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38–834 2008

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–62]

ORGANIZING THE ROLES, MISSIONS, AND

REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEPARTMENT

OF DEFENSE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

HEARING HELD

JUNE 20, 2007

(II)

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

IKE SKELTON, Missouri, Chairman

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina

SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas

GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi

NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii

MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts

SILVESTRE REYES, Texas

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas

ADAM SMITH, Washington

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California

MIKE MCINTYRE, North Carolina

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California

JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island

RICK LARSEN, Washington

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

JIM MARSHALL, Georgia

MADELEINE Z. BORDALLO, Guam

MARK UDALL, Colorado

DAN BOREN, Oklahoma

BRAD ELLSWORTH, Indiana

NANCY BOYDA, Kansas

PATRICK MURPHY, Pennsylvania

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia

CAROL SHEA-PORTER, New Hampshire

JOE COURTNEY, Connecticut

DAVID LOEBSACK, Iowa

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND, New York

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

KENDRICK B. MEEK, Florida

KATHY CASTOR, Florida

DUNCAN HUNTER, California

JIM SAXTON, New Jersey

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

TERRY EVERETT, Alabama

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland

HOWARD P. ‘‘BUCK’’ MCKEON, California

MAC THORNBERRY, Texas

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina

ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina

KEN CALVERT, California

JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri

J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia

JEFF MILLER, Florida

JOE WILSON, South Carolina

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey

TOM COLE, Oklahoma

ROB BISHOP, Utah

MICHAEL TURNER, Ohio

JOHN KLINE, Minnesota

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia

MIKE ROGERS, Alabama

TRENT FRANKS, Arizona

THELMA DRAKE, Virginia

CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS, Washington

MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky

ERIN C. CONATON, Staff Director

ANDREW HUNTER, Professional Staff Member

JENNESS SIMLER, Professional Staff Member

MARGEE MECKSTROTH, Staff Assistant

(III)

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS

2008

Page

HEARING:

Wednesday, June 20, 2007, Organizing the Roles, Missions, and Requirements of the Department of Defense .................................................................. 1

APPENDIX:

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 ...................................................................................... 55

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2007

ORGANIZING THE ROLES, MISSIONS, AND REQUIREMENTS OF THE

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Ranking Member,

Committee on Armed Services ............................................................................ 3

Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Chairman, Committee

on Armed Services ................................................................................................ 1

WITNESSES

Hamre, Dr. John J., President and CEO, Center for Strategic and International Studies ................................................................................................... 4

Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., President, Center for Strategic and Budgetary

Assessments .......................................................................................................... 8

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Hunter, Hon. Duncan ....................................................................................... 59

Hamre, Dr. John J. ........................................................................................... 65

Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F. ............................................................................. 70

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), List of Government Funded Contracts/Grants 10/01/03 - Present .................................... 89

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

Mr. Skelton ....................................................................................................... 97

(1)

ORGANIZING THE ROLES, MISSIONS, AND

REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, Washington, DC, Wednesday, June 20, 2007.

The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in room 2118,

Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ike Skelton (chairman of the

committee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED

SERVICES

The CHAIRMAN. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today’s hearing, which is on organizing the roles and missions and the requirements of the Department of Defense.

Before we start, I wish to introduce a very special group that is

with us from Afghanistan. And I would like to call their names,

and if I may ask them to stand.

First Noorulhaq Olumi, the Chair of the Defense Committee;

Zalmai Mujadidi, the Chair of the National and Domestic Security

Committee; Jamil Karzia, a Pashtun member of the National and

Domestic Security Committee; Mohammad Almas, a member of the

National and Domestic Security Committee; and Helaluddin Helal,

a member of the National and Domestic Security Committee.

We are also pleased to welcome Ambassador Jawad, who is with

us today. Ambassador, thank you. We certainly appreciate you

being with us. Several of us, on a bipartisan basis, had the opportunity to visit with you, and it was very, very helpful, and we do

appreciate your thoughts and your suggestions; most of all, your

friendship.

So thank you again for being with us.

Today we have two very distinguished witnesses to discuss this

all-important and yet in all respects, as has been in the past, at

least up through 1958, a controversial issue: Dr. John Hamre,

president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,

former Deputy Secretary of Defense; Dr. Andrew Krepinevich,

president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

and officer of the United States Army, retired.

You two gentlemen were called to testify because you have given

deep study through the years to some of the most important issues

facing the Department of Defense.

Today’s topic is a very crucial one. It has been a topic of intense

debate, and since the Key West agreement—my staff says 1948, I

say 1947, you will have to clarify that—but today’s definition of the

roles and missions is largely the same as the agreement reached

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then and as modified in 1953 and then again in 1958, but nothing,

nothing has been done under those roles and missions since 1958.

While the operational part of the military has been made fully

joint thanks to the Congress of the United States, the training and

equipment side remains fragmented and stovepiped, and our committee adopted significant and far-reaching legislative recommendations of roles and missions and requirements in our recent defense act, passed and sent to the Senate. These recommendations were developed on a bipartisan basis and reflect a

deep commitment on the part of our committee to reform and modernize that Department.

We require the Secretary of Defense to review the rules and missions of the Department every four years in the down time between

the Quadrennial Defense Reviews. We recommend that the Secretary determine the core competencies agencies and military services and defense agencies currently offer in fulfilling these missions; ensure that they develop the core competencies that are currently lacking; and generate some capabilities that are not related

to core competencies.

Now, this is going to be a tough job for them that has to be done,

and that is why your testimony today is so important.

The committee’s recommendations would also reform the requirement process to organize it according to the core mission areas

identified by the Secretary; require that the requirement process be

informed by realistic estimates of the resources available. The bill

requires the Department to present its budget by mission area in

addition to the traditional presentation by appropriation. It requires combat commanders to engage directly, I think for the first

time, in planning for future capabilities.

I have reviewed your written statements, gentlemen. I am struck

by the fact that both of you indicate there are serious and significant deficiencies in the way the Department of Defense determines

its missions, how it organizes itself, how it equips itself. Both of

you suggest the Department is not adequately preparing themselves for the nontraditional missions that are likely to be increasingly relevant in today’s security environment.

Both of you also suggest in your statements that the requirements process is dominated by service interests sometimes to the

detriment of the warfighter. In these judgments, I believe we are

all in consensus. I know, however, that you propose some additions

and alternative recommendations for our bill.

And I think we know that our bill in that regard is not perfect,

but we did address it, and the fact that we did address it for the

first time since 1958 is significant. And you are here to help us—

we still, of course, have conference with the Senate, and I am not

sure if the Senate will even touch the issue. I just have no knowledge of that whatsoever, which means that the burden will be on

this committee to carry forward this issue, and that is why your

testimony, gentlemen, is so important.

The Ranking Member, my good friend, Duncan Hunter.

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STATEMENT OF HON. DUNCAN HUNTER, A REPRESENTATIVE

FROM CALIFORNIA, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON

ARMED SERVICES

Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding this hearing this morning. I think that this reflects on your understanding of military history and your being the guardian of our

military education facilities, and I think your understanding that

we are involved in nontraditional wars right now. And sometimes

it is tough to overlay the structure of the services over these new

challenges that we have and to determine where jointness applies,

and where new roles and missions need to be taken up or need to

be sorted out, and where just enormous flexibility needs to be embedded in the services. So thanks for having this hearing.

And I also welcome our guests and welcome our gentlemen who

are on this panel who have contributed so much to national defense. So to Dr. Hamre, you have done a loyal yeoman’s work for

this country and for this committee for many years, and we sure

appreciate you.

And, Dr. Krepinevich, thank you for your contributions to our

country. You gentlemen have great judgment, and you have shared

it with us over many, many years on important issues. This is one

of those issues.

Although the Department of Defense, as it is currently organized,

has been in existence since 1947, we have continued to struggle

with the appropriate roles and missions of the Department and

what capabilities each of our military services should have in order

to fulfill those roles and missions. And since the end of the Cold

War, it has become apparent that the Department must respond to

both the changes in the geopolitical climate and to the adaptation

of modern technology which poses what you might call irregular

and disruptive threats.

And these changes require no less than a complete review of the

missions of the Department of Defense and reevaluation of the capabilities needed to deliver desired effects.

I might say on that point the fact we are in a shooting war in

two major theaters and smaller contingencies around the world

right now I think has given us an urgency in terms of sorting out

roles and missions, one that doesn’t usually attend peacetime eras,

but in light of the fact that we are executing, if you will, new roles

and missions every day as a matter of necessity in the warfighting

theaters, I think it is instructive to us in many areas and hopefully

to you as well.

I want to get—I don’t want to put my entire statement—read my

entire statement, Mr. Chairman. I ask unanimous consent that it

be put into the record and just say this before we get started.

It looks to me like there is going to be three key factors that we

are going to have to look at carefully that attend this issue. One

is jointness; of course, the ability to do things together, work together. I think we have never had probably more jointness than we

have right now; but also flexibility, and that means the ability of

a military leader to step beyond the perimeters that have been established by doctrine and by schooling and by the—and by regulations and undertake two new missions, and be able to do a couple

of things to step out of his box, his or her box, and move into new

4

areas, and also to work with his troubled service in such a way

that the new mission is undertaken in a cooperative way with maximum effect. And, last, I think that creativity is going to be an important element now and a necessary element in the leadership of

our officers.

It is—because we are going to have—we are going to have missions which aren’t susceptible to easy categorization, which are

going to require lots of new thinking, and to some degree there

may be some push-back from the services as it appears that one

service is trespassing on something that they think is in their traditional jurisdiction, if you will. And so this is going to be a time

when people that are willing to take risks in the officers corps are

going to need to step to the fore. And everything can’t be laid out

in terms of prescribed regulations. Basically the blueprint can’t be

perfectly designed by us, nor can it be perfectly designed by Pentagon leadership. This is going to be a time when people take risks

and are held accountable to some degree for risk taking. I think it

is going to be a time for boldness in our military leadership.

Having said those few words, I look forward to listening to these

two gentlemen who I think represent the finest, very finest, representation of a great pool of individuals who have lots of experience, who have shared their wisdom with us over many years to

take on this challenge.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to the testimony.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Hunter.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be found in the Appendix on page 59.]

The CHAIRMAN. My good staff tells me that the Key West agreement regarding roles and missions which was urged by President

Harry Truman actually was dated 1948, and I was wrong on that

by one year, but I was right in the initial urging by the then President. So this is really important. This is very important. That is

why we are here.

Mr. Hamre.

Dr. HAMRE. I was a staffer for ten years, and I never made the

mistake of correcting my Chairman in a public meeting. So I—forgive me, Andrew.

Thank you for inviting me to.

Mr. SPRATT. Dr. Hamre, welcome to the people’s House.

STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN J. HAMRE, PRESIDENT AND CEO,

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Dr. HAMRE. And let me just begin by saying how grateful I am

that all of you are serving in this role and holding this hearing. I

think it is crucial.

You know, I have worked for the Congress for 17 years before I

went to the executive branch, and I honestly believe that our Congress is the crown jewel of American democracy. When you think

of the Nation, you think of the President; but when you say ‘‘we,

the people,’’ you think about the Congress. And I think it is that

crucial balance in America that has been so important, and it has

made this such a glorious democracy. So I thank you all for serving

with us in this and being the representatives of the people on these

very big issues.

5

Sir, I prepared a written statement, but I think I made a mistake. I think I drafted that statement too narrowly concerning the

provisions that were in your bill. I am happy to talk about them,

but you framed this hearing in a much larger way today, and so

if you would permit me to put the statement in the record, and

could I make a few general observations and maybe use that as a

jumping-off point for what I hope would be a useful conversation.

I was on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee when

we worked on the Senate side of Goldwater-Nichols, and I remember Bill Nichols, a great man, having led this committee in leading

for what it brought to the table for this really remarkable legislation. And it did transform the Defense Department in very positive

ways.

There were three crucial things that were in Goldwater-Nichols.

The first was it raised the importance and prominence of the

Chairman and the Vice Chairman and the Joint staff.

The second thing is it raised in prominence the Unified Combatant Commanders—we used to call them Commanders in Chief

(CINCs)—but the Combatant Commanders, and it gave them a

much stronger voice inside DOD deliberations.

And the third thing it did was it required—it stipulated that no

one could become an admiral or general until you had joint duty,

you had served in a joint command. That was really the foundation

of Goldwater-Nichols, and it really transformed the Department.

