLeon’s point that there have been dramatic changes in our defense strategy, but those have really occurred when the President 

and the Secretary of Defense are directly, directly involved. At 

other times, things go less well. 

As to the timing, I am one of those people that believes that the 

current timing is probably the least bad option. The QDR used to 

be submitted earlier, and I think the experience was that a new 

Administration didn’t have all of its folks in place and could not 

really put its stamp on the review. If you wait later, which I think 

sort of sound analysis would say you want to take longer and so 

forth—if you wait later, you are really into the Administration’s 

second or third budget going up before Congress, and there is very 

limited ability for the Administration to shape things. 

So I am not a fan of the process, having been a part of it multiple 

times, definitely not a fan of the process, but I would say that the 

current timing at least is the least bad option out there. 

Mr. FORBES. Ms. Bordallo. 
19 

Ms. BORDALLO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And again, thank you 

to all the witnesses. Each of your statements were very insightful, 

and some presented some daunting issues. 

So I would like to start with Mr. deLeon first. As you know, U.S. 

Pacific Command, as well as other commands, has extensive programs in the military to foster military-to-military and military-tocivilian relationships in their respective AORs. You mentioned the 

Pacific region being a strategic area, and, of course, I have to agree 

with you on that. 

My question for you is this: With what other countries should the 

U.S. be expanding our relationships to enhance our partnerships? 

Also can you comment on the effectiveness, both geopolitical and 

budget-wise, of the National Guard State Partnership Program? 

How do you see this program playing a part in the mixture of tools 

available to a combatant command? 

Mr. DELEON. Thank you. 

You know, when we look at Asia, our military-to-military relationship with Japan is crucial, and it has become all the more crucial given some of the challenges going on in the South China Sea. 

Interestingly, we have a unique relationship developing with 

Vietnam. They are a critical country in the region, and that is one 

where we will do it step by step, but that is clearly an area, given 

their geographic position in Asia. 

India, the relationship is still developing, but they are a risen 

power economically. They have their own issues in terms of their 

relationships with both China and Pakistan. But that is another 

area of opportunity. And then at a core minimum, the United 

States needs to continue to press the PLA for some kind of dialogue. It is much different than the U.S.-Japan military-to-military 

exchange. But there has got to be enough of an exchange so that 

both sides have the capacity to talk to each other when there is a 

crisis. 

We had one on the Korean Peninsula. The Americans like to talk 

when things are at the crisis level because it creates stability, it 

creates understanding. The Chinese don’t. And so this is a problem 

as China continues its economic development and as it continues 

to develop military capabilities. 

But we start with those countries where we are in strategic alliance, and that begins with Japan, opening up with India. We have 

the model to follow. And I think our Army led right after the fall 

of—the breakup of the Soviet Union and those relationships that 

they had had informally that they were able to solidify with those 

Warsaw Pact countries that made for their rapid admission into 

NATO. But having those relationships—and you have to start them 

early. Young officers who become the leaders need to have those relationships when they are young. 

Finally, there are great roles that the Guard can play, particularly on the humanitarian missions to support the Active Duty 

Forces, as well as the fact that the National Guard units are now 

a key strategic reserve. In our tenures we have seen the Guard go 

from being sort of a backup contingency for a big war in Europe 

to being operationally able to deploy quickly. The committee has 

had a clear voice on this in the last 30 years in terms of Mr. Mont-
20 

gomery and the Guard and the critical role that they play and the 

contingencies that they bring on the nontraditional areas. 

Ms. BORDALLO. Thank you very much. 

Dr. Mahnken, I have a question for you. In your testimony you 

mentioned China’s fast-growing anti-access capability—which I certainly agree in your statement—and the correlating recommendations from the QDR which call on countering this threat by expanding the U.S. Navy surface and subsurface fleets, increasing the 

bomber force, and expanding our long-range precision strike capability. These types of military weapons systems are often used in 

strategic environments, which are very different from those we 

have our men and women pursuing today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and 

elsewhere around the world. 

How would you recommend that we continue to use our military 

forces to defeat nonstate actors and other threats, while training 

them and equipping them for the future strategic threats that you 

mentioned? And what do you consider the single most important 

shift in readiness priorities from the Department that this committee should consider during this year’s cycle? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. Thank you for that question. 

On dealing with nonstate actors and dealing with terrorist organizations, I think the most important role that the U.S. Defense 

Department will be playing and the services we will be playing as 

we move forward is in training and advising foreign militaries. I 

think in many ways as we look back, Iraq and Afghanistan will not 

be the typical way that we will go about it. I think the typical way 

we will go about it is the typical way we have gone about it in the 

past, which is to help governments that are under threat from 

insurgencies and terrorist groups to build up their capacity to defeat those threats. 

And certainly as we have seen in the Philippines, working with 

the Armed Forces of the Philippines strengthening their capacity, 

I think that is going to be a key role. And while in my remarks 

I focused a lot on naval and air capabilities for dealing with antiaccess challenges, I think for the Army and for the Marine Corps, 

building the capacity to advise foreign militaries really is going to 

be key. It is not going to necessarily be the—you know, the majority of troops involved, but a very key part of the force structure. 

As Ms. Eaglen mentioned earlier, our Army Special Forces are 

the only part of the U.S. military that are recruited and trained 

with an expertise and selected based on their aptitude for dealing 

with foreign militaries, and I think strengthening that capacity is 

key. 

Now, you say single most important thing that the subcommittee 

can do, I would go back to dealing with China’s anti-access capabilities. And again, there are a cluster of capabilities associated 

with that that you outlined, but then also improving our infrastructure and our basing infrastructure, and making sure that our bases 

in the Asia-Pacific region are hardened and survivable I think is 

important. I think it is important for deterrence. I think it is important for reassuring our allies, and should there be a conflict, 

and I certainly hope there won’t be, it will be important then, too. 

But the greatest value for these types of investments is in averting 

conflict. 
21 

Thank you. 

Ms. BORDALLO. Thank you very much, Doctor. 

I do have other questions, Mr. Chairman, if we are going to have 

a second round. Thank you. 

Mr. FORBES. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Scott. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I would like to just 

make a general statement, and then I would like the committee 

members to respond as fast as possible. 

And I believe, and I think most believe, that well-trained, wellequipped soldiers with proper dwell time should be our priority, 

and they are the key to victory for us in any conflict that we go 

into. The Department of Defense and the generals in most cases 

say the same thing. Yet when we look at DOD proposals, the DOD 

has proposed to eliminate the number of soldiers or reduce the 

number of soldiers by 43,000 and to hire 30,000 additional bureaucrats or procurement officers. 

DOD proposes to eliminate the C–17 buy, which is arguably the 

most important plane in our fleet with everything that we do with 

it. I can understand reducing the purchase if we have enough, but 

to totally eliminate it when you have already got the line up and 

running to me seems not a very wise thing to do. 

And they want a new bomber that they tell us they can’t get to 

us before 2025. And if they follow their current track record, it will 

be somewhere closer to 2035 or maybe 2045 before we get the new 

bomber. 

And my question is: There’s an obvious disconnect here; what is 

wrong at DOD, and how do we fix it? 

Mr. DONNELLY. I do not mean this as a flip answer, but DOD is 

an institution that is suffering from lack of guidance and not 

enough money to do all the things that it is being asked to do. I 

mean, it is a big bureaucracy, you know. They get a lot of money. 

But their tasks are larger than the force can handle. 

Mr. SCOTT. Can I stop you right there, because I want to hear 

other people. Okay. But they are proposing to eliminate approximately 45,000 soldiers and hire 30,000 bureaucrats. If we talk 

about their budget, they are going to spend a whole lot more and 

pay those 30,000 bureaucrats a whole lot more than they are going 

to pay the soldiers. So from a budget standpoint they don’t seem 

to care what they spend. 

Mr. DONNELLY. Actually I believe Secretary Gates has put at 

least a halt on expanding the civilian workforce. I am not quite 

sure that the original plan to hire additional procurement officers 

is going to proceed as originally announced by the Administration. 

I share a concern about Army and Marine Corps end strength 

cuts. We have seen this movie before. We always believe there will 

never be another land war, and then there is. So that is something 

that is deeply worrying to me. 

Mr. SCOTT. Would one of the others speak specifically to the decision to absolutely eliminate the C–17 buy and the value of that 

plane to our fleet, while at the same time pursuing another plane 

that they can’t have to us before 2025? 

Ms. EAGLEN. Absolutely. First let us start with the practical implication to permanently shutting down a line, which you have al-
22 

luded to here, and the great costs of doing so, not just in the termination fees, but losing America’s only wide-bodied cargo production 

line in existence. 

Mr. SCOTT. Absolutely. 

Ms. EAGLEN. So it is not just the C–17, but you want the capability for more C–5s or C–130s or any one of these types of platforms that are incredibly—I mean, current operations grind to a 

halt without the ability to move people and equipment around the 

globe. 

We saw when the U.S. military responded to humanitarian operations in Haiti, C–17s along with the other wide-body cargo aircraft 

were diverted from missions in Afghanistan because there just simply aren’t enough to do everything, as Tom has said. 

The benefits of this sort of strategic lift go beyond warfighting 

operations, of course, to every other type of mission, to building 

partner capacity, to the humanitarian assistance and more. The 

most interesting part about actually closing this line and then restarting it, if we choose to do so, which we usually find out after 

the fact that these are mistakes—the cost of closing down the line 

is about $6 billion if you want to restart it later. 

To answer your question, what we are seeing in the Department 

are budget-driven strategies, and so you have a short-term cost 

savings that appears as a cost savings, but it is really going to cost 

you more money in the long term; whereas if you have sort of stable, predictable Defense budgets, and you are building enough of 

everything, you are able to save money. But what they are saying 

is, we need this dollar to go here as opposed to here. And it is a 

shortsighted investment decision that ends up again costing you 

more, because what is not noted publicly by DOD are two things: 

the cost of termination of any major program. It is very expensive 

to pay the contractors when you say you are going to build this, 

and then you build fewer than that number; but also the cost of 

restarting, as I mentioned, and then what you have are the longterm—nobody talks about the fact that you are going to have to rebuild something again in the future. 

So, for example, take the Marine Corps Expeditionary Fighting 

Vehicle [EFV]. Yes, it saves money if you cancel it this year, but 

the Marine Corps still needs an amphibious combat vehicle. So we 

are not saving any money by not building it this year; we are just 

pushing that bill to next year or the year after. 

Mr. DELEON. May I, sir? 

Mr. SCOTT. That is up to the chairman. My time has expired. 

Mr. FORBES. Go ahead. 

Mr. DELEON. I think you are asking a good question, and you 

ought to ask that of the witnesses as they come. Maybe I will follow up and come and visit. 

On the civilian side as we deployed to combat, we were short the 

people in the field who can do contracting. This is logistics contracting. We ended up taking a lot of people out of the Corps of Engineers who would manage $50 million or $100 million water 

projects, putting them into Iraq where they were supervising a billion dollars a week in logistics contracting. So it turns out that the 

people who can write contracts are fairly, fairly important to the 

effort. 
23 

Mackenzie talked about the slow rate of modernizing, particularly Army procurement equipment. One of the things the Army 

needs to do a little bit better is to frame their requirements so that 

the government knows exactly what it is buying. I am not sure that 

they still have some of the technical expertise to specify what the 

exact composition of the vehicles are to look like, things like that. 

And so that is translating requirements to contracts, and it is 

hugely important to the warfighter who needs the equipment, and 

it is hugely important to the taxpayers because they need to pay 

a fair price for the equipment. So figuring out how to do that better, Mackenzie is right, we are living off of the M1s and the Bradleys and the legacy of those who put those in the pipelines as long 

as 30 years ago. 

Dr. MAHNKEN. Mr. Chairman, if I could just briefly, and it is on 

this issue of shutting down production lines. I think we need to 

have a strategic view of these types of decisions. And we should be 

looking not only at U.S. acquisition, but also foreign acquisition as 

well. That is just to take the C–17 example. I could talk about 

other examples as well. We have sold a number of C–17s, and there 

are opportunities to sell more of them. 

I think in our planning we should be taking those export opportunities into account to hopefully try to keep these production lines, 

as Mackenzie said, the expertise in place to bridge the gap until 

the next time we use them. And I think that there are all sorts of 

opportunities to do that in other parts of our production capability 

as well, to include, you know, UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles], 

for example, and even maybe our submarine capabilities. 

I think we need to have that strategic view of our production capacity, because we have drawn it down. I think we have drawn it 

down to a point where you have maybe one or two providers of any 

particular capability. We are sort of at the ragged edge of where 

you want to be if you want to be competitive. 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you. 

I now recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Reyes. 

Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding 

this hearing. I think we are just starting to scratch the surface of 

the many different issues that affect our readiness. For instance, 

I am always, I guess, perplexed that 40 years ago when I was in 

Vietnam, I was dodging the AK–47 and RPGs [Rocket-Propelled 

Grenades]. Today those are still a basic staple weapon that our 

troops are very much concerned about not just in Iraq, but today 

in Afghanistan and in different parts of the world. 

I got to Vietnam when the M–16 was an issue because it was 

jamming. It wasn’t designed to be in the mud and the muck and 

all of that other stuff. I was in the 11 Bravo. I wasn’t a grunt, I 

was a helicopter crew chief, but we carried them into battle, and 

so we heard all of those concerns, and some were openly saying we 

have got to kill the enemy and get their AK–47s so we can defend 

ourselves. 

Now, why I mention that is because sometimes in our effort to 

modernize, to continue to modernize, we fail to see that sometimes 

the basic staple—now, the AK–47 doesn’t work for our Special Ops 

troops. They carry weapons that have to be silenced and all of 
24 

those other things. But a staple of the regular weapons has to be 

different. 

Which I guess the frustration I feel is that we shouldn’t modernize for modernization’s sake and to keep these things kind of 

self-perpetuating themselves. And one of the things that I have 

learned over the course of being on the Intelligence Committee and 

chairing that committee is the remarkable relationship today between intelligence and the military, you know, our soldiers and marines, because of the asymmetrical threats that exist against us. 

So earlier this week I asked General Casey, I said—you know, 

he is retiring, so General Dempsey, if the Senate confirms him, is 

coming in—what kind of guidance have you received to prepare our 

Army for future challenges? I am very concerned about reducing 

the end strength of the Army and the Marines, because the ones 

that pay the price are troops and their families. That is how we 

got into that—I can remember when I first got to Congress that the 

philosophy was the two-war strategy—and I think you mentioned 

that, Mr. Donnelly, in your wrap-up, in your conclusion—which is 

no longer in vogue. 

But I would submit we may have to do not just two operational 

commitments, but multiple operational commitments. And, yes, 

maybe it is not in the traditional sense in terms of committing 

thousands of troops, but still for the troops that you commit for the 

Special Ops that are supported by intel and vice versa, you still 

have to have a supply chain. You still have to take care to make 

sure that you don’t send people out there and leave them hanging, 

because that is not the strategy that we follow. God knows we have 

got all of these challenges with not just the Horn of Africa, the Iranians and others, but the Chinese. The Chinese have been very active. 

When you mentioned the Special Ops whose main duty is Latin 

America, I couldn’t agree with you more. I found it the most ironic 

to be speaking Spanish on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan with our Special Ops people who were telling me, you 

know, we need to do a better job of paying attention to Latin America. That is our hemisphere. That is where Chavez and all of those 

other actors are busily trying to undermine places like Mexico. 