Now, I think it is extremely important to understand what this

did. What that—what Goldwater-Nichols did was to clean up and

give much more of a balance to what I call the supply and demand

equation in the Department. You need advocates of supply, and you

need advocates of demand. And we had very weak voices for demand because back then the people who were the supply guys, the

chiefs of the military departments, were also kind of in charge of

demand, and we were not getting a good balance between the two.

So we raised up and lifted up the voices that demand combat

services and capabilities, and we balance it against the very strong,

powerful forces of supply in the Department, and it is a good compromise. It is a very good formula.

And I think this clarity of supply and demand, I would ask you

to keep it in mind as you are thinking about it. We have some

problems, the way it is structured, and I will come back to it in

just a moment.

Now, I would say that the central problem in the Department

today, and I am not making—I will only comment on experiences

that I had when I was the Deputy Secretary. I am not commenting

on how it has operated in the last six years. I have not been there.

I would ask you to think about the concept of friction. You know,

there is good friction, and there is bad friction. Good friction is congressional oversight. I mean, you don’t want to move too fast. You

want oversight, and that is good friction, and you want good friction so that when decisions are coming up to the Secretary, you

really do have a point of view that has been vetted, you know, in

a cross-sectional way so that you really do have a good feel for the

implications. You want good friction.

We have a lot of bad friction in the Defense Department. We

have got a lot of competition which is really more about turf than

6

we do about responsibility. And I think what I would ask you to

think about when you are designing this legislation is that you

think about properly structuring the good friction that you want,

the oversight that you want and that you need, and minimizing the

bad friction, and we have got a lot of it.

Now, if it is in that regard, may I just say I spent a fair amount

of time when I was in the Senate working on the Armed Services

Committee on rules and missions, and I had never worked in the

Department before I had done it. I had spent then seven and a half

years working in the Department, and I will honestly tell you that

a rules and missions initiative really sets off a lot of friction in the

Department, and I think it works against a very important goal

that I know you all have, which is to improve jointness.

We want our services to fight in an integrated way better, but

when you force people to fight over rules and missions, it forces

them into a parochial posture. They fall back on things that they

feel they have to do for the good of their service rather than things

they need to do for the good functioning of the whole Department

in a joint way.

So I would ask you to think very carefully about how you want

to press this issue of demanding a rules and missions review, because I do think it probably cuts against the grain when you want

to promote better jointness.

Second issue I would ask you to think about, our form of government holds—when I was the Deputy Secretary of Defense, I was

responsible to the American people through the President and

through the Secretary. And everybody in the Department is responsible to the American people through two chains: through the

President when you are appointed, and to you, the Congress, representing the people. Everybody. And that goes down to the buck

private.

That chain of command has one central person who is the most

important person who is accountable to you, and the person—and

that is the Secretary of Defense, and I would ask you to be careful

not to undermine the Secretary of Defense when you design some

of the directions that we are talking about here.

Now, I know we have had a period where we have had some

rough edges between the Department and the Secretary in the last

several years. I think we have a superb Secretary of Defense. Bob

Gates is a superb man. You do not want to—you want to have as

much clarity in what comes to the Secretary so that when he

makes a decision, he is accountable for it. But you don’t want to

precook what it is that he designed by having things decided at

lower levels. The Secretary has to be accountable. The Secretary

has to have that authority.

Now let me speak to one of the concerns that I have, and that

is it is about the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, the JROC.

The JROC is meant to be a place in the Pentagon where we at the

very senior level decide what do we need as a requirement to fight

together in the future. It should be largely populated by people who

are responsible for demand, not supply. But if you look at the competition of the JROC, it is all of the supply side of the equation and

not the demand side of the equation. It is the Vice Chiefs of the

services who are in the business of supplying goods, services and

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equipment. It is not the CINCs or the Combatant Commanders

who really are the ones who say, here is what I need now, here is

what I think we are going to need in the future.

So we have a problem with the way the JROC is structured

today. It is too much oriented around—it is a demand function that

is run by supply people. That is a problem, and we should work on

that.

Now, what I don’t think is a good idea is to put more supply and

demand inside JROC, because that is basically deciding issues before the Secretary decides them, and ultimately you are holding the

Secretary accountable; you are not holding the JROC accountable.

You have to let the Secretary have the full authority to decide and

be responsible for what he decides. So I would ask you to look at

that provision. I think it is a very important one.

I understand exactly what you are trying to do. You are trying

to strengthen the good friction, the oversight that we need, and

minimize the bad friction, and I think that is exactly the right spirit to have, and I would ask you to think about how you have done

it in the legislation.

If I could say a word about core competencies, and, again, I understand very much what you are after. You are trying to make

sure that we focus on what it is going to take to win wars not just

today, but in the future. But if you start with the premise you identify core competencies, I would argue that is what the services do

well already. I mean, nobody does night ops off of an aircraft carrier better than the United States Navy. That is a core competency.

They do that exceptionally well. But what we don’t do well are

noncore competencies, things that are perceived to be noncore competencies.

But if you start by directing people to work on core competencies,

you probably are keeping them from looking at the big problem,

which are the things that aren’t core, and we should probably think

about working that legislation so it pushes us in that direction.

The CHAIRMAN. For instance?

Dr. HAMRE. For example, postconflict reconstruction. We are not

good—we were very good at winning wars. We are not very good

at building functioning societies after wars, and it is unclear when

that is a military responsibility and when that is a civilian responsibility, and we need to work on that. Obviously we are responsible,

DOD, we are responsible for the security environment, but we

haven’t been focusing on that like we should have.

Now, you can say maybe that is a core competency now, but it

wasn’t seen as a core competency six years ago.

So I would ask you to think about, in a slightly different way,

think about what are the key missions you think we are going to

have to undertake as a Nation and whether or not we are addressing them properly, but if you start by saying, I want you, DOD, to

focus on core competencies, you are probably going to get them to

focus on things that aren’t problems and not look at the things that

are problems.

Finally, could I say a word about the provision you have in your

bill that calls for creating an under secretary for management? I

like the idea of having an under secretary for management. Now

let me explain what I think is the problem.

8

Again, I think it is very important to keep a clean distinction between staff and line. You know, in a corporation you will have a

staff headquarters at the corporate headquarters, and then you will

have line responsibilities, line managers.

In the Defense Department, our line managers, there are three

line managers: the Combatant Commanders, because they are out

fighting a war. It is our service chiefs and service secretaries; they

are running the departments. And then it is the defense agencies.

The defense agencies do not have good management oversight.

The defense agencies all report to the Secretary of Defense through

an assistant secretary, and the assistant secretaries are basically

staff guys. Those are staff functions. Those are not line operations.

It would be very good to create an under secretary for management and have that under secretary for management be responsible for the defense agencies and for the purple activities that fall

through the cracks of the Department, and we have a lot of those.

So I think it is a very important initiative. I support what you

are recommending. I think the way it is currently in the bill, it is

a little confusing whether you have in mind a line function or a

staff function. And I think you should take a look at that. I personally think you need line management, and I think it would be good

to have an under secretary who has the same responsibilities to the

defense agencies that the Secretary for the Air Force has for the

Air Force or the Secretary for the Army does for the Army. I think

that would be a very good thing to do, and I would encourage that.

And I would be delighted to work with you and the staff, Mr.

Chairman, if you want to refine that idea if you think it is worth

pursuing.

Let me conclude to say thank you. This really is important work.

Too often hearings are held about the little issues, the daily issues.

They are not held about the structural issues. And this is a matter

of a hearing on structural importance, and I think it is really terrific that you are taking this opportunity to lead the American people this way.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Hamre, thank you for your excellent testimony and recommendations.

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

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Krepinevich, welcome.

STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, PRESIDENT,

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As always it is an

honor to appear before you in this committee.

I share your concerns regarding the need for analysis of military

service roles and missions, also core competencies and capabilities.

I think we all share a concern that despite the decade-old rhetoric

about the need for transformation, the new threats, the new challenges that we see emerging and existing, and the new missions

that are clearly there, missions that certainly weren’t there in

1948, I guess it was, when the Key West agreement was arrived

at, missions like layered homeland defense against nontraditional

attack by weapons of mass destruction, or locating and neutralizing

9

loose nuclear weapons, undersea commerce defense, defeating modern insurgency, cyberdefense, power projection against rogue states

armed with nuclear weapons, these sorts of missions for the most

part didn’t exist 20 years ago, let alone 60 years ago, and yet in

many ways we have been remarkably slow to adapt.

In fact, when you talk about transformation, our effort seems to

have been primarily reactive as opposed to anticipating threats, anticipating problems and getting out in front of them, and even

there, when we are trying to react, the pace of reaction has been

excruciatingly slow.

Having said that, I am not convinced that a solution to these

problems, to these broad issues, as the Chairman said, can be

found in new processes or, to be precise, in new processes alone.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, I think the flaws lie not so much in

our processes, but in ourselves.

What do I mean by that? Well, our organization has done a fair

amount of study on historical case studies where militaries have

been confronted with new circumstances, new situations, new roles

and new missions. As Dr. Hamre said, under those circumstances,

it is not the existing core competencies or set of expertise that you

have that may count the most. You may have to develop new ones.

And when you look at how these military organizations have

adapted successfully, there are a number of factors that come

through again and again as characteristic of what you look for in

a military that is adaptive, that is aware of changing circumstances

and is getting out in front of the threat as opposed to reacting to

it.

One is clearly a vision. You know, what are the big new threats

to our security? What are those challenges? How are they going to

manifest themselves? What sorts of new technologies and capabilities do we have to put in our toolbox that might be useful? What

new competencies do we need to develop?

Time and again, what you see are very insightful senior military

leaders, leaders who can think broadly the way that this committee

is encouraging us to think, leaders like, for example, Admiral

Moffett, the father of naval aviation; Admiral Rickover, the father

of the nuclear Navy; General Hamilton House, the father of Army

aviation.

And it is not only their intelligence that is striking, but it is also

their extended tenure. For example, Admiral Moffett served in his

billet 12 consecutive years as the Navy struggled to adapt itself

from a fleet centered on battleships to one centered on the Fast

Carrier Task Force that enabled us to win World War II in the Pacific. These leaders were able to successfully distill these threats

into a series of planning scenarios or contingencies for the military.

And in my testimony, I allude to the famous color plans that

were developed by our military a century ago in dealing with a

very uncertain world, a world where we didn’t know where the

next threat was coming from. We were plagued by small wars, we

were dealing with rapidly advancing technology. And were mistakes made? Yes. But did they get it right for the most part? Absolutely.

So in a sense, when you asked the Defense Department, you

know, what are your defense planning scenarios, you are getting a

10

sense of what the military—the problems, the threats that the military has been asked to address, the problems they have been told

they need to solve.

Now, how do they go about solving the problem? This is where

process really comes into play. But my experience, and certainly

the experience of these historical case studies, would indicate that

a lot of it has to do with military professionals practicing their profession. It involves them learning skills through professional military education.

When you look at some of our best commanders in the field in

Iraq, for example, people like General Petraeus, General Corelli,

some of the field grade officers, H.R. McMaster and John Noggle,

these are officers that went off the beaten path to develop their

professional skills through education. I taught with Petraeus and

Corelli at West Point. That is five years out of your military career,

in a sense, if you want to call it that, to get that two-year graduate

education and spend three years on a faculty.

Professional military education becomes key because this kind of

thought enables you to get the right diagnosis. It enables senior

military leaders to avoid putting old wine in new bottles. Second,

at the schoolhouse, they get involved in war gaming and simulations. The military services involve themselves in field exercises,

and in a sense they take a hard look at where they are and where

they need to go. It enables someone like Admiral Sims in 1925 to

sit before a congressional committee and declare in heretical terms

that the carrier, not the battleship, is where the Navy needs to go.

It is where an admiral like Chester Nimitz can say after World

War II, because of what the Naval War College did and the exercises the Navy conducted to figure out how to essentially address

these scenarios, address these color plans, that the U.S. Navy was

not surprised by anything it encountered in the Pacific war, including Pearl Harbor, with the exception of the kamikazes. We seem

to have lost that ability today.

In 2002, the largest peacetime exercise in recent years, Millennium Challenge 2002, was conducted to look at a specific problem,

and the problem was how do we deal with low-end nuclear states

who have so-called anti-access aerial denial capabilities. We discovered significant problems in our ability to deal with that kind of

situation and with littoral sea control.

So what does the process tell you to do then to solve those problems? Well, what we did was we layered on more process. Joint

Forces Command introduced Operational Net Assessment. We have

Combined Joint Task Force Headquarters cells. Now, these processes and these headquarters cells may be what we need and what

we are looking for, but what we really need an answer to is how

are we going to deal with that particular kind of military problem?