A scenario that in the next election, which is next year—remember we just dodged a major bullet with Obregon. We would have 

had Chavez’s military advisors on our southern border, because 

that is what he had offered Obregon. 

This is not something that we do a hearing and move on, and I 

applaud you for thinking in these terms. But we need to do more. 

Maybe in a roundtable would be better because I get frustrated— 

and I was a chairman, so I always tried to do what the chairman 

does and say, I will ask my questions at the end, because 5 minutes is not enough when you are dealing with the kinds of complex 

issues that this case represents. 

Mr. FORBES. Will the gentleman yield? 

Mr. REYES. Absolutely. 

Mr. FORBES. I absolutely agree with you, and one of the things 

that we proposed was just what you said, sitting in that type of 

roundtable. The ranking member did not want to do that at this 

point in time. But I hope that we will continue to do that because 
25 

I agree with you 100 percent. These issues are vitally important for 

us to get at instead of trying to put our questioning in staccato 

mode where we really can’t reach them. So I hope we can do that. 

Mr. REYES. Thank you so much. 

Can I just make one more observation? There is one thing we 

learned in the two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. We learned that we 

shouldn’t ignore the first one so we can carry out the second one, 

number one. Number two, is we learned that contracting out is not 

a way to do that. 

I mean, I don’t know, Mr. Chairman, how you have had input 

from our troops, but they are very frustrated that some of their 

former colleagues leave the service and go into contracting and 

earn two or three times more than they are earning because they 

go with the contractors. We have so many things like that that we 

have got to get our arms around. So I again thank you for doing 

this, and these are very—people with a lot of great insight, and we 

owe this system for the future more dialogue in terms of—like I 

said, a roundtable for me would work much better. 

Mr. FORBES. If the gentleman would agree, and the committee, 

the gentleman raises an excellent point. One of the things that we 

know that we have found is that we had difficulty fighting in both 

Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. We moved out of Afghanistan into Iraq. It left us with some vulnerabilities in Afghanistan. 

And Congressman Reyes raises a good point about South America. What kind of vulnerabilities do you think that we are leaving 

exposed in South America because of our focus on other parts of 

the world? And maybe you could take just a quick moment to address those before we move to our next question. 

Mr. DELEON. So Mexico is the key. We owe the government in 

Mexico our attention as a national security issue. It is much broader than the immigration question. Secretary Clinton was right. We 

have a drug consumption problem on this side of the border that 

fuels a lot of lawlessness on the other side of the border because 

it is a pipeline. 

On the other hand, South America, you have got some very vibrant, energetic economies. Brazil is now a G–20 member trying to 

play a global role. That is another area where we have not really 

focused all that much on our mil-to-mil, but as Brazil, Chile, Argentina become global players in the economy. And then demographically in Central America we have got the issue of 18- to 22- 

year-olds and are there jobs for them, and do they become members 

of an economy, or do they get into the drug trade? The drug trade 

has been an attention point of this committee for 25 years, and it 

institutionalizes a series of very corrupting behaviors. 

Some of this is homeland security, but some of it—and the milto-mil relationship between the U.S. and Mexico has always been 

one of a struggle because of the history of the two militaries—but 

figuring out how to engage that dialogue looking south. 

Now, as we had an interdiction program in Colombia that had 

some successes, that had an impact on pushing more of the business into Mexico. Now as we focus on Mexico, some of the drug 

trade business gets moved to West Africa, and it creates different 

plans. But I think working with the government in Mexico as a 
26 

partner, and then realizing that we have got problems on this side 

of the border that we have got to deal with, that is a start. 

Mr. FORBES. Now the chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 

Missouri, Mrs. Hartzler. 

Mrs. HARTZLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Yesterday, General Casey said that the Army’s rotational force 

model allowed them to hedge against unexpected contingencies. Is 

this a reasonable assessment of the state of the force? 

Mr. DELEON. General Casey has worked hard to build in a rotation force. Since the end of the cold war, there has been a fundamental impact on our ground forces. Their optempo [operations 

tempo] has gone up much higher. During the cold war we would 

put our forces forward-deployed, in Korea, in Germany, and they 

would live there with their families, the schools were there, and 

you would go to a rotation, and it would be for 2 years, 3 years. 

When the wall came down and we started to bring our troops 

home to garrison, we were deploying troops from the continental 

United States, and so they went from being forward-deployed to 

contingency-based, and so that started a lot of wear and tear on the 

ground forces in particular. And so it has developed over the years 

a different rotational philosophy. When you put someone forwarddeployed in Korea, they are there for 2 years, but in a contingency 

operation we are deploying the forces regularly. We are sending 

them for a year, bringing them home, sending someone else. So it 

means you have got to have troops in the pipeline that replace the 

troops in the field, and when the troops in the field come home, we 

need to restore their quality of life with their families. We need, 

as Mackenzie said, to restore their training opportunities. 

So General Casey, as one of his marks of his tenure as Chief, has 

really been focused on a larger rotational base. It gets to the earlier 

question on the size of your ground forces, because not only do you 

have to have troops for the mission, you have to have the ability 

to rotate those troops once they deploy. 

Mr. DONNELLY. Can I add a quick footnote to that. I think Rudy 

is quite correct; however, the effect has been essentially to transform the National Guard from a strategic reserve to an operational 

reserve, as General Chiarelli said earlier this week. The rotational 

model may be the least bad choice that we have, but the rotation 

base inside the Army, the brigade combat team system was designed to get people out to make units smaller and lighter. The result is that every time they deploy, they have to be plussed up by 

as much as 40 percent with enablers, and National Guard units 

have to step up onto that rotational conveyer belt at rates that 

were not anticipated when these force structure decisions were 

made. 

Mrs. HARTZLER. Do you think that we can rapidly respond to an 

unplanned event should several of them occur simultaneously? 

Mr. DELEON. Well, one, you know, Mackenzie has raised the fundamental issue for us, and that is we have an All-Volunteer Force, 

and appropriately we compensate that All-Volunteer Force much 

differently than we did when we had a draft. We have now 

stretched an All-Volunteer Force through 10 years of combat. It has 

been a challenge to maintain the quality. It is more expensive, but 
27 

no one would want to shortchange the people who are sacrificing 

so much for our country by serving. 

But the ground mission is a unique one because it is manpowerintensive. And so I think we as a country need to ask the fundamental question: If more and more ground contingencies are going 

to be the norm—I think we hope not, but the troops always need 

to be prepared—then we need to have a long-term debate about 

how we raise—you know, the constitutional mandate is to support 

a Navy and to raise an Army. So we should probably have a debate 

on how we raise an Army at some point. 

Dr. MAHNKEN. If I could, I would broaden this out, and I would 

say that the Joint Force, all of our capabilities give us all sorts of 

opportunities to hedge. And so my direct answer to your question 

would be it depends. It depends on the type of contingency that we 

would face. In some types of contingencies, you know, our naval 

and air capabilities, which are relatively less stressed than our 

ground capabilities, would be able to take the fore. Depending on 

the contingency, our allies would have an important role. If we 

were talking about a contingency on the Korean Peninsula, for example, South Korea and the Republic of Korea’s Armed Forces, 

particularly their ground forces, would play a major role. 

This is a topic that OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] and 

the Joint Staff have to deal with constantly as they are looking at 

global force management and how to balance these risks on a dayto-day basis. 

Mrs. HARTZLER. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. FORBES. The gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Kissell. 

Mr. KISSELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and panel, for being 

here. 