That is what we want. We want an answer to that question.

Now, as Congressman Hunter said, we want creativity, but this

kind of creativity creates winners and losers. When we talk about

a very different problem set, it is unlikely that the same old forces,

the same old capabilities, the same old programs are going to one

to one map on to this new circumstance.

So once you start conducting these kinds of exercises, once you

tell the military this is the new problem set, that is where friction,

11

as Dr. Hamre said, really comes into play, because you are creating

winners and losers, winners and losers among service cultures,

among service budgets, among service programs. And they react

rather strenuously in opposition to that. That is why change can

be so difficult.

What do you need? You need a Defense Department leadership,

civilian and military, that is willing to make tough decisions; willing to force concentration on the problems; divine the lessons that

come out of these kinds of processes, education, analysis, war

games, field exercises, and say, look, we are going to make the

right decisions here, and we are going to make them stick. We

haven’t seen that capacity, I think, for quite some time now.

It also requires a Congress that is willing to promote competition

among the services as well as to eliminate redundancies.

There are certain areas where we have built up excess capacity

over time through competition. There are other areas, the new core

competencies that Dr. Hamre talks about, where we are not quite

sure how we are going to solve this problem. Here is where we

need competition. Here is where some redundancy can do you some

good.

A classic example in the American military is in the 1950’s. Each

of the services had its own ballistic military program, and if you

ever see the movie, The Right Stuff, you will see we were blowing

up a lot of these missiles on the launch pad. We were failing left

and right, but at the end of the day, the Air Force gave us the Minuteman missile, the Navy gave us the Polaris, the Army gave us

the Jupiter/Redstone that launched our space program, and eventually the Army dropped out of that mission area, if you will.

But what you want in a situation where the answers aren’t obvious, where the missions are new, is competition among the services, and you want to encourage that, and you want to tolerate honest failure; not incompetence, but honest failure.

And what you also need, and I think Congressman Hunter here

said, flexibility. What you need is speed. If you look at the kinds

of military competitions we are in today, time is becoming an increasingly precious asset in terms of security. Whether it is trying

to keep up with the improvised explosive device (IED) competition

in Iraq, the war of ideas that is being waged within the information cycle in the media, defense against cyberattack, covert weapons of mass destruction (WMD), biological and nuclear attack,

building partner capacity rapidly so we don’t overstress and overstrain our forces, time and the ability to be flexible and use time

as an ally and not an enemy becomes a very important factor and

consideration. I don’t know how we necessarily work this into our

process, but it is something that seems to me that we need to address.

So in short, I think that what we need is a military that learns

from the past, anticipates in the future, can move quickly based

upon the conclusions it reaches about this, and I would caution

against legislation that essentially, while it is good in its motivation and asks the right questions, does not incentivize the Pentagon as it exists today to really give you the kind of answers you

are looking for.

12

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be happy to respond to any

questions.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich can be found in the

Appendix on page 70.]

The CHAIRMAN. And as you know, interest in professional military education really came from this committee back in 1987, 1988

and helped revise the war colleges and increased their rigor, among

other positive aspects.

Between the wars, World War I and World War II, we found our

country in the golden age of military education because there were

more fine officers than there were billets of command, and so many

of them found themselves not only in classrooms, but teaching in

classrooms. And it did a marvelous job in preparing them not just

what Admiral Nimitz said about the Orange Plan and about the

Navy War College, but as an example, Troy Middleton spent ten

years of his life in the classroom either as a student or as an instructor, and later on he was the corps commander during the Battle of the Bulge, and there are others that did the same thing.

So I welcome your comments. I hope we can follow through.

We are going to have votes within the near future, and that is

why I am going to eliminate my questions right now, and I will go

straight to Mr. Hunter and then the others.

Mr. Hunter.

Mr. HUNTER. Thank you.

Gentlemen, thank you very much for your great opening statements. You really have covered a broad range.

Let me go quickly to something Dr. Hamre talked about.

You talked about demand and supply. One of the frustrations

that I have seen during the current conduct in the warfighting theaters that exist in Iraq and Afghanistan is this: We have a supply

system which is heavy with power, and we have a battlefield system that is using the equipment that is produced by the supply

system, and it occurs to me that when we see things that we desperately need on the battlefield, you have lower-ranking officers requesting—making requests to very high-ranking officers in the supply system to get equipment to the battlefield, which is exactly the

wrong—the wrong way to do things, in my estimation.

I think you should have the demand side—that is, the users of

military equipment should have the stars on their shoulders and

should be making the demand to the supply side and ensuring and

holding them accountable if they don’t get it.

Time after time I have looked inside the warfighting theaters,

and you will see a lieutenant colonel or a colonel begging on bended

knee to a supply system in the United States. And you are right;

I think Mr. Krepinevich described it as the storekeepers. Essentially Congress and the Pentagon comprises the storekeepers for

the people on the battlefield, but you will see the people on the battlefields and the warfighting theaters as supplicants to this supply

system which has enormous power, which tells them they will get

stuff to them when they get around to that.

To combat that, two years ago I put into the law this language,

and I have got it here. We tried to move the power, the brass, to

the battlefield, and we mandated the designation of a senior comVerDate 22-MAR-2001 11:31 Dec 03, 2008 Jkt 038834 PO 00000 Frm 00016 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-62\171000.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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missioned officer with the responsibility of administering—who has

capability in acquisition experience to act as a head of contingency

contracting during combat operations, who reports directly to the

Commander of the Combatant Command, the guys we used to call

the CINCs. That means the guys that is running Central Command (CENTCOM) or whatever other area of operations that the

warfighter is taking.

Now, that wasn’t taken to heart by DOD. And you see the same

reports coming back from the field that says, here is the 85 things

we asked for; here are the five things that we got from this recalcitrant, slow-moving supply system on this side of the water.

So I would like your comment on that.

Now, to go to Dr. Krepinevich, you made, I thought, a great response to the Chairman in my opening statement to the effect—

and if I am getting it right, tell me, and if I am getting it wrong,

tell me—but essentially your statement is you need to maintain not

monopolies for the services in various areas, but you need to maintain some competition. Maybe it is a little bit like our nuclear

weapons laboratories. We set them up to compete with each other,

and the ones that had the best idea would then be, if you had a

follow-on program—would be the leader in that program, and the

ones that didn’t, the losers, would be the follow-on, or they would

be the supporters in that particular program. And you used the

three missiles done by the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army as

an example of that.

So the idea of maintaining some competition, of course, costs

money, I mean, because we are going to look at this thing as a committee and say, wait a minute, you got three missiles being developed here, if we were back in 1950, and couldn’t we just designate

one service as a missile development service; and your answer

might be we could do that, but we are not going to have the best

system.

Now, let me go—so I would like your comment on how we maintain that balance, how we maintain the efficiency that you have

with a monopolistic system, so to speak, or a strict role or mission

with respect to acquisition, and yet you maintain the creativity, the

competitiveness that produces excellent systems.

Last thing, you know, this committee has got a lot of innovation,

and we have had in the past what I call the Wal-Mart hearings

where we brought in people who had—Members, Members who had

great stuff that was invented in their districts. We just saw some

good force protection outside that just came from Virginia.

You know, this committee built a ship. It wasn’t built by Naval

Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). It was built by the Office of

Naval Research because we made them build it. We built a ship

that is now the fastest ship in the Navy. It goes 60 miles an hour.

The leadership of the Navy sat where you are sitting and said, we

need a couple of things. We need speed with our ships. Then they

said, we have got these high manning levels, these three and four

and five manning-person levels in our ships. We need to knock that

down. We need to go to low-manning levels. And then, you know,

we need this multirole capability. We want ships that can strike,

we want ships that can accommodate Special Operations and mine

14

lanes and things like that. We want ships that can operate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

This committee built a ship. We built a ship called the X-Craft.

We built it up in Mr. Larsen’s district up in Washington. This ship

called the X-Craft, now I think named the Sea Fighter, goes 60

miles an hour. This ship has a capability—it has got a UAV platform, which the Navy told us they needed. It has got a helicopter

platform. It has got a Special Operations capability, and you can

stuff it with 524 medium-range ballistic missiles, which is roughly

four times the loadout of ships that cost ten times as much as this

ship and have enormous strike capability.

In fact, the former Under Secretary of the Navy went out and

visited the ship, went on it during its operations, wrote a glowing

letter about what this ship does. That ship was created by the

Armed Services Committee by the members who sit on this committee.

The Navy hates it, and the same admiral who gets up and makes

the Rotary Club speech about transformation saying we need

speed, multimission capability—it does all of this, incidentally,

with a crew of 26 people to go to low manning. 26 people. So the

same admiral that makes or Secretary who makes the statement

that we need speed, we need multimission capability, we need firepower, and we need low manning levels, he steps off the speaker’s

dais, and a reporter comes up and says, so what are you building

this year, Admiral? And he says, let me see, an attack submarine,

a carrier, and a couple of guided missile destroyer (DDGs). And the

reporter said, what about the speech you just made? He says, that

was a speech. This is what we are building.

How do we force our services to break out of this role that they

seem to fall back into so readily? That is my question.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Goodness.

You need to—there is—as Dr. Hamre said, and you said, Congressman, you need to look at the resource issue as well. And I

think part of any look at roles and missions is to look at where you

have excess capacity, where you have capacity in missions that

seem to be progressively less relevant.

Let me give you two examples. In the second Gulf War, we used

40 percent of the strike aircraft in terms of numbers that we did

in the first Gulf War because they have become so much more effective with the advent of precision munitions. This isn’t a mission

that is important, but it is an issue where precision munitions arguably have given us excess capacity for certain kinds of contingencies. And then you look at how many more major combat operations where we are going to find an enemy like the Republican

Guard like we encountered. So that is one possibility.

Another area where we may have excess capacity is in ground

forces oriented on traditional or conventional warfare. The warfare

of choice of our enemy seems to be irregular warfare, as you pointed out in your opening statement. What is the Army doing? The

Army is going to take the 65,000 soldiers that have been approved

and authorized, and they are going to build six more brigade combat teams (BCTs), which are not particularly oriented on this kind

of warfare, nor is the Army in general.

15

So, again, we are in a situation where in certain areas we have

excess capacity.

In terms of not creating monopolies and promoting competition,

let me just give you one example. For at least a decade now, the

services and people like us having think tanks have been talking

about the antiaccess aerial denial threat, antiaccess referring particularly to the ballistic and cruise missile threats and positioning

their forces at fixed forward bases; and the aerial denial threat

being the threat to naval forces operating close to the coast or in

constricted waters like the Persian Gulf, for example. And exercises

in war games have shown that this is a problem. This is something

that needs to be addressed. This is something that is only going to

get worse over time as technology continues to diffuse.

Well, there is no obvious answer as to what service should have

predominance in dealing with this kind of threat to our ability to

protect power. It could be that missile defenses are the answer, or

it could be that long-range strikes that destroy the enemy’s missile

forces combined with Special Operations Forces that battle damage

assessment and so on is the answer. Or the answer could be in

networkcentric warfare, the idea that you can greatly—you can use

information technology to have highly distributed, highly

networked forces that don’t really rely on large fixed forward bases.

And here is where you can have a healthy competition. You can

say, look, this is an extremely important problem for the American

military to be able to solve for our vital interests. We don’t know

the answer to this. We are going to think about it at our war colleges. We are going to war-game it. We are going to field-exercise

it. We are going to invest some money in prototypes, and we want

you services to compete for the best way for us to be able to deal

with this problem.

And maybe the answer in the end is heavy on missile defense,

or maybe it is heavy on networkcentric operation. We don’t know.

We know it is important to find the answer. It is important to find

the answer quickly before our enemies threaten us, and it is important to get it right.

So that is an area where I would say a healthy competition and

the sorts of things that you mentioned, and this has been done before. Congress has helped the military do smart things, and it has

helped it avoid doing dumb things. As Congressman Skelton surely

knows, in 1926, the Congress told the Navy go out and build 3,000

planes, and we will fund that, because we know the commercial

aviation industry is on its duff. We know you don’t have much of

a big budget, but we think this is an area worth investing in. And

about seven years later when the Navy wanted to build some god

awful thing called the flying deck cruiser, the front end was a

cruiser and the back end was a flight deck, Congress said not only

no, but hell no. And thank God they did because it was a terrible

idea. What we ended up winning the war with, of course, was aircraft carriers.