I am going to do something I don’t normally do. I am going to 

talk more than I am going to ask questions. I generally like, when 

we have expertise here, to go straight to questions. And I think it 

is the nature, Mr. Chairman, of what you have got set up here 

today, and I have been writing notes, writing notes, writing notes, 

and I finally quit writing notes. I think it is more of an indication 

of what we are doing here. And the direction that I have decided 

I really would like to ask in goes back a little bit to what Mr. Scott 

was talking about, what Mr. Reyes was talking about. 

It doesn’t bother me as much that we are going to be hiring some 

people in the Pentagon if they are going to do the job, because we 

went through two major bills of procurement reforming when the 

bottom line was we keep coming up with these acquisition plans 

that don’t come in on time, don’t come in on budget, don’t do what 

they are supposed to. We don’t have oversight of what we want 

them to do, so we keep adding all the bells and whistles, and all 

of a sudden we wonder why the combat littoral ship, the expeditionary force for the Marines, the Army’s experiment with the reforming to the combat futuristic models, whatever they were, on 

and on. And the F–35 is how many years behind? The engine is 4 

years behind. On and on and on, and we wonder why we have old 

equipment. Because the new equipment is not coming in. And as 

Mr. Reyes said, we have contractors who seem sometimes their in-
28 

tent is to maintain their position and not deliver the bang for the 

buck that the American taxpayers need. 

So I don’t mind if we bring some of that expertise in. I also recognize that a lot of the expertise is retiring. If the people won’t do 

the job, save the money, and predict what we need, and get it done. 

And that is where a lot of the our legislation went. And I think, 

Mr. Chairman, that is kind of the gist. 

And I think, Mr. Chairman, you may be the one that has pointed 

out that we go out and spend billions of dollars buying equipment, 

and we don’t even own the intellectual rights to that equipment. 

We don’t even get blueprints of that equipment. You know, we tell 

somebody to go spend billions of dollars and build it, then you get 

to keep it, and anytime we want something done, we got to come 

back to you as if you were the original possessor of that idea. 

So all of that said, I have some concerns in how we go about 

doing this. But the end result is we have got old equipment, we 

have lines not coming in on time, and we are shutting down lines. 

And I guess I have got finally a question. 

I believe one of the concerns that I have is that manufacturing 

has become kind of—something a lot of people don’t think we need 

anymore in America. So if we have to ramp up, if we have the need 

to start rebuilding, where do we stand? What is our base industrial 

core strength in America in terms of if we had a higher than a normal response, how can we respond? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. Just two brief responses. First is I think you raise 

a number of excellent points on acquisition, and I would just commend to your attention the acquisition chapter of the QDR Independent Panel’s report. The task force was chaired by retired Air 

Force General Larry Welch, who I think has a lot of wisdom in 

those pages as to how to improve the acquisition process. 

On the manufacturing base, I agree. I share that concern. If you 

look at the way America has traditionally fought its wars, we have 

been able to mobilize our industrial base, and we have been able 

to produce the materiel that we need in wartime. That base in a 

number of areas, whether it is shipbuilding, aircraft, even logistics 

and a lot of munitions and expendables, I think is not where it 

was. And I do think we need to think strategically about that, 

about that industrial base. 

I mean, there was a time not too many years ago where we had 

a shortage of small-arms ammunitions because of some problems 

with a couple of the manufacturers’ manufacturing facilities. That 

is relatively simple stuff. We could find ourselves in a situation 

where we need to replenish more complex items in the inventory. 

So I think that is an excellent observation. 

Mr. KISSELL. Well, Mr. Chairman, I think you have set a good 

tone for what this subcommittee can be looking at. And one last 

specific question. That red light just went on. Do we need the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle? If anybody wants to join? I am on 

Air, Land and this subcommittee, and I am hearing so much back 

and forth. Is that something that we need? 

Mr. DONNELLY. My view would be yes. Mackenzie earlier said we 

need a capability that is something like this. The marines have to 

get from their amphibious ships ashore somehow. They can’t all fly 

in a V–22. They can’t all ride in an LCAC [Landing Craft Air Cush-
29 

ion hovercraft] or walk ashore. And once they get ashore, they need 

mobility and firepower. And the way to get from ship to shore is 

either you plow through the water like an AAAV [Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle] currently does, or you get on top of the 

water like a speedboat, the way the EFV was supposed to do. 

The idea that we won’t need forcible entry capabilities in the future, particularly in a Pacific contingency, again strikes me as nonsensical. When you are talking about the anti-access question, 

what is vulnerable really are the ships themselves. So, you know, 

you can put all of these requirements in a blender, and some 

version is going to come out. And if it is going to do what you want 

it to do, it is going to look like an EFV; or you are going to have 

to sacrifice the speed, the ground mobility, the firepower, the ability to carry a full squad; or you are going to have to come in close 

to shore to disembark the marines. Anybody who has been in an 

AAAV, the first briefing you get is: Puke into your helmet so it 

doesn’t clog the bilge that way. So you can pay us now, or you can 

pay us later. 

Ms. EAGLEN. If I may, quickly. That is correct. So it is not about 

the EFV. You can call it the ACV, the Amphibious Combat Vehicle, 

but they need something. So the question I would argue for Congress and for the taxpayers since they funded this is when you look 

at how you build a major system like this, it is roughly broken 

down into design, development, and then production where you are 

actually turning them out. Congress has to ask, and all of you in 

this room in particular, do we finish that last marginal production 

at this point because it has been under development for over a decade, and we have spent—I don’t know the exact number—I think 

over $10 billion so far, or do you make that a sunk cost and you 

restart the ACV? 

The government should be leveraging the taxpayer investment in 

the development up to this point, I would argue. So even if you 

don’t need the EFV, and you want to call it ACVX, the point is to 

keep all the investment in hand so you don’t throw overboard the 

taxpayer money spent to date. 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you. 

Now Mr. Gibson from New York. 

Mr. GIBSON. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. 

I thank the panelists here today. I appreciate your experience 

and your scholarship. I also note Ms. Eaglen’s previous experience 

for the good people of New York 20 I now represent, and I appreciate your service there. 

I would like to pick up on a point Mr. Donnelly mentioned earlier 

about lacking guidance and the mismatch between requirements 

and resources. I concur with that assessment. And, of course, just 

the central question for today’s hearing, are we ready, begs the 

question: Ready for what? 

Now, you know, from an a priori statement, I don’t believe that 

we can afford to start a war that we don’t finish and we don’t win. 

We have to do that. I supported the surges; I fought in the surge 

in Iraq. And clearly I think it is a consensus, we are going to protect this cherished way of life, and we are going to make sure that 

we resource us to do just that. 
30 

There are a variety of opinions as to exactly what that means. 

And looking towards 2015 and beyond and the kind of force posture, the structure, and how we are going to lay down forces and 

command and control, I really come at this from the standpoint 

that we are asking too much of our military. And I want to go to 

the point earlier made as far as the potential groupthink, of the 

QDR, and the role the independent panel can play, and I am curious to know are there divergent viewpoints in any arguments that 

resonated that we should take a look at how we array our Armed 

Forces both in terms of posture, command and control, the requirements thereof, discussions that came in the QDR and independent 

panel, and your assessment as to whether or not you think we have 

a system that allows for alternative viewpoints? 

Mr. DELEON. Well, Mr. Gibson, I think first the alternative viewpoint in our process comes from the Congress, and so that is the 

institutional role. The President is the Commander in Chief. Most 

of us have taught courses on this. The President is the Commander 

in Chief, and the Congress provides for the common defense in 

terms of the raising of the Army and supporting a Navy, and the 

rules and regulations thereof. So this is the unique relationship 

that every Administration and every chairman of the committee 

and chair of the subcommittee have to deal with and come to grips. 

And so it is we have spent a morning talking about the requirements. We are sitting on this side of the table, and we are no 

longer responsible for the resource generation. When we served in 

our various offices, we had to have that balance. And that is where 

I think the challenge and the debate comes. 

Looking at each of these situations, the Pacific, the troops in Iraq 

and Afghanistan, you know, I have always felt that when you have 

fighting troops in the field, they become the number one priority. 

I think Secretary Gates told the QDR panel one of his issues in 

the Pentagon was that the Pentagon was too quick to get into the 

next budget instead of focusing on the troops in the field and what 

are their requirements. And you are correct; once we start, your 

moral obligation is to the troops in the field. 

We probably need a better, more detailed process at the front end 

when we decide to deploy the troops. With an All-Volunteer Force 

and supplemental appropriations, it is very easy to do. If you look 

back at FDR on the Lend-Lease, these were votes that went one 

way or the other. On Desert Storm it was a very close vote not in 

the House, but in the Senate, and lots of questions back in 1991 

about the first ground combat the country was considering. And so 

it was good in terms of what were we asking the force to do, what 

would we think victory looked like, things like that. 

So we probably owe a front-end process, because Iraq and Afghanistan have been a bit unique because we really have funded 

those through emergency supplementals. That has been a departure in our history in terms of how we have provided for the common defense. And then with the Volunteer Force, these are folks 

that are well-trained, ready to go, highly professional, and, whether 

intended or not, the Guard has stepped in and really made an 

enormous contribution to the country. 

So I think it is easier to define the requirements and look to the 

future than it is to engage in that discussion on how many re-
31 

sources are we now prepared to provide. In terms of actual dollars 

spent, we have gone through a decade where we have spent more 

than we spent during the Reagan 1980s. Now, in terms of the economic measure of that, it was 7 percent GDP in the 1980s; it is 

4.5 percent in this decade. So the economy has historically grown 

and is larger. 

But I think deciding on the resources, deciding on what the priorities are and how you balance, one of the points that Tom 

Mahnken in our staff on force structure wrote is that we constantly 

add to the missions of the force, but we really don’t increase the 

size of the force. We increase the budget, but we have wrapped 

around a lot more contracting around the Active-Duty men and 

women than we had, for example, during as recently as Desert 

Storm. 

So that is, I think, that issue of the balance between requirements and resources. Your subcommittee is at the heart of that in 

deciding what is right and what is appropriate. 

Mr. DONNELLY. I will try to be brief. 

There was certainly a lot of spirited discussion amongst the panelists. At the same time, I am struck about how at the end of the 

day most of those got worked out. So people from a wide variety 

of backgrounds very much came together on a core set of conclusions. 

And there was a lot of discussion about what is an appropriate 

military mission and what should be the job of other agencies. I am 

not sure that we have fully answered that, but we certainly did 

talk about it a lot. 

I would just conclude by saying it has been more than 20 years 

since the Berlin Wall fell, and we haven’t gotten to those questions 

that Rudy described. They have been out there, but we have been 

looking through the wrong end of the telescope, if you would, and 

having arguments about how many tanks and how many ships, 

without really thoroughly addressing this question of what is it 

that we really need to be doing. 

Again, I think the panel felt that was more than we could really—had the time or the resources to address. And I would really 

commend this idea of, you know, a panel of wise men or whatever 

that could be both a resource for the executive and the legislative 

branch. It would just be a focus for discussion of these issues, because, you know, it is a garbage-in, garbage-out process. If you 

can’t define what the yardstick would be, any measurement of 

readiness is as good as the other. 

Mr. GIBSON. Mr. Chairman, if I could have 30 seconds to wrap 

that up. 

Mr. FORBES. Go ahead. 

Mr. GIBSON. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. 

I appreciate the commentary here, the testimony. And, you know, 

to me, I think these a priori questions, now is the time to be asking—it is really overtime to be asking it. But as we look towards 

the backside of Iraq and Afghanistan, we should ask some fundamental questions: Who are we as a people? I think we would agree 

we are a Republic, but when you look at the facts, we look like an 

empire. We are laid down all over the world. We have command 
32 

and control that reaches all over the world. I am not convinced we 

are any safer by doing it that way. 

Something that strikes me as wrong, that when there is an event 

overseas, the number one seat in protocol goes to the combatant 

commander rather than the ambassador. I think we should take a 

look about the way that we array our forces and how we look at 

a whole government approach. We are talking about protecting our 

cherished way of life here, but I think there are alternative visions 

and approaches that I am not convinced have been fully developed 

and at least compared and contrast. 

So thank you very much for your testimony, and I look forward 

to working with you as we go forward. 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Chris. 

We just have a couple of questions left. Thank you so much for 

your patience. 

Ms. Bordallo. 

Ms. BORDALLO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do have a couple of 

questions, but I will enter them into the record, and hopefully the 

witnesses will be able to answer them. 

And also on the subject of the roundtable discussions, I have 

thought about that, and I think it is a good idea. So I look forward 

to that. And Mr. Reyes also mentioned to me that he thought offsite visits would be very valuable. Thank you. 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you so much, Madeleine. 

If I could just close with two questions, and I know some of our 

Members may need to leave, but I deferred these. 

We are constantly trying to get the balance between whether or 

not the budget is driving our defense strategy or our defense strategy is driving our budget. We have yet to have anyone from the Department of Defense to acknowledge that the budget is driving the 

strategy, as we might appreciate. 

There seems to me to be three components that we are always 

talking about, but we blend them quite a bit. One of them is something that Mr. Gibson was raising: What is our strategy? Are we 

asking the right questions for the strategies that we need? 

The second one is what we saw with the helicopters we had up 

at the beginning of this hearing, which is: Are we making the right 

assessment of our ability to meet that strategy? 

But the third one is the assessment of what part of the strategy 

can we afford to implement? 

We are always concerned here that we are not getting those 

three in balance. How do we ferret out and make sure we are really 

hearing the strategy and not somebody’s filtering of the strategy 

through the budget? Do you have any suggestions, any wisdom for 

us as we move down that road of how we make sure that we are 

dividing those three so that we are getting this right? 

Mr. DONNELLY. Well, I would just go back to the readiness reports that the committee did back that Rudy referred to earlier. 

Obviously the point of departure is the information that you get 

from the Department, but it is important to sort of go beyond that 

and ask, well, are these the right measurements? And I think one 

of the things we found was that, particularly looking outside of the 

spotlight in terms of looking at units that were not immediately deployed, if you look at units that are in the trough of unreadiness, 
33 

that is where you kind of get a better assessment of the problems 

that beset the force in terms of manpower filler or equipment readiness or in the National Guard, for example. 

But to go to the question of affordability, I keep using Rudy as 

a point of reference, but I think he was quite right. In the absolute, 

or as a slice of our national wealth, our military commitments are 

at pretty historic low, at least a post-World War II low, but the nature of the government, and what the government spends its 

money on, and the nature of our society has changed. So probably 

the largest contributor to our long-term strategic readiness is 

whether we can get the government’s fiscal house in order, I would 

say. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. deLeon. 

Mr. DELEON. In the mid-1980s, this committee was instrumental 

in passing the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Back to that setting of priorities and how to match the budget with the strategy and, most importantly, the strategy with the budget, you now have two very 

independent sources of information. You have the commanders 

from the field. You have General Mattis and Admiral Olson this 

afternoon upstairs in the full committee. So they are in the field, 

and they are at the front of the spear. And so their mission is are 

we ready to execute the missions that the command authority has 

asked them to do today. 

You have another group, the Joint Chiefs, and under GoldwaterNichols and the Title X, their job is to organize, train and equip, 

and not only today, but to be thinking about where we will be in 

2015, in 2020, and 2025. 

And then you have got the committee, which I think needs to ask 

the questions of where do we see the country—because we are still 

operating, in terms of the sizing of the military, under many of the 

assumptions that are still derivative of the cold war, and yet we 

are in an economic period where the economic power is much less 

concentrated. 