So congressional involvement in terms of oversight is absolutely

crucial, but it is that mix between identifying where the excess capacity is, identifying where the big problems are, and promoting innovation and competition to get the best answer. That would be an

16

enormous service. It is a service that Congress could provide. It is

a service that Congress has provided by virtue of its oversight.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I will be very brief.

To the question of the acquisition process, our Nation has been

at war now for four years, but our acquisition community has not.

I mean, it is a peacetime mentality, I am afraid, and I think that

is structural. When Goldwater-Nichols was passed, the acquisition

reforms were not part of Goldwater-Nichols, but they were attached

at the same time.

We made a mistake, in my view, at that time. We took the chiefs,

the military service chiefs, out of the chain of command for acquisition. We made the service chiefs responsible for buying people, facilities, training, but we took them out of the responsibility for buying things, and we put that in a different chain, and that has created a fault line within the Department where we do not have the

capacity to hold people accountable.

I think the chiefs ought to be brought back in the chain of command and made accountable for acquisition.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you so much.

Mr. Spratt.

Mr. SPRATT. Thank you for excellent testimony, very provocative

testimony.

You mentioned the Under Secretary for Management, Dr.

Hamre. You in particular addressed that, but you say what we

have got in the proposed legislation is muddy.

How do you avoid, if you are going to have this creature called

the Under Secretary of Management, which you support, basically

overlapping, muddy definitions?

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I think—what I think is muddy is the distinction

between line responsibilities and staff oversight, and I see both of

them inside the provision that you have written. I think you need

to decide which one you want.

I personally think it would be good to have an under secretary

responsible for the defense agencies that has the same responsibilities that a service Secretary has for putting together a budget

overseeing, being accountable for the activities inside that service.

I would make them a line manager and have them responsible for

running those defense agencies. That would be a line function.

Now, you could create it exclusively as a staff function, and then

it is kind of a—it is an inspector general on steroids kind of thing,

or Viagra, I guess.

But I personally don’t think that is your best answer. I think it

would be good to get management brought in, management over

the defense agencies. These are now large businesses, and they deserve first-line talent that is good at managing them and running

them.

Mr. SPRATT. It seems to me the problem we have as a committee,

and I appreciate your recognition of the committee’s role. I think

there is clearly one. And I think there are examples from the past

that we should hold out to try to emulate, each of us, from Ike

Skelton to Bill Nichols and Arch Barrett, let’s not forget him, the

players in that process who really made fundamental changes. But

we really run risk here in the House and the Congress if we get

too prescriptive in defining roles and missions. We want our judgVerDate 22-MAR-2001 11:31 Dec 03, 2008 Jkt 038834 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-62\171000.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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ment to be executed and carried out, but if we get too prescriptive,

we encourage jurisdictional fights between the services. How do we

tread that line?

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, again, I think it is positive and negative friction.

We need you to create positive friction. And that is through this

oversight process. I can’t overstate how important it is. The Department really does take seriously when they have to come up and

testify to you. They really do. It has a powerful impact. You may

be frustrated that it doesn’t produce results all the time, and then

you should just follow up. I always used to say in the Pentagon nobody takes you seriously until after your third meeting on the subject. Because at the first meeting, people are saying, oh, okay, that

is what it is about.

The second meeting they try to come and tell you, oh, we already

did it, but we did it a better way, and it was the way we were planning to do it. And it is only at the third meeting when they say

he really cares about this. You tend to hold oversight hearings, but

you only hold one. You need to come back on these things. You

really need to come back on oversight. And I think it is a powerful

tool, sir. I agree with you, don’t tell the Department how to organize. Hold them accountable for efficient organization.

Mr. SPRATT. Let me ask both of you a specific question about a

problem that is now before us, and the issue now before us, and

that is UAVs. Who is to have executive management oversight at

least of UAVs? How would you resolve that in the sense of assigning roles and missions? Because this could be part of air warfare

in the future in a much bigger way than it is now. This could be

a 1947-like decision.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Well, again I would go back and look at what

I have called the problem set. You know, what are the key set of

scenarios or contingencies that the military is looking at? And

there may be an executive agent for unmanned aerial vehicles for

purposes of administration, but I would not restrict any of the services in terms of competing. If they thought that there were—there

is or are particular UAV programs that would help them successfully execute what they see as their part of that mission. And so

for example the QDR lays out three major areas of challenge. One

is irregular warfare, a second is essentially a proliferated world

with nuclear rogues, and third is countries at strategic crossroads,

which I believe is code for China.

Mr. SPRATT. Do you think sorting through this is our responsibility primarily? We will certainly have to sit in judgment on it? Is

it our responsibility primarily or should the JROC be undertaking

this themselves?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. In the ideal world the JROC would undertake

this. On the other hand, I don’t think during the course of its existence the JROC, at least in my estimation, has really contributed

a lot in terms of reconciling these kinds of issues. Certainly not if

you are saying looking at the broad sweeping changes that we are

confronting. And what programs need to be accelerated, where does

competition need to occur, what major programs need to be terminated? I don’t think the JROC has really produced those kinds of

results. And in part, it is because those vice chiefs have to go back

to their services at night and report on what happened.

18

And there was a term that developed in the 1990’s called the volunteers dilemma. I would be glad to elaborate on it. But it essentially spoke to the disincentives that services had to really make

those kinds of trades, to give up certain programs for the opportunity to get into a new area or do something different. And they

learned their lesson—the Navy in particular learned their lesson

the hard way in 1994. And we have seen the results ever since.

Mr. SPRATT. Dr. Hamre.

Dr. HAMRE. Mr. Spratt, first of all, let me congratulate you. I

think it is much better if you got a problem, force the Department

to wrestle with the problem. Don’t create a generic roles and missions process to get out of a specific problem. This is a specific

problem here. And it is good for you to bore in on it. And it’s every

bit of the responsibility of this committee to bring the Department’s

attention to it. So that is a very good thing you are doing. I think

any time you get new capabilities it is probably okay to have some

competition.

Now, to be honest, we haven’t—we have not yet developed really

highly reliable UAVs. We are still in an infancy in many ways on

UAVs. And so some competition here, in many ways, it is a little

like where we were when we had all the X planes. It is not bad.

It doesn’t mean, however, that you should not be forcing the Department to confront the larger question of how do you plan?

Where are you going? What is your strategic direction? How does

it fit with each of you? And when you are talking about your core

competencies, how do UAVs fit with that? Is there a more efficient

way to do it from a joint perspective? Those are all extremely important and very legitimate inquiries that only you can bring their

attention to. That will not naturally come out of the Department.

Only you can make that happen.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank the gentleman. Before I call on Mr.

Saxton, let me say that your testimony is just excellent, and we appreciate it in the interests of the committee. This is historic turf.

Our committee needs to follow through on it. And you continue to

use the word ‘‘oversight.’’ and I hope this decade will prove that

this committee is good at that oversight. Mr. Saxton.

Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me just follow up on

something the chairman just said. I believe that what we are—the

discussion that I have heard here this morning has been extremely

helpful and educational, and it has caused me to think some things

that perhaps I wouldn’t have thought had I not been part of this

conversation. So thank you for your straightforward approach.

The term ‘‘changing circumstances’’ has been mentioned here a

couple of times this morning. And I think it is very important that

we understand—it seems to me that it is very important to me that

we understand that changing threat is, in fact, changing circumstances. And that looking forward it is very important that we

understand what those changing circumstances are and what they

are likely to be going forward. And that the structure of our military needs to be designed in order to be flexible enough, as Ranking Member Hunter said, to be able to look down the road to understand what those changes are about and how to deal with them.

In the current situation, it seems to me that we can learn some

lessons by looking at a couple of changing circumstances. One is a

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changing circumstance which has occurred over the last 20 years

or so in terms of the ideology of the foes that we face. Certainly

during the Cold War, we had a foe which had an ideology, and we

were able to design a defense mechanism that held them at bay

until they were economically defeated. And that was quite a thing.

Today’s ideology of our foe is much different. And the mechanisms

that we used during the Cold War no longer seem to work. Second,

technology is a changing circumstance. Nuclear technology is no

longer new, but nuclear technology is changing in terms of its dissemination. Certainly a changing circumstance. Biological weapons

are relatively new and extremely dangerous and something that we

need to deal with.

And I might say that there is a new world in terms of the Internet. Someone pointed out to me not long ago when we were talking

about the Fort Dix Six terror cell, somebody said they weren’t connected to al Qaeda. And somebody else said, oh, yes, they were, because they used the al Qaeda training manuals that are on the

Internet. And who knows how many other Fort Dix Six groups

there are who are being trained without training camps or training

bases because of information that exists on a new world called the

Internet? And so these changing circumstances it seems to me are

things that we need to be able to deal with. And my question then

comes how do we structure our defense mechanism to deal with

these kinds of rapidly changing circumstances?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. You raise at least three new problems, Congressman. One is ideology linked to modern information technology. Modern insurgency is similar to traditional insurgency in

that the insurgents are trying to mobilize the population against us

or against a regime. As you pointed out, they have a mass media

now that they never had access to before. Things like the Internet

that helps them recruit, organize, train and equip, lessons learned.

That is a situation that we have to essentially reorient ourselves

toward. It has to be a core mission. The Secretary of Defense directive, I think it is 3000.05 says these kinds of operations are now

a core mission co-equal with conventional or traditional operations.

And what we have to do, again, as I said before, is it is not going

to be necessarily an acquisition process, although that might be important. But what is going to be important is to begin to understand the cultural terrain that we are going to be operating on.

And that is going to come from our war colleges, from academia

and so on, to exercise. We are changing our training ranges, such

as the Army’s National Training Center, to put people into this

kind of environment. But what you want is a sense from the military, you know, this is a new problem.

What is—how do you plan to solve this problem? What are each

of the services going to do to defeat modern insurgency warfare?

Whether you find it in Iraq or whether there is a failed state in

Pakistan or Nigeria or Indonesia or in Latin America. You know,

what is our approach for dealing with this new and different kind

of problem? In terms of nuclear and biological weapons, the big

threat now, or one of the big concerns is the fact that with a proliferated world ambiguous aggression becomes much more of a risk,

especially with the possibility of a covert attack on the United

States.

20

I was at a briefing of one of our commands, and they said we

looked at Katrina and we looked at one of these, and this is

Katrina times ten. And so the logical question is wait a minute

now, in the Quadrennial Defense Review, we say we are going to

defend the homeland in depth. Well, what does that mean? How

are we going to do that? Are we going to try and hit the enemy

before he hits us? Fine. But how do we protect the approaches to

our coastlines and our borders? How do we control those borders?

How do we detect, particularly in the case of a biological agent, an

attack so we can begin quickly to undertake remedial operations

and limit the damage? How do we do what the military calls consequence management? It is what happens after the weapon goes

off. How do we think about retaliation?

So in my mind process is good, but I would rather have some answers to these kinds of questions, and say look, not only how is the

military, but I think John may have alluded to this, how is the

U.S. Government prepared and organized to deal with these kinds

of problems? I mean, I don’t want to oversimplify it, but at the end

of the day it is as a good doctor, how we diagnosed the real threats

to our security, the threats as you point out, that are changing,

that are new in form, and new perhaps in the scale at which they

might be mounted. And what is it that we are doing to solve them?

It is really not rocket science. It is some pretty basic direct questions that you would like to get answers to.

And I will tell you from my own personal experience, being part

of a group that looked at the aftermath of Millennium Challenge

in 2002, where our fleet got sunk essentially in the Persian Gulf,

or heavily damaged by the opposition force, that the response

wasn’t, well, how do we operate our fleet effectively under these

kinds of circumstances? It was all about process. It was about, well,

we need an operational net assessment. We need joint task force

standing headquarters elements. And again they may be important

to improve the effectiveness of what we do, but we need to think

about what we are going to do to deal with these problems. And

that I think is the common frustration that I share with this committee. We see these problems emerging, and we would like to get

some sense of just how we are going to deal with them. And we

have seen what happens when you run into a problem like modern

insurgency warfare in places like Iraq and other parts of the Middle East and you haven’t thought about it in advance. And that is

my concern.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. Several who are on the

list that arrived before the gavel have stepped out, but we will go

ahead with that list. The next gentleman that is present is Mr.

Thornberry. It looks like Mr. Meehan and Mr. Thornberry and then

Ms. Davis. Mr. Thornberry. Or excuse me, Mr. Meehan first. I am

sorry.

Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank

you to both witnesses for outstanding testimony. I just have one

question. The Quadrennial Defense Review process, does it provide

the best venue for evaluating the division of labor for the roles and

missions of the Department of Defense? And if it does provide the

best venue, why do you believe that this analysis appears to have

been done in such a cursory way in recent years? For example,

21

there was a one paragraph summary in the most recent QDR. And

if it doesn’t provide the best venue, do you—do either of you believe

that Congress should require a separate review for consideration of

roles and missions?

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I participated in three QDRs and I have watched

three QDRs—no, I say I participated in two and I have watched

three QDRs. They almost all start out as a very grand process of

thinking about the future, and they always end up as a budget

drill, because that is ultimately what you have to register. You

have to register your choices and put budget plans against those

choices. You do need a framework that lifts you out of the mechanics of budgeting to a larger vision. And I think that the QDR is

helpful in that regard. Roles and missions is a constant process

that is going on all the time.

The competition between the services over how to deal with a

problem is ongoing. I think it is a good thing to have it ongoing.

My fear is that if we elevate it and say we are going to—every four

years we are going to force everybody to go through it, you are saving up all of the tensions, and you just get the negative side of that

roles and missions review, not the positive side. Roles and missions

is best when you have to confront the advantages of new technology, the constraints of old technology, the affordability of force

structure, etc. And the services have made enormous changes over

the last ten years, but it has never been called a roles and missions

review. We used to have an enormous amount of the Navy, for example, that was dedicated to submarine warfare. You know, P3s.

We had a huge P3 fleet to do submarine warfare. We have retooled

the P3 fleet to do useful things because it is not hunting submarines any more.

This is what process is going on, sir. If you force it to a grand

process, you know, a once every four years look at roles and missions you are going to get a lot of friction, negative friction I am

afraid. And I would like to find a way to avoid that.

Mr. MEEHAN. Would you agree it has come to be more cursory

in the last few years?

Dr. HAMRE. I think the explicit roles and missions reviews have

become cursory because they are always a fistfight, and people

don’t want to just end up spending energy in a fistfight. What I

think you should do is target issues that you think are important,

bring in outside counsel to help you. If you need to create a commission, create a commission. But find issues that you think are

really important. I personally think back to Mr. Saxton’s question.

I think the most important issue we should be facing in roles and

missions is who has responsibility for preventing a nuclear terrorist

incident in this country? Who is doing that? And what is the plan?

Now, that is a very concrete task. And that is a mission worth

drilling in on. And if you take things like that and say let’s get to

the bottom.

Who in the Department is working on that? Are you working together? Do you have integrated plans? Are you working with the

rest of the executive branch? That would be a great service. But

if you just step back and say I want you to do a roles and missions

review, you are going to get the Army and the Marine Corps ready

to fight each other about infantry, and the Air Force and the MaVerDate 22-MAR-2001 11:31 Dec 03, 2008 Jkt 038834 PO 00000 Frm 00025 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-62\171000.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
22

rine Corps and the Navy getting ready to fight each other about

aviation. It isn’t going to produce a positive result. But if you pick

a problem you know exists and say we are not dealing with it, and

force them to get in on it, that would be a great service to the country.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would agree with a lot of what Dr. Hamre

says. In terms of the potential value of a Quadrennial Defense Review, I think at least among us wonks in the think tanks there was

a lot of anticipation about what would come out of the most recent

one. It was the first one that had been conducted since the 9/11 attacks, since the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, confronting new

insurgency, concerns as Dr. Hamre says about homeland WMD attack. You had a sitting Secretary of Defense, so he wasn’t new. He

had four or five years of experience in sort of deciding what was

important to him.

So of course, the great disappointment that essentially no tough

choices were made, no new directions were really taken on. But I

think there is a value there. And my experience, like Dr. Hamre,

I have been part of every review going back to 1989. It is kind of

like Ground Hog Day for us. Every four years we wake up and here

we are again. But going through every one since 1989, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

have to know going in pretty much what they want to do, what

they see as the big problems, and the answers that they are going

to demand of those problems. They have to be willing to put those

to the services. And they have to be willing to act if the services

don’t give them a good answer. And in 2001, my experience was

Secretary Rumsfeld said these are new problems. And I think he

expected different answers, you know, changes in the program and

so on. And he sort of got the Henry Ford answer. You know, I will

give you any Ford you want as long as it is black. You can have

any program you want as long as it is the program of record. And

under those circumstances you have to be willing, independent of

the services, to make decisions. And you have to be able to make

them stick, because you have worked it with the Hill and you have

also worked it with industry.

And that was not something that they had prepared themselves

to do, as you know from personal experience. But if you are expecting a bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people to give you

the answer of where future warfare is going, where the big problems of the world are going, and to identify the scenario set that

is the right scenario set to capture these problems, you are not

going to get it. The leadership here has got to come from the top.

It has got to be directive. And you look for advice and insights from

your staff, which you hope is a good staff. But you have got to—

I think it has got to be driven by a Secretary of Defense and a

Chairman of the JCS that have a vision, a common vision of what

the big problems are, and at least some sense, a point of departure

of sense of how they are going to solve them.

Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. I am intrigued, Dr. Hamre, about your suggestion in looking at the problems rather than creating the fistfight

that we anticipate in roles and missions within the Department between the services. May I make a request of each of you to give

23

us a list of five—and for the record, not today—but make a list of

five of those unanswerable questions that should go into the roles

and missions mix? And I realize—I don’t want you to just fly them

by the seat of your pants today, but think about them, and within

the very near future give them to us for the record. Thank you. Mr.

Thornberry.

[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page 89.]

Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And first I want to

thank you for having this hearing and asking these questions and

for having these witnesses who, with the organizations they represent, I think are among the leading national security thinkers in

the country. It does seem to me, though, that today we are just beginning to scratch the surface of a lot of questions and issues that

we need to pursue in this committee in the future, as the witnesses

have said. And I hope that we can do that.

I have listened to you both. Just to follow up on what the chairman was just saying, I have listened to you both saying you need

to take specific problems, try to work them through, whether it is

the UAV executive agent, or whether it is nuclear prevention, or

whether it is who is responsible for cyber warfare. To take another

example, press reports show that it looks like Estonia was attacked

in some ways. Who is responsible not only for defending us and our

allies, but for having a strategy?

When you are not dealing with tremendous numbers of things

coming off an assembly line, and you are in some ways dealing

with more intellectual problem sets, whether it is the war of ideas

or cyber or other things, it seems to me more difficult. So I hear

what you are saying about that. But as I look at the new chair of

the personnel subcommittee, I also think about the incentives to

changes in culture that come with personnel rules. That was part

of Goldwater-Nichols. It wasn’t just rearranging the boxes. It was

saying if you are going to get promoted, you got to do joint duty.

And so my question to you is, understanding what you say about

the specific problems, are there incentives, areas that we should

look at to encourage creativity and speed and flexibility for the

problems that we may see distantly or may not even see? Ways to

improve the system that do fall within our responsibility, or at

least areas that we can encourage?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Oh, goodness. I think the ultimate incentive

really is the power of the purse. It is the committee deciding itself,

you know, what are the important challenges confronting us? And

again, they can’t just be loose nuclear weapons. It has to be specific

enough so that you can pin the Defense Department down in terms

of, all right, how are we going to solve these problems? What tools

come out of the toolbox in terms of forces and capabilities? Which

ones seem to be left in there? And again, use the power of the

purse.

And in some cases, perhaps the power of legislation to help promote that kind of activity. Legislation pertaining, for example, to

the process that I discussed, which is not only professional military

education, to make sure that—for example, there are a lot of

stresses on the Army right now, and there are a lot of pressures

to ignore what is going on in the school house. And yet, you know,

24

to do that is to eat our seed corn. We have just passed in the world

the demographic point where over 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Ten years ago, a commission that

I was on recommended the establishment of a joint urban warfare

training center, which the Defense Department has never gotten

around to making a priority.

But again, that can help you find answers to where future warfare might be going. It may be not only incentivizing the Defense

Department to decide who is responsible for cyber warfare, but asking ourselves the question are the best cyber warriors really in a

military uniform? Are they perhaps working for Citigroup and

firms like that that are attacked on a constant basis that realize

monetary losses? Or maybe, again, among private citizens.

Incentivizing groups.

And again, about ten years ago, the Marsh Commission met, trying to look at these sorts of questions, and found that business

didn’t want to work with the government. Business didn’t want to

work with the government in terms of cyber warfare because they

didn’t trust the government to keep a secret. They didn’t think the

government was better than they are in terms of protecting it. And

they didn’t trust that the government could do any kind of an exceptional job of protecting them. So can we reduce the barriers to

those kinds of cooperation? So those are, I guess, a few of the

things that occur to me off the top of my head.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, it is a huge question. And to be honest, I don’t

think I have very good answers to it. With your permission, I

would like to come back, if I could. Could I offer, however, two comments about some structural things I think that would be very

helpful for you to consider? First, we do not have an adequate or

strong enough voice for the people who are most interested in joint

operations, the combatant commanders here in Washington. We do

not have that voice adequately presented in Washington. The

JROC, which is a demand office, is populated by supply people. We

need to get that stronger voice here. And how do we strengthen the

Joint Forces Command? Or do we bring—do we make the deputy

of the Joint Forces Command a Washington guy who sits in the

JROC? Maybe sits in the Tank? I mean how do we get a stronger

joint voice?

I think if you and the committee and the committee staff could

work on that it would be great. I have my own ideas, but they are

not necessarily well developed. But I would be happy, and I think

it would be great if you could work on that.

The second issue I would encourage you to look at, we have a superb officer corps, because we buy ten percent more officers than

we need for all the billets that we have. And we use that ten percent to be able to send them to training, to joint duty assignments,

to a year off working for the State Department. In other words, we

grow a phenomenal officer corps because we budget an excess that

they can then go off and do it. You don’t have to have everybody

in every job. When it comes to civilians, we do not do that. We only

budget maybe one half of one percent. And so there isn’t enough

excess capacity where you could force civilians to go get joint experience. If you want to get an experienced person at DOD who

25

knows something about State Department operations, you know,

you got to dig it out of hide, because there isn’t that overhead.

Now it doesn’t have to be ten percent. And it certainly doesn’t

have to be ten percent of the entire officer corps. It is probably the

GS–14s, 15s and up where you budget a surplus. But we do not

budget enough overhead for civilians. And this would be maybe,

you know, $50 to $70 million a year on—but that is not expensive

when you think about the talent you could be buying. So I would

ask you to look at that as well, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank the gentleman. Mr. Cooper.

Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to congratulate

you for the committee stepping up to its real responsibilities by

asking these tough questions, and I appreciate the expert testimony of the witnesses. Also I want to thank Dr. Hamre in particular, because your reports from CSIS, Beyond Goldwater-Nichols,

have been extremely helpful to the committee. And we are particularly sensitive of the section on Congress not necessarily meeting

its responsibilities. We hope to improve on past records. In your

testimony, Dr. Hamre, you mentioned, you suggest perhaps we

need to have a four-star general to advocate more for the demand

side in the Pentagon. Could you elaborate on that suggestion?

Dr. HAMRE. Thank you, sir. Currently, we ask that—the voice for

that four-star voice outside of the chairman and the vice chairman

is really Joint Forces Command. Joint Forces Command is extremely important, probably doesn’t have enough horsepower to be

able to do all of what is needed. It could come from strengthening

the Joint Forces Command commander, give him more resources,

more depth. Or it may be creating maybe a deputy to the Joint

Forces Commander who is actually in Washington. Some way we

have got to get that voice more in the Pentagon, not just in the Department. You know, when you are located 150 miles away you are

not at the key meetings all the time. We need to have that voice

in the meetings, the key meetings.

Mr. COOPER. Would that do enough to address the supply and demand imbalance that you mentioned in your testimony? That

one——

Dr. HAMRE. No, sir. You know, Washington is about supply. I

mean it is about the institutions that provide things looking forward. And we don’t do nearly the quality job for oversight and follow through. We never have. I must confess when I was staffing

over in the Senate side I did not hold many hearings that looked

at what we had done. I was always organizing hearings for what

we ought to do for the future. We don’t do a good job of assessing

our current operations. And I think that again comes with oversight. I mean who is it, General Mark Clark that said organizations do well the things that the boss checks. And you are the boss.

Mr. COOPER. Your suggestion that the Under Secretary for Management be focused on defense agency problems, what recent problems do you have in mind from the defense agencies that they

could do a better job of supervising?