My colleague and I, who is with me today, we were in a conference, and we were in Beijing a year ago. And the thing about 

the economists on the Chinese side is that they not only have been 

trained in the United States, but they are tenured professors of 

economy at Stanford and Princeton and Johns Hopkins, so they 

know what they are talking about. But their point was during the 

cold war, we wanted to be on your side. There were only two 

choices, and your side was the side that the whole world wanted 

to be on. 

And now the economic drivers are much more diffuse. You have 

got a Middle East that is dominated by 18- to 22-year-old young 

men who don’t have jobs. You have got an Asia which is focused 

on manufacturing excellence and how you continue to grow economic capability and economic influence; a Europe which is sort of 

status quo; and then America which has been the great leader of 

the global coalition. 

But the broader issues that I think—it has changed much since 

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower through President Reagan 

dealt with a set of issues. The Presidents since then are dealing 

with a much different kind of threat, a much different kind of 
34 

world, but yet still people look to the United States on the national 

security side for the leadership. So I think that is your challenge. 

Ms. EAGLEN. Verbally, you are right. The Department isn’t going 

to acknowledge or admit the reality that most of their decisions are 

budget-driven, but practically we all know that that is true. How 

do we know that? They told you indirectly. So if you go back 

through the hearing transcripts from just the last 3 years, because 

the 2010 budget was really the pivotal year where we restructured 

the investment portfolio—the Secretary did—for the armed services 

and proposed killing over 50 major programs that have been on the 

books some for two decades, and when you go back in the posture 

hearings and everything from combat search-and-rescue helicopters 

for the Air Force, to the F–22, also for the Air Force, to even just 

recently the EFV, all of them said, I need this, and I want this. 

We can’t afford it. What they are telling you is it is just a budget— 

exactly what they are saying, it is purely budget-driven. 

Now, practically, the tools that you have available to you are not, 

you know, archaic. They are still very valuable. And I would just 

take you back. I’d applaud you for your conversation with the three 

stars, as we are calling it, bringing over those less than sort of the 

same old faces. The dialogue on that sort of upper middle management is important to get outside of this groupthink. Field hearings, 

I found, are very instrumental in the work that you do to get outside of Washington; of course, CODELs [congressional delegations] 

as well. 

Senator Dole’s former MLA [military legislative assistant] just 

recently put an op-ed out in the Washington Times, and basically 

it said—she had asked the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, 

how are you going to do everything—to Mr. Gibson’s question— 

with the money that you are getting and what we are asking you 

to do, and it is too short? And he said in this one-on-one: How do 

I give you an honest answer without losing my job? Now, of course, 

it is in the public domain. But my point is that they will tell you 

perhaps in just various venues. 

And then lastly I would applaud the full committee chairman 

Mr. McKeon for continuing the tradition for asking for the military’s unfunded requirements list. The challenge is that the Secretary has upended that process by requiring OSD vet those lists. 

And I would encourage you to push back, because obviously they 

are night and day in terms of what they look like now. Yes, nobody 

is going to ever say, you have the whole world at your feet and you 

can buy anything you want, but they were an instructive benchmark of what the service thought they needed in order to accomplish everything. It doesn’t mean that you were going to give them 

that. But those were very valuable tools before 2010 until the Secretary took them over in highlighting to Congress some of the 

things they need to buy and are unable to do so. 

Dr. MAHNKEN. Mr. Chairman, I think this committee offers an 

important independent venue for assessing risk, and I think really 

what we have been talking about throughout this session really in 

different ways is risk and ways that you balance risk. I mean, in 

the old days we used to be able to throw money at it and buy down 

risk. We can do that to some extent, but I think we are much more 
35 

in a situation where we need to accept some forms of risk, but we 

need to be cognizant that we are doing so. 

I think what my colleagues have been saying is it can be difficult 

to get a straight answer as to what the real risks are. And so I 

think groups like the QDR Independent Panel and things like this 

hearing are a great venue to get other voices and other assessments of risk that can then help you make the decisions as to how 

we deal with that risk. 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you. 

Ms. Bordallo has, I think, a follow-up question. 

Ms. BORDALLO. No. 

Mr. FORBES. You are done? 

If not, then I just want to thank all of you for the service you 

have done to your country in so many different venues, coming in 

here, the great work that you did on that panel. And thank you for 

spending this morning with us and help bring us up to speed, and 

we look forward to picking your brains down the road as we go. So 

thank you all very much, and we are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:02 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

A P P E N D I X 

MARCH 3, 2011 

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD 

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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING 

MARCH 3, 2011 

(95) 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MS. BORDALLO 

Ms. BORDALLO. The military services have adopted a rotational readiness construct which enables deployed and deploying forces to obtain the highest level of 

readiness, while non-deployed forces are left without critical personnel and equipment and are, in most cases, unable to train due to the shortages of resources. 

While I understand that this model is ensuring we have ready forces for Afghanistan and Iraq, what are the strategic implications to the force? 

Mr. DELEON. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. We have become heavily reliant on the Navy and Air Force to provide individual augmentees to meet ground force requirements in CENTCOM. When 

this practice started several years ago it was supposed to be a ‘‘temporary fix’’ to 

the imbalance in the force. How has the long-term use of sailors and airmen to meet 

ground force requirements impacted the readiness of the Navy and Air Force? In 

your view, why has the DOD not been able to right-size its force structure to ensure 

that taskings for CENTCOM are filled with the best qualified individual for the task 

and not a surrogate from a different service with different core competencies? 

Mr. DELEON. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. The fiscal year 2012 budget request reflects shortfalls in depot 

maintenance requirements across the Department. How much risk is this to the 

readiness of our force? What is the impact of the delay in the FY11 appropriation 

and the depot maintenance activities of the services? 

Mr. DELEON. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. The QDR report identified force structure requirements and capabilities to deal with challenges and threat to U.S. interests. What force readiness 

levels did the QDR team assume in its calculations? Did they assume all of our 

forces were fully ready or did they project an anticipated level of readiness over the 

next few years and use that in their model? Did the QDR presume all of our 

prepositioned stocks were fully reset, in place and ready for issue? 

Mr. DELEON. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. In your opinion, are we ready? Will we be ready? If not, what 

should we be doing? 

Mr. DELEON. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. Your statements also focus on the strategic use of the military and 

I agree with you—it is indeed difficult to measure military readiness without knowing what the measure of effectiveness may be to declare ‘‘strategic readiness.’’ We 

as a nation have been challenged for the past decade. We have been fighting 

tactically and developing a military force that is more battle-hardened than perhaps 

they ever have been at any other time in American history. Indeed every branch 

of service has been involved in combat operations abroad and has developed skills 

they did not necessarily posses before September 11, 2001. The military has expanded their foreign language capacity, broadened their general cultural awareness, 

refined their hand-to-hand and urban combat skills, refined their civil-military relationship building, and a bevy of other skill sets. So my question for you is, do you 

believe the past ten years of military experience (both in personnel and in weapons 

systems), technological ingenuity and design, and our ability to realize massive military mobilization in the Middle East be parlayed into a ready force that is able to 

meet the future strategic threats? Will we be able to protect our interests in space, 

ensure in unimpeded access to the high seas, and protect our homeland? How would 

you recommend we begin preparing our military to position them for success in 2030 

and beyond? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. The military services have adopted a rotational readiness construct which enables deployed and deploying forces to obtain the highest level of 

readiness, while non-deployed forces are left without critical personnel and equipment and are, in most cases, unable to train due to the shortages of resources. 