Dr. HAMRE. Well, sir, I will use this as—again, I am very careful,

I don’t want to criticize people when I don’t know the decisions that

they had to make. So let me go back to something that was a problem we had that I felt I didn’t deal with very well. When the DeVerDate 22-MAR-2001 11:31 Dec 03, 2008 Jkt 038834 PO 00000 Frm 00029 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-62\171000.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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fense Commissary Agency was going to bring in, you know, these

bar code scanners, you know, that you have in the grocery store,

we—it took us two years to buy through an acquisition process a

bar code scanner. Two years. Commercial vendors you could have

had this out in the commissaries within two months. It took us two

years. And that is because there wasn’t sufficient high level attention, there wasn’t an insistence on performance along the way. We

let the acquisitions system grind on mindlessly. And I think it is

that sort of—we need a business man who is overseeing the operation of the business activities of those defense agencies.

Mr. COOPER. Your suggestion that we put the service chiefs back

in responsibility for some acquisition decisions. What changes of

behavior do you think that would cause?

Dr. HAMRE. Well, sir, again my personal sense is that where

DOD gets in trouble is when there is—when it is an unclear set

of authorities and responsibilities. And we have an unclear set of

the responsibilities. We get the service chiefs that are designing

budgets, we get the service chiefs that are sitting in the JROC and

putting in on requirements, but the service chiefs are not responsible for the outcome of the acquisition system.

That is really in a separate chain. And so it is that fault line

when they aren’t completely—they have to be accountable and they

have to be responsible, but there is now a breakdown. And we have

not done well in equipping a force that is at war. And I can only

say that is because you haven’t put that responsibility on one person and say you are accountable here. I do not want to see troops

without flak jackets. I want that fixed, and you got a week to fix

it. You know, that is the kind of stuff that we need do to get the

acquisition system moving.

Mr. COOPER. Dr. Krepinevich, in the short time remaining, I hate

to ask you a tough question, but if we were to call for a hearing

in the next couple of weeks from the Pentagon on who is in charge

of defending the homeland against rogue nuclear attack, what is

the likely process in the Pentagon that would go on between now

and that hearing other than panic?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Goodness. Well, I think they would probably

call up Northern Command and assign the task to them of responding. There are multiple entities right now that are responsible in

some way, shape or form to dealing with an attack on the United

States. And it is not just the Defense Department. It is other

branches of the government in terms of the executive branch, but

also State and local, obviously, authorities in terms of responding.

And again, that is an area where there are so many seams and so

many levels of responsibility. You know, I have had conversations

with people at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), people

on the Homeland Security Council and so on, and it is a big problem. I think as the chairman alluded to, he mentioned 1958. You

know, that was 11 years after the Defense Department was formed.

And we still had major problems to sort out. We were fortunate

then that in the span of those 11 years we never were attacked in

the way we fear we might be today in our homeland.

So again, I think that is one of those areas where, as Dr. Hamre

says, boy, the responsibilities aren’t clear, you know, who is going

to do what and when and how does that all fit together? Again,

27

that would be again a great opportunity to begin to look at, okay,

what are the contingencies? You know, let’s get the relevant organizations together and see how effectively we would respond. I

could go on at length about some of these issues. Congressman

Thornberry and I are on the advisory board of Joint Forces Command. About a year or so ago we were down for a briefing, and

they were looking at Hurricane Katrina, and the response there,

and they were looking at a nuclear event, and the conclusion was

the nuclear event was sort of an order of magnitude at least more

challenging than Katrina. And so you get a sense of the magnitude

of the problem. And of course what you want to jump up and

scream, okay, Joint Forces Command, how are we going to solve

this problem? You know, we just want to know. And again, there,

I think as Dr. Hamre alluded to, there is a lot of stay in your lane,

don’t get out of your lane, you know, this is what you are responsible for and so on. You can just see how it kind of hems in that

kind of organization. And it does it I think to the detriment of our

security.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank the gentleman. Dr. Gingrey?

Dr. GINGREY. Mr. Chairman, let me, first of all, thank you for

holding the hearing. I think this has been one of the more interesting ones that I have attended in the five years that I have been

on the committee. Dr. Hamre and Dr. Krepinevich, your testimony,

your oral statements, and your written testimony was very, very

good. I find some of your thoughts, particularly Dr. Hamre in regard to JROC, very, very interesting. And I would like to hopefully

have an opportunity to follow up on that with you. I particularly

wanted to ask a question about the education requirements under

Goldwater-Nichols for our general and staff officers, our flag officers. The Key West agreement was in 1948. I was in the first grade

at that time, and not thinking too much about Key West agreement. I obviously was not here for Goldwater-Nichols, and learning

more and more about that. But I wonder if the unintended consequences of Goldwater-Nichols and the jointness requirement,

educational requirement in the War College for general and flag officers has not taken away some of the time that they would—the

respective branch potential general and flag officers need to spend

in their own particular branch learning what they need to know.

And I don’t question the importance of jointness, but I worry about

the dilution factor in regard to the educational requirements.

The CHAIRMAN. May I interrupt it then? And I will take it out

of your time. We did consider that. And all the testimony that we

had and the evidence that we had, that it did not detract. I was

insistent going into this issue, Dr. Gingrey, that the officer be the

best and most competent Army, Air Force, Navy as possible before

they even touched the jointness arena, because people learn from

each other in the schools. And I hope that has been fulfilled. But

that was considered at that time those many years ago. And I will

take that out of your time. But that is my clear recollection.

Dr. GINGREY. Mr. Chairman, thank you for that, and thank you

for not taking that out of my time. And it may be that we need

to go back and look at it and relook at it. And as the chairman

says, it has been a while since we have looked at it. So that would

be one question. And other thing I think, Dr. Hamre, in your writVerDate 22-MAR-2001 11:31 Dec 03, 2008 Jkt 038834 PO 00000 Frm 00031 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-62\171000.000 HNS1 PsN: HNS1
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ten testimony, you maybe described JROC as like a corporation of

outside members of the board of directors, where they tend to

scratch each other’s back. And I think that that is a problem,

would be a problem. And it would be important for us to know,

well, how can they function better? And what changes specifically,

if you are prepared to make that recommendation to us here today,

or I would also be interested in Dr. Krepinevich’s opinion on the

same subject.

Dr. HAMRE. You want to talk about the education thing?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Sure. I think that is a fundamental question

in terms of education. It really speaks to what kind of an overall

skillset do we need for our senior leaders to have? I think if you—

let me just give you the Army as an example, because I am fairly

familiar with the Army. And you look at the Army right now looking at spending somewhere between $50 and $100 billion, maybe

$150 billion to reset the force. Well, it is an extremely important

strategic question, how do you reset the Army? You know, do we

just rebuild the old force or do we create a new one? And you look

at some of the things you have to understand to make those kinds

of decisions as say General Casey or General Cody have to make.

The idea of how to wage modern counterinsurgency warfare, how

to conduct stability operations, how to conduct urban operations in

an increasingly urbanized world, how to conduct protracted operations, how to engage in building partner capacity not only with allies, but with perhaps tribes, as we found out in al-Anbar province.

These are all things that you don’t learn at the National Training Center. And in fact, I think that there is one danger, at least

in terms of the Army as a service, is that over the years, the National Training Center has become the be all and the end all. But

what the National Training Center, until recently, taught officers

is, number one, how to fight conventional warfare, and number

two, how to be very good tacticians. You go to the War College to

learn to think about strategy, about the broad issues, about the

things that you are going to need to know to be a senior general.

And again, I think that is why that part of the education is absolutely critical. And what I am concerned about right now is not

that we are doing too much of that, but that we are doing too little.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, may I just speak to the question of the JROC?

I was looking very quickly to make sure I didn’t use the word

scratching each other’s back, because I didn’t want to give you or

any of the members the impression that I didn’t think that members of the JROC were trying very hard to do a good job. They are.

The vice chiefs serve on the JROC, and they take very seriously the

goal of understanding how we are going to fight jointly together

with new systems looking into the future. But they will do that as

one or two hours out of a week, and the rest of the week they are

spending really on service issues, service-specific issues. It isn’t

their daily job to think about joint activities the way it is for a combatant commander or for Joint Forces Command.

So I personally believe that the Joint Requirements Oversight

Council actually should be populated by people that come from the

demand side of the equation rather than the supply side of the

equation. And that I would try to find a way to get the combatant

commanders to have a stronger voice. Now we can’t have them

29

here all the time. They got to be out fighting wars. So I don’t want

to waste their time. They need stronger J8 functions. That is the

planning, budgeting functions. They don’t tend to have good strong

J8s. And there needs to be a focal point for them in Washington.

Now that could either be through the Joint Forces Command or we

could create something new.

So again, thank you for letting me clarify. I don’t mean to imply,

and do not believe that the current members of the JROC are not

really trying hard to do the job of that organization. It is that it

is not their day to day inclination.

Dr. GINGREY. Right. Dr. Hamre, I apologize if I mischaracterized

your—either your oral or written testimony, and I appreciate that

explanation. But I think that both of you have done a great job this

morning, and I appreciate your testimony. And I yield back, Mr.

Chairman. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. I might add, in addition to my comments earlier, being somewhat familiar with those chosen to go to

the Joint Forces Staff College down in Norfolk, that they are a

group of heavy hitters and specialists in what they do. As a matter

of fact, to give you an example, a young Missouri student roomed

with the four-striped captain whose next assignment was to take

command of the USS Nimitz. So it gives you a reflection that they

are choosing the right caliber of people to go into the joint billets,

which frankly encourages me.

Ms. Davis.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank

you for both for being here. This has been, I think, a very important hearing. And I would go along with my colleague, Mr. Thornberry, and I say I think we need more of them. So thank you very

much. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on the noncore competencies that you mentioned and the military versus civilian input

in a post-war conflict. Can you design that without the state or

other executive departments? Can you design that jointness? And

I know a lot of very smart people, and in fact the chairman as well

is very interested in this interagency work that we need to do, as

well as focusing on the Congress. And yet I think that it is difficult

to quite define who should lead that effort.

If the military leads that effort, if DOD leads that effort, then

they will, in fact, impose on it as they have now. And unfortunately, as we know, the other departments have basically been absent without leave (AWOL) at this. So help me out with this.

Where should that—the real focus for that planning begin? How

should it develop? And how does the leadership develop out of that

as well?

Dr. HAMRE. Ms. Davis, you have just asked the hardest question

in front of the country, to be honest. And the reason this is so hard

is that you are dealing with probably the largest fault line in the

American Constitution. We have a separation of powers between

the executive branch and the legislative branch. There is no question that the Congress has a right to oversee the operation of the

departments of the executive branch. That is well established. But

when it comes to the interagency process, that is seen as being a

Presidential prerogative, how he organizes the National Security

Council and the coordination process. And if I were working—when

30

I was at DOD I would have fought very vigorously to keep the

President alone responsible for that.

So we have a strong constitutional problem here. We don’t have

well functioning interagency processes. But you can’t put the burden on just the Defense Department to solve it. You know, so this

is a—I really don’t have a good answer for you because it is such

a crucial question. I don’t think it is possible to do a GoldwaterNichols for the interagency process, because you are, in essence,

saying the Congress is going to tell the President how he is going

to organize the interagency working of the executive branch. And

I would have fought that when I was in the executive branch. And

I understand that.

So how do we get around it? I think we should find—we need to

strengthen the capabilities of the departments. We need to hold

them accountable. I don’t know if this committee has ever asked a

State Department guy to come up here and talk about postconflict

reconstruction. I think you should. I think you should help. I mean

Congress—I also must say Congress reinforces the lack of cooperation in the executive branch, because we all report to committees

of standing jurisdiction.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. We all have our own jurisdiction.

Dr. HAMRE. We are all part of this. This merits deep, deep thinking. But I don’t think it is susceptible to a Goldwater-Nichols solution the way we had before. But Andy may have more insights.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Just a couple of observations. First of all, I

very much agree with what Dr. Hamre said. Second, I noticed in

the legislation, unless I missed it, there was really no definition of

what a core competency is. The term comes originally from the

business literature. And there has been some work in the Defense

Department, particularly in the Office of Net Assessment, to try

and apply that to defense circumstances. There are two—well, several things that characterize core competencies. One is it is a complex combination of things. And so it would be people, equipment,

doctrine, industrial base, and experience that enables the U.S. military to do something of strategic significance exceedingly well. So

it is complex, it is hard to create, it is hard to replicate. It allows

you to do something that has strategic impact and allows you to

do it at a world class level. And so again, if you are going to go

in that direction with legislation, I think definitions become important. A couple of examples I would give you, global command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) would be a core competence of the American

military. Long-range precision strike, 24-hour all-weather operations. These are things that are really complex combinations. If

you are looking at where we might expand, I would say operations

in complex terrain, meaning urban terrain, cultural terrain and littoral terrain, which is usually heavily trafficked, time-based competition. The world is—the military competition is becoming increasingly time sensitive. And we are getting worse and worse and

worse at acting promptly and quickly. With respect to jointness in

the interagency, in a sense it goes beyond the interagency, really

looking at the interface between the Federal Government, State

and local, but also the civil sector.