While I understand that this model is ensuring we have ready forces for Afghanistan and Iraq, what are the strategic implications to the force? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 
96 

Ms. BORDALLO. We have become heavily reliant on the Navy and Air Force to provide individual augmentees to meet ground force requirements in CENTCOM. When 

this practice started several years ago it was supposed to be a ‘‘temporary fix’’ to 

the imbalance in the force. How has the long-term use of sailors and airmen to meet 

ground force requirements impacted the readiness of the Navy and Air Force? In 

your view, why has the DOD not been able to right-size its force structure to ensure 

that taskings for CENTCOM are filled with the best qualified individual for the task 

and not a surrogate from a different service with different core competencies? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. The fiscal year 2012 budget request reflects shortfalls in depot 

maintenance requirements across the Department. How much risk is this to the 

readiness of our force? What is the impact of the delay in the FY11 appropriation 

and the depot maintenance activities of the services? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. The QDR report identified force structure requirements and capabilities to deal with challenges and threat to U.S. interests. What force readiness 

levels did the QDR team assume in its calculations? Did they assume all of our 

forces were fully ready or did they project an anticipated level of readiness over the 

next few years and use that in their model? Did the QDR presume all of our 

prepositioned stocks were fully reset, in place and ready for issue? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. In your opinion, are we ready? Will we be ready? If not, what 

should we be doing? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. Expanding, indeed even maintaining a large industrial military 

base is of course very important but also very costly. The military has to continue 

to invest in people while also developing new and improved weapons. What changes 

do you think we can make in the cost of military readiness that would encourage 

retention of our best and brightest while sustaining the long term growth of the 

military industry? 

Ms. EAGLEN. You are correct that the defense spending priorities must carefully 

maintain a balance between strengthening the all-volunteer force and providing 

those in uniform with modern weapons systems. 

Congress should be concerned about the general loss of innovation in defense-related research and development. Policymakers must take care to ensure the Department of Defense is not giving away critical skill-sets in the shrinking defense industrial base that will be needed to imagine and build the next generation of platforms 

and capabilities the U.S. Navy will require in relatively short order relative to acquisition timelines and traditional build cycles. The critical workforce ingredients in 

sustaining an industrial base capable of building next-generation systems are specialized design, engineering, and manufacturing skills. Already at a turning point, 

the potential closure of major defense manufacturing lines in the next five years 

with no additional scheduled production could shrink this national asset even further. 

As the cost of training has grown the past decade, many of the services are increasingly relying upon simulations in lieu of live-fire exercises when both are required. Defense leaders should more regularly sponsor regular and realistic training 

in degraded environments. Forces must be capable of operating in live-fire exercises 

without access to the U.S. overhead architecture of space and satellite assets. The 

U.S. military should know how it will operate without access to U.S. forward bases, 

as well as allied and foreign permissive airspace. 

Congress should not exclude itself from the need to engage in the participation 

in wargaming exercises. These exercises would not be for Congress to join military 

members simulating combat but rather to react to proposed scenarios of varying 

depth and scope and determine the policy implications of those decisions and lessons 

learned. 

Ms. BORDALLO. The military services have adopted a rotational readiness construct which enables deployed and deploying forces to obtain the highest level of 

readiness, while non-deployed forces are left without critical personnel and equipment and are, in most cases, unable to train due to the shortages of resources. 

While I understand that this model is ensuring we have ready forces for Afghanistan and Iraq, what are the strategic implications to the force? 

Ms. EAGLEN. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Ms. BORDALLO. We have become heavily reliant on the Navy and Air Force to provide individual augmentees to meet ground force requirements in CENTCOM. When 

this practice started several years ago it was supposed to be a ‘‘temporary fix’’ to 

the imbalance in the force. How has the long-term use of sailors and airmen to meet 

ground force requirements impacted the readiness of the Navy and Air Force? In 
97 

your view, why has the DOD not been able to right-size its force structure to ensure 

that taskings for CENTCOM are filled with the best qualified individual for the task 

and not a surrogate from a different service with different core competencies? 

Ms. EAGLEN. Since 2003, the Navy and Air Force have taken on new responsibilities on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq, in many cases serving in lieu of 

soldiers to relieve the strain on the U.S. Army. All the services are under stress, 

wearing out equipment much more quickly, and experiencing reduced readiness levels across the board. The Air Force and the Navy, however, have had to live with 

flat or declining budgets for the past several years. As a result, modernization is 

the primary budget casualty. 

According to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, the service is slowly coming back 

into balance and achieving healthier deployment-to-dwell time ratios. However, the 

reliance upon sailors and airmen is unlikely to decline significantly in this area of 

operations before 2014. This may prove to be unhealthy for the Navy and Air Force 

given the potential long-term damage to individual sailor and airman promotion 

rates and military career specialties. Supplementing ground forces indefinitely 

threatens to overstress non-ground forces and their equipment and harm training 

and specialization. Congress should exercise stringent oversight of this practice to 

ensure that no good deeds are being inadvertently punished. 

Ms. BORDALLO. The fiscal year 2012 budget request reflects shortfalls in depot 

maintenance requirements across the Department. How much risk is this to the 

readiness of our force? What is the impact of the delay in the FY11 appropriation 

and the depot maintenance activities of the services? 

Ms. EAGLEN. The negative impact on defense spending plans, programs, and 

maintenance has been tremendous due to the lack of a defense appropriations bill 

for fiscal year (FY) 2011 and the Department of Defense receiving significantly less 

funding that was requested as part of the President’s defense budget request for 

FY11. The result will be that defense programs will end up costing more money as 

schedules slip and procurement rates are reduced. 

A sample list of planned maintenance, upgrades, and depot work affected by the 

defense budget uncertainty for the current fiscal year includes: 

• Army officials are currently lacking funds to purchase 4 new transport helicopters that are employed extensively in overseas operations in Afghanistan. • The Army currently lacks funds to refurbish HMMWVs. • Temporary furloughs and possible shut down of production lines at Texas’ Red 

River Army depot and Pennsylvania’s Letterkenny Army depot. • Shipyard repairs and maintenance are being canceled. • Navy and Army leadership have are scaling back training for sailors and soldiers. • The Army has imposed a temporary hiring freeze for its entire civilian workforce and Navy leaders have said that 10,000 jobs are at risk. 

The defense spending levels proposed in recent spending bills (continuing resolutions) would eliminate the DoD’s proposed purchasing power growth of just 1.8 percent for 2011. This is essentially a double hit on defense spending because the secondary impact means that the military would be able to buy even less defense for 

the out years than it plans on the books today. 

Congress should ask all the services to report back on the impact of the FY 2011 

defense budget delays and what plans and programs will be upended, altered, or 

affected by the reduced funding provided to DoD for the remainder of the fiscal year. 

Ms. BORDALLO. The QDR report identified force structure requirements and capabilities to deal with challenges and threat to U.S. interests. What force readiness 

levels did the QDR team assume in its calculations? Did they assume all of our 

forces were fully ready or did they project an anticipated level of readiness over the 

next few years and use that in their model? Did the QDR presume all of our 

prepositioned stocks were fully reset, in place and ready for issue? 

Ms. EAGLEN. Policymakers should understand that the number and variety of 

threats challenging U.S. interests are growing. The Congressionally-commissioned 

Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel report identifies key global trends 

that will affect America, including: 

• Islamist extremism and the threat of terrorism, 

• The rise of new global powers in Asia, 

• The continued struggle for power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle 

East, 

• An accelerating global competition for resources, and 

• Persistent problems from failed and failing states. 

Yet the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) does not adequately identify the panoply of risks confronting the United States. Still beyond the challenges 
98 

that defense planners and policymakers can predict are the unforeseen challenges. 

History indicates that as states destabilize and as rising powers see weakness 

among Western-allied democracies, international crime, terrorist safe havens, piracy, oppression, and lawlessness will increase. Such drastic scenarios may seem 

unrelated, but as the QDR Independent Panel report notes, ‘‘the risk we don’t anticipate is precisely the one most likely to be realized.’’ 

Ms. BORDALLO. In your opinion, are we ready? Will we be ready? If not, what 

should we be doing? 