31

So for example, if you are looking at cyberdefense, again I think

it is very blurry who is responsible for what. And it may be that

the private sector does a better job than the government sector

would. You know, World War II we worried about bombing factories, and so we had air defense systems to protect them from air

attack. It may be again that Citicorp is best at protecting Citicorp.

I don’t know, but I think it is important for us to begin to figure

those sorts of things out. Satellites, space defense, a lot of what is

up there that we use is in the commercial sector.

But certainly, irregular warfare is an area where the interagency

issue has come up again and again. And I think at this point in

time the military does not want that mission. But as you pointed

out, the weight of historical experience, whether it was Vietnam in

the 60’s or what we confront now in Afghanistan and Iraq indicates

it is the military that ends up doing it. And I think the burden of

proof is on the other elements of the interagency to explain how

they somehow are going to remedy that.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you very much. I know my

time is up.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. I will go to Mr. Jones next. But let

me tell the committee we have four votes, one 15-minute vote that

has already started, and three five-minute votes. We will return.

And gentlemen, we appreciate your waiting us out for that. Mr.

Jones?

Mr. JONES. Mr. Chairman, thank you. And to the panelists,

thank you very much. And Dr. Hamre, I will ask this question of

both, but you mentioned in your testimony, and no wonder thinking of the committee, about under secretary for finances. I have

been here 14 years, and one of my biggest frustrations is the fact—

and I am just talking about budgets now, I am not talking about

investments in new equipment, but budgets—is that it seems that

each and every year, even before Iraq and Afghanistan, that there

is very serious concern about the bureaucracy, and how—I don’t

want to say fraud, but waste in the Department of Defense as it

relates to their budgets. And I took it upon myself four or five

years ago, and I cannot remember the gentleman’s name, he was

number two at GAO. I had seen him on some talk show, so I asked

him to come in and brief me. And he said Congressman, you know

about the only way that you will ever get a handle on the budgets

at the Department of Defense is if an individual could have an appointment for six years, and either the Congress could remove the

person or the president.

I don’t know how that should be structured, no idea. But he said

that you have got to have a person that has the knowledge and has

the control that you can get these budgets to where they are more

efficient and less wasteful. Do you think that makes any sense at

all, that this person is like David Walker now is the Comptroller

General of the GAO. But it seems like these budgets at the Department of Defense, and I am not criticizing anybody, but you have

got too many hands in the pie. And it seems like that they are autonomous in one respect. And the Secretary of Defense does not

have the time. I know he has, you know, assistant secretaries. But

I am thinking if we are going to ever really get it straight. Does

that make any sense? And it is not my idea.

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Dr. HAMRE. Sir, it probably was Gene Dodaro, who is a friend of

mine, who was the deputy to Dave Walker. I served for four years

as the Comptroller, Chief Financial Officer for the Defense Department. Initially went over for Les Aspin, and then with Bill Perry.

And so I know a lot of about how we put budgets together and how

we manage the financial resources of the Department. This is the

primary tool by which the Secretary brings policy control over this

very large, complex organization.

I used to say to people, I said if you want to breathe oxygen, I

can give you oxygen, but you are going to breathe the Secretary’s

oxygen. And you are going to follow through, because the Secretary

was going to be accountable to you. And so the system over there

is designed really for policy accountability more than anything.

And accountability to the Congress. All the systems, the accounting

systems, financial management systems are really designed to

make sure we can answer the questions you are going to ask when

we come up and ask for more money. Now so I say that to the following. We have set up a system where we control the Department,

the primary mechanism of political control, policy control is budgetary. And if you are going to create a different system for budgeting, then you have got a much larger question we have to wrestle

with, which is how is the Secretary going to manage the Department? It is, in essence, his primary tool. I am very open to exploring ideas with you, sir. I do think that you—again, the Secretary

is accountable for everything that happens in that department. Everything down to a buck private. And he has to have the authority

to be able to control that.

And so, giving him a comptroller that he controls, as opposed to

one that has kind of an autonomous role, is I think is important.

I would not support an idea of having kind of an independent financial manager that is separate from the Secretary.

Mr. JONES. If I could, very briefly to the doctor, I don’t think—

the issue is when you look at the fact that we have had testimony

after testimony—I know we are in a war, so let me make that

clear—but we have had—I mean, I brought to the committee last

year an ice maker that you could go to Lowe’s and buy for $4,000,

it is like would go into a plane that they were paying $25,000 and

$30,000 for. I mean it was documented. And to me if the checks

and balances, if you don’t have—I know my time is up, Mr. Chairman, and I will be real quick—but if you don’t have—the Secretary

of Defense, in my opinion, has so much in front of him that he has

got to have some help to make this system more efficient. Because

we are in a competition with the Chinese and other nations. And

if we cannot account to the taxpayer how that money is being

spent——

Dr. HAMRE. Yes.

Mr. JONES [continuing]. Then I don’t know if we will be doing the

same thing, having these same hearings five or six years from now.

Dr. HAMRE. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman. And to the witnesses we

thank you, and we shall return. And if you don’t mind, when we

return, to continue our questions. Thank you. We will be in recess.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will resume. Thank you for waiting.

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Mr. Sestak.

Mr. SESTAK. Thank you, sir. It is a pleasure.

I was struck. There were a couple of things that were mentioned

in your testimony.

You both used the word ‘‘capability’’ and you know we have gone

to a capability-based or tried to go to capability-based analysis over

there. Again, lead by Andy Marshall and others. And you both focused upon the issue of, I think, jointness. And to me, jointness

talks about commonality and understanding. And you also mentioned the common challenges of terror and anti-denial, anti-access.

My question has to do with some perceptions of the Defense Department.

They are human beings over there. They respond to incentives.

To some degree, you have talked about changing incentives in the

process, the JROC is a good example and in warfare capability in

the Goldwater-Nichols Act that the chairman read from over here,

and we changed incentives and there is really only two incentives

over there, promotion or owning the money. So you changed the incentive for promotion for joint warfare by saying you are not going

to get promoted, not unless you go join.

My question comes to some degree, Doctor, to you, Dr. Hamre

first. You have talked about the roles and missions and having

watched a number of efforts over the years kind of come up with

the same thin rule at the outcome.

Do we need to really not look so much at roles and missions and

try to delineate who has what but focus on the proper incentive

that hasn’t been touched yet, that is the money, and try to change,

not just the process by putting more civilians in that JROC because

they haven’t done badly. They have got them OSD in the lower

level and they are even going to put somebody in the JROC in the

vice.

But in the second change, the second incentive we have, which

is the money, and move that into the joint world for the one that

is common to everyone. And it is truly—and Dr. Krepinevich kind

of talked about it, is truly at the center of the real transformation.

It is not kind of delineating the roles anymore. It is what is common, and if it is common, how do you incentivize everybody to come

and meet the same requirement. Why not give the money for

C4ISR to the joint staff and change the incentive?

JROC is great. I have watched them come up with these common

denominators time and again and whichever one said this is a requirement didn’t matter. Did you have the money to make them

come up with the requirement?

What is wrong with that is the real essence of the second—Goldwater two, so to speak, where we haven’t touched that incentive in

what truly is one of the tragedies of Iraq, the transformation that

never occurred.

Sir.

Dr. HAMRE. First, Admiral, thank you for continuing to serve

your country. I am really grateful that you are here.

When we first started Goldwater, this beyond Goldwater-Nichols,

we started with a threshold question. Do we want to change the

basic formula where we give the dollars to the military departments and they buy things. Do we want to take that away. Other

34

countries have done that. They have removed the funding from the

military services and centralized, et cetera. We thought that that

would not be a good move except in one important area and that

is C4ISR.

If you really want seamless interoperability, you cannot do that

by trying to build it from the outside and work your way in. You

have to start by starting with the center activity and work your

way out.

And so if you leave the command and control funding with the

services, their first interest is to make the eaches in the field talk

to each other and then they will work their way toward the center,

and that is why we have profound interoperability problems to this

day.

I would do exactly what you said. I would take the funding for

command and control, and I would centrally administer it for the

department on an enterprise-wide basis and I would certainly use

the J–6, which is the J-Code function. I would turn that into the—

into the acquisition executive for command and control, enterprisewide command and control for the Department.

Now, Secretary Rumsfeld has experimented, but we have got two

different experiments going on: We have got an experiment where

Strategic Command (STRATCOM) is doing enterprise and Joint

Forces Command (JFCOM) is doing enterprise-wide. And instead of

having horizontal, or I mean vertical stovepipes, we are now getting horizontal stovepipes. This is not the right answer. We need

to get a single idea. I like the J–6.

Now the J–6 would probably have to count on this to be its technical arm underneath it. We would have to augment because the

J–6 doesn’t have the organic capacity to do it in just the J–6, but

I think it is a good idea, and I think it ought to be explored as an

issue.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Dr. Snyder.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. I apologize for having had to leave. I

presided over the House for the last two and a half hours, but I

intend to read the transcript so I am going to ask you a couple of

questions, and if you have covered them, tell me. I assume that

somebody asked about the issues that have been floating around

out there about some people’s belief that we need to do a real major

study in terms of some kind of jointness study with regard to other

agencies other than the military.

Did that topic come up during this hearing?

Dr. HAMRE. Partly, but it is worth talking about again.

Dr. SNYDER. Because we talk about the Administration, everyone

acknowledges that mistakes have been made over the last several

years in Iraq that we are not getting to our end results as quickly

as we want to.

But I think the military has been frustrated because I think they

feel like if they had, I don’t know, a level of commitment, level of

effort, the kind of personnel they needed brought forward early on

from other agencies in the Pentagon and the military, that we

would be much further down.

And so what are your comments about where we need to go with

regard to, for want of a better word, we call it some kind of a

jointness study with regard to other agencies?

35

Dr. HAMRE. I spoke to an earlier question that spoke to this, and

let me let Andy begin with this, and I will offer one comment.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Part of the discussion as Dr. Hamre said earlier did get to this issue. I guess to summarize a response, there

are a number of existing and emerging challenges we confront that

can’t be confined to the Defense Department in terms of the skillset

needed to respond.

The one that clearly hits us is insurgency. Modern insurgency

warfare requires a combination of diplomacy, intelligence, reconstruction efforts as well as security efforts. And it is beyond the

purview of the Defense Department, beyond the assigned skillset.

There are other areas. We talked about Homeland Security

against non-traditional WMD attack, cyber warfare that may get

us beyond the interagency and into the private sector and their engagement on the issue. And what strikes me if you go back to the

1994 commission on roles and missions headed by John White, the

predecessor to Dr. Hamre as Deputy Defense Secretary, the Commission calls for a Quadrennial Security Review, and I thought

that was one of the really insightful recommendations of that commission. That in fact the threat, the kinds of challenges and

threats we were confronting couldn’t be neatly compartmentalized

necessarily within the Defense Department within all issues.

And if you look at—I mean, going further back in time, I would

argue that we are in a position right now somewhat comparable to

the late 1940’s, early 1950’s where the Soviet Union was a new

threat, communism was an ideology, was in our face. You had new

technologies, ballistic weapons, nuclear weapons, satellites, and so

on. And now it is radical Islamism, it is a proliferated world, it is

the very unusual things China is doing. These are problems that

don’t seem likely to go away any time soon just as the Soviets

didn’t seem likely to go away any time soon.

And what the Truman Administration did through National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) and the Eisenhower Administration did through Solarium is say we need a grand strategy review.

And in the case of Eisenhower in particular, he became directly involved in the effort and the idea was we can’t, you know, a lot of

this is focused on defense but we can’t, we can’t limit it to defense.

There has to be a propaganda element to this. There has to be a

diplomacy effort. There has to be an assurance that we have essentially provided for our commission foundation which is a source of

enduring strength for this country.

It was really, you know, strategic planning, the way you would

like to see it done by two very different administrations in some

ways.