Ms. EAGLEN. It has been said that America waits for wars to become prepared 

for them. Such a pattern, as evidenced by repeated procurement holidays in the 

twentieth century, leads to repeated surges in spending that are more expensive 

than continued, sustained outlays. The best and most cost effective way to preserve 

the military’s core capabilities, high readiness levels, our domestic production, and 

a sound defense budget is to keep the military in a constant state of health, ever 

ready to defend this country from both known and unknown threats. 

Over the past two years, policymakers have cut plans and programs which are 

critical to recapitalizing the legacy fleets of all the military services. These recent 

defense cuts come on top of the military’s dramatic reduction that began in the early 

1990’s. The size of the U.S. Navy has been cut by half since then, and today it is 

the smallest it has been since 1916. 

The U.S. military is already too small and its equipment too old to fully answer 

the nation’s call today, much less tomorrow. The U.S. has largely failed to recapitalize its military in a generation, leading to an ever-growing gap between what the 

U.S. military is asked to do and the tools it has to accomplish their missions. 

High readiness levels require robust National Guard and Reserve forces that can 

provide national surge capacity when needed, and it entails investment in a wide 

range of dual-use, multi-mission platforms. Further, the U.S. should not only prepare for the full spectrum of risks, but also maintain substantial safety and technological superiority margins. Seeking to have ‘‘just enough’’ of any important capability would be foolish. 

To keep its global edge and to develop the abilities to defeat shifting threats ranging from IEDs to ICBMs, the U.S. military must maintain, modernize, and ultimately replace old weapons while simultaneously researching, designing, testing, 

and fielding next-generation systems. The average ages of most major weapons systems in use are startling, and many next-generation programs are being eliminated. 

Congress has acceded to most of the Administration’s defense budget requests and 

voted to terminate or truncate more than one dozen major defense programs in the 

2010 defense bills—predominantly for budgetary rather than strategic reasons. As 

a result, the military will lose vital capabilities along with the potential to develop 

them later as defense industries shut down production lines and hemorrhage skilled 

workers. 

Ms. BORDALLO. The military services have adopted a rotational readiness construct which enables deployed and deploying forces to obtain the highest level of 

readiness, while non-deployed forces are left without critical personnel and equipment and are, in most cases, unable to train due to the shortages of resources. 

While I understand that this model is ensuring we have ready forces for Afghanistan and Iraq, what are the strategic implications to the force? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. The rotational readiness construct has allowed the U.S. armed 

forces to wage successfully two protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of 

course, optimizing the armed forces on winning the wars we are in creates tradeoffs. Because of the current focus on counterinsurgency, some parts of the U.S. 

armed forces are less ready to respond to other contingencies. Moreover, proficiency 

in areas not related to counterinsurgency has declined. As the United States reduces 

its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department will both need to preserve its expertise in irregular warfare and rebuild its competency in conventional 

warfare. 

Ms. BORDALLO. We have become heavily reliant on the Navy and Air Force to provide individual augmentees to meet ground force requirements in CENTCOM. When 

this practice started several years ago it was supposed to be a ‘‘temporary fix’’ to 

the imbalance in the force. How has the long-term use of sailors and airmen to meet 

ground force requirements impacted the readiness of the Navy and Air Force? In 

your view, why has the DOD not been able to right-size its force structure to ensure 

that taskings for CENTCOM are filled with the best qualified individual for the task 

and not a surrogate from a different service with different core competencies? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. The long-term use of sailors and airmen to meet ground force requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan has augmented our ground strength and improved our effectiveness in those conflicts. The practice has also reduced the readiness of the Navy and Air Force. Such a reduction in Navy and Air Force readiness 
99 

would appear to be acceptable in the short term. However, it does raise the level 

of risk should another contingency occur. 

The availability of Individual Augmentees from the Navy and Air Force—to man 

Provincial Reconstruction Teams, for example—has allowed the Army in particular 

to avoid making some difficult but vital personnel, training, and education changes 

to optimize itself to carry out such important irregular warfare missions. In my 

view, the Defense Department has yet to fully embrace the need to organize, train, 

and equip for irregular warfare missions, despite the persistent and sincere efforts 

of civilian and military leaders over the past five years. This is because changing 

the culture, values and training of the U.S. armed services is very difficult, a project 

that is likely to last years or decades rather than months. 

Ms. BORDALLO. The fiscal year 2012 budget request reflects shortfalls in depot 

maintenance requirements across the Department. How much risk is this to the 

readiness of our force? What is the impact of the delay in the FY11 appropriation 

and the depot maintenance activities of the services? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. I am not qualified to provide an informed answer to this question. 

Ms. BORDALLO. The QDR report identified force structure requirements and capabilities to deal with challenges and threat to U.S. interests. What force readiness 

levels did the QDR team assume in its calculations? Did they assume all of our 

forces were fully ready or did they project an anticipated level of readiness over the 

next few years and use that in their model? Did the QDR presume all of our 

prepositioned stocks were fully reset, in place and ready for issue? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. The Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel assumed that 

the United States would continue to a rotational readiness construct and that U.S. 

forces would remain in both Iraq and Afghanistan in large numbers through at least 

2015, and in smaller numbers thereafter. 

The Panel did not assume that our prepositioned stocks were fully reset. Rather, 

in our deliberations we identified the need to reset those stocks as a priority. 

Ms. BORDALLO. In your opinion, are we ready? Will we be ready? If not, what 

should we be doing? 

Dr. MAHNKEN. The United States is ready to wage and win the wars that we are 

in. Because of our experience in waging counterinsurgency campaigns, we will also 

remain ready to do so for some time in the future. I am concerned, however, that 

our readiness to respond to higher-end contingencies, such as those that could involve China, has been declining for some time. The United States is not fully ready 

to respond to a catastrophic event in the homeland or cyber attacks. The Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel contains a number of recommendations for 

increasing U.S. readiness to respond to such contingencies. 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MRS. HANABUSA 

Mrs. HANABUSA. My question is about the timeline of the Futenma and the Guam 

relocation. Are you concerned that the agreed timeline of 2014 will be expanded 

thereby adversely affecting our readiness in the region? 

What is PACOM’s plan B or default plan should the U.S. and Japan fail to reach 

an agreement on a relocation plan in time for a 2014 relocation? 

Mr. DONNELLY. [The information was not available at the time of printing.] 

Mrs. HANABUSA. Are you aware if the long term planning of rotations includes 

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George G. Casey Jr.’s plan to increase Army dwell time 

to one year deployed to three years dwell time for active duty and one year deployed 

to five years dwell time for reservists (as he stated last year)? How do you anticipate 

this will impact readiness? 

Ms. EAGLEN. U.S. Army leadership is currently implementing its plan to restore 

the force to better health and balance by increasing the dwell times for active duty 

personnel and members of the Reserve Component. By authorizing and funding additional end strength for the Army during the past decade, Congress has helped increase the dwell time for soldiers. The dwell time for soldiers will continue to grow 

over the next several years. Compared to a few years ago, soldiers are now spending 

an average 18 months at home in between deployments, up from 15 months. General Casey has said recently that those who deploy after October 2011 can then expect two years of dwell time at home after their combat deployment. Indicators show 

the Army is on track to achieve its dwell time goals by 2013. 

This is important to help the Army maintain healthy retention levels as the economy begins to rebound. It is also very important to help military families have more 

notification time and predictability. As General Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2011, Army families are the most brittle part of the force 
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today. Keeping healthy recruiting and retention levels will require support for Army 

leader efforts to continue increasing dwell time for servicemembers. 

Congress will need to carefully weigh budget proposals by Secretary of Defense 

Robert Gates to cut ground forces’ end strength in 2015. It is unclear if this will 

save any money and could negatively impact force readiness and morale. 

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