And I think we are lacking that kind of an effort right now. I

think it should be one of the top priorities for whoever the next administration turns out to be.

And finally, I would say as a practical matter, the Defense Department is—sort of feels it is in a catch 22. If it deploys forces for

these kinds of contingencies, especially a regular warfare, they

know it can’t succeed unless the interagency shows up. But Vietnam has showed us, Iraq has showed us, Afghanistan has shown

us that if the interagency doesn’t show up in sufficient numbers

and sufficiently quickly to enable us to succeed the way we need

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to, so does the Department begin to step on other toes in trying to

do it itself, or does it continue to its own knitting.

And I think that is a gray area of inquiry and oversight that this

committee might investigate.

Dr. HAMRE. I will be very brief.

I know that the interagency process can be fixed the way Goldwater-Nichols fixed the Defense Department. And the reason I say

that is the interagency process is about how the President chooses

to organize the executive branch and his operations, and any President is going to resist a Congressional solution as to how he is

going to organize it. There is no question that Congress has a role

over the departments, but how the interagency works is really an

ambiguous part of our government, and it is in—any President will

fight you to say that you should organize that.

I do think there are important things that contribute to our poor

job of coordination, and one of them is there is very little excess

capacity for contingencies in non-DOD agencies. There are no extra

civil servants in management positions sitting around in peacetime. We buy ten percent more officers in the military than jobs.

That way we can send them to schools, joint duty assignments, on

a training exercise with State Department.

But the other agencies of the executive branch do not do that.

They budget about one half of one percent, which is the long-term

disability rate. So they don’t have people they can send to Iraq.

They have to take them out of a job where they need them in that

job as well.

So one of the things we could do would be to start buying more

management capability by buying more—a little more depth in

some of these critical agencies. I think that is something we can

do.

I also think it would be possible to think of some mechanical

things that would help.

Every administration struggles its first couple of years before it

gets its sea legs on how to work together. And I think creating like

a field activity that works for the executive secretariat that could

become the core of a crisis action team which when a problem

comes up, you would have the ready made, at least the connective

tissue. You still need decision makers. You still need to follow

through with your decisions. That has been a problem. But at least

you would have the mechanics in place.

I think there are some things that can be done, but inherently

we have a constitutional problem saying how you are going to organize the President’s operation. I think that is going to be a difficult

one to solve.

The CHAIRMAN. Grand strategy review. I am intrigued by that

because you are so correct.

Recently, the chief of Naval operations, Mike Mullen, gave a

speech stating that we were in need of a strategic plan for the

Navy, sea power. Strategic review, for lack of a better phrase. And

he set forth certain criteria in that speech. I am not sure if you are

familiar with it or not. But it was reflected in a recent news story.

Let me ask each of you very briefly.

37

What would you include in your grand strategy review, and since

you mentioned the phrase first, Dr. Krepinevich, we will let you answer the question first.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think it would have to focus on the three

principal challenges that we see to our security, which I think radical Islamism being one, but I think in the larger context we are

looking at an increasingly disordered world for a number of reasons. And so essentially how to deal with that.

The second, the consequences of a more proliferated world, particularly with respect to nuclear weapons. And third, how to deal

with the rise of China, not that China is the second coming of the

Soviet Union. But we have seen, as history shows us, that rising

powers in the past, if the situation isn’t tended to, can sometimes

produce very unwelcome outcomes.

And I think given those three challenges, then you need to look

at the geopolitical situation, the military situation, the economic

situation as well as I would say the social situation. And here I am

just cribbing directly off of Truman and Eisenhower.

They—Eisenhower’s guidance, he had three principal elements of

guidance in terms of looking at the challenges he saw. One was he

would support no grand strategy that undermined the economic

foundation of the country, and certainly there is a lot we need to

do to get our economic foundation in better shape.

And that also gets to the issue of energy dependence and these

kind of issues.

Second, he would support no strategy that would not be supported by our critical allies. I think we are in a situation today

where we are not quite sure, given the very different kind of problems who we confront, who our critical allies are going to be in five

or ten years. Particularly since the focus of the problem has moved

from Europe really to the Middle East, south Asia and east Asia.

And we are probably going to find allies in these tougher neighborhoods, I think, more in the future than we will, perhaps, in

some of the traditional areas.

And third, he would not support a new strategy that ran a high

risk of nuclear war. And again here, I think one of the critical

issues is how do we prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.

So, again, I think you would have to look very comprehensively

and from that, begin to distill what you saw as, again, the major

contingencies, the major scenarios that you would have to address,

make sure they are representative enough so that you cover what

you consider to be the full waterfront of potential problems. And

then ask, you know, bring together some very smart people to work

on it.

It was Paul Nitsa and a few others in the Truman Administration. Eisenhower formed three groups. Sent them over to the National Defense University. They worked seven days a week for six

weeks. George Kennan headed one of the groups. They came back

to report to Eisenhower in the White House Solarium, hence the

phrase Solarium Project, and what is astounding to me is George

Kennan, who had an enormous ego, himself writes later when they

all finished, Eisenhower stood up and spoke extemporaneously for

38

45 minutes on grand strategy and in the course of that 45 minutes

proved himself the intellectual superior of everyone in the room.

I think that is the kind of effort, the level of effort and the kind

of firepower that we need to bring to bear. And again, you really

do get into some of these broad issues. The Eisenhower review, just

very quickly to sum up, you got into areas like where to invest in

science and technology, the whole issue of Homeland Defense, alliance relationships, expanding the alliance relationships and so on.

It really was profound in terms of its scope.

The CHAIRMAN. Was that the last time we got it right?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. That was the last time I think we had the kind

of circumstance that we have today. The Soviet Union was our ally

until the middle 1940’s. All of a sudden, it is an enemy. It is a new

ideology. It is not fascism. It is communism. Much more virulent.

Atomic weapons, hydrogen weapons, ballistic missiles, we were

looking for the first time at an existential threat to our homeland,

and if you look at the situation now, again, the issue of the forces

of disorder, as was mentioned before, I think, their ability to organize, direct efforts, coordinate efforts and their access to ever increasing amounts of destructive power whether potentially nuclear,

radiological or biological weapons, makes them a potential largescale threat to this country.

The issue of rogue states armed with nuclear weapons perhaps

trafficking in fissile materials, using these weapons and then the

issue of China which, again, we don’t know what their intentions

are but their building capabilities, for example, to challenge our

ability to access and control the global commons: Space, cyber

space, the sea and the undersea.

And this is a very different kind of problem set than we are comfortable and familiar with. And that is why I say there is a comparison between now and that period in the late 1940’s and early

1950’s. So we got it right enough then that we won the Cold War.

We are in the very unusual period again, and it is extremely important that we get it right this time as well.

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Hamre.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I think there are four factors that when they are

combined, create the peril of our time.

I think the first is the residue of the Cold War that left lots of

nuclear, biological, chemical weapons.

I think we have the rise of transnational terrorist organizations

that embrace a suicide approach to warfare. We have irresponsible

nation states that give harbor to these transnational actors. And

then we have an air of globalization where we make it very easy

for people to move about.

And I think it is those four in combination that create the peril

of the era we are in and I think we need to design a grand strategy

that deals with those four elements. I don’t think we have in place

that grand strategy.

At the core obviously is building stronger capabilities in government around the world and establishing closer working ties with

those governments, and we are going to have to build from the bottom up a network that is going to help us prevail against this

threat. It is going to take a long time. But I think it deals with

those four things.

39

And if I could ask one thing of this committee today is that you

take as a priority trying to get the government focused on how do

we prevent nuclear terrorism more than anything that is the existential threat that we face as a country.

Another 9/11 or where they fly into buildings, that will be a bad

day, but that will not be an existential day for American democracy. But if a nuclear device goes off in a major city in the country,

that will take American constitutional democracy down for some

period of time.

And we can’t afford that. And we need a comprehensive strategy

for dealing with that.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Just one final point. If you look at the deliberations of NSC 68 and the Solarium project, what Dr. Hamre said

was very important. Not only were they concerned about the existential threat to the survival and security of the United States, but

also what they would have to do to ensure it. In other words, would

we need to develop a strategy that is that to began to compromise

our civil liberties and our way of life that we stopped being who

we are. And that has got to be a critical part of any grand strategy

that is developed.

The CHAIRMAN. Excellent. Thank you.

Ms. Bordallo, and then we will go to the second round.

Ms. BORDALLO. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank

you for holding this meeting.

To me it is very important for our new majority to hold oversight

hearings on the performance of the Department of Defense, and I

think we are very fortunate this morning and this afternoon to

have two very informed witnesses to be with us.

To that end, I feel that there is a critical piece lacking in these

discussions, and that is the role of the Department of Defense in

homeland defense and in support of civilian authorities.

To any of the witnesses who wish to answer, at present, the current statutory mission of the Department of Defense does not explicitly include a requirement to provide support to civilian authorities in times of domestic emergencies.

In the post 9/11 world with its increased terrorist threats, it

seems prudent for us to for acknowledge a more integrated civil

military capability to protect Americans from any future catastrophe. So do you agree that the formal mission and requirements

of DOD should be extended to include providing support to civilian

authorities?

Dr. HAMRE. If I might begin, and I will turn to Andy.

I think this is a crucial issue. And it is a very difficult issue because Americans don’t feel comfortable having American soldiers

driving around their streets. They feel comfortable if they are policemen or if they are National Guardsmen, but they are very uneasy if they are military people. And yet we know that a catastrophic event will be so large and so horrible it will require the

Department of Defense to get involved. And so we have this dilemma. We don’t feel comfortable working with the military working with the civilian response authorities in peacetime, and yet we

know we are going to need it in wartime.

So we have this organizational problem. How are we going to

bridge across that gap?

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I don’t think we have it right now. I think that the idea that we

will—that the Defense Department only deals with war and the

Department of Homeland Security only deals with consequences is

not going to work. We know that there is one core competence that

the Department has which is to carry out an order when the President gives it to you. And we know the President is going to tell us

that we have to get involved to help when it happens.

Now if I could make one recommendation that I think would help

in the near term.

The Department of Homeland Security is struggling, to be candid. It doesn’t have the kind of operational culture yet. It will get

it at some point, but it does not have it now.

It doesn’t have the kind of operational culture that the Defense

Department has when it runs command centers.

I would personally like to see that NORTHCOM, the northern

command which is located out in Colorado, it is too far away from

Washington to get integrated with domestic response. I would like

it like it to have a Washington liaison organization that provides

command and control interface with the Department of Homeland

Security. And that it become the core around which we have a

seamless integration between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. I think it can be done, and I

think it can be done with a very straightforward organizational implementation.

I would be delighted to come up and talk with you about it some

time because I think it would make a great difference.

Ms. BORDALLO. Thank you.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would agree with what Dr. Hamre said at

least in terms of what the Defense Department, the attitude that

I sense, and I think it is not only confined to them, this is something that we are not used to doing. We play away games. We don’t

play home games. So this is not—it is kind of uncomfortable.

Second, there is no money in it. You know, nobody is going to

drop a huge slug of money that we are aware of to help us support

this mission.

Third, there is a civil liberties issues, as Dr. Hamre says, you

know. It has all sorts of concerns about men on horseback and the

military running things inside the country. So there is that issue.

So for a number of reasons, unfamiliarity, lack of resources concerns about negative reaction, the military, in my sense, has kept

this at arm’s length.

But as you point out and as we discussed, the ability to respond

very quickly to an attack like this may be critical, especially in the

event of a biological attack, for example. The ability to identify

that, to respond very quickly, to provide support for those affected

but also to quarantine an area, all of this is going to have to happen exceedingly fast. And what you don’t get from, you know, Justice is responsible for this and the Coast Guard is responsible for

this and the military that and NORTHCOM—is speed of response.

You just don’t get it.

And, again, my suggestion would be to keep posing that question

and say look, I am not—I don’t care about operational net assessment organizations or that staff. I want to know how you are going

to solve this problem. I am giving you a problem. It is a problem

41

we are all worried about. It is on our top ten list. How are you

going to solve it and put the burden on them as part of your oversight to say well now, here is a contingency. Here is how we would

operate and then, of course, you have to begin to practice oversight

in terms of what makes sense and what doesn’t. And there are

going to be a lot of embedded assumptions and a lot of magic will

likely happen the first time around in terms of things that work

seamlessly that you know in your gut can’t.

And that is the great virtue of the Congressional oversight system. You could just keep pressing and pressing and pressing until

you get an answer. And you have got the power of the purse. As

Congressman Sestak says, that certainly gets people’s attention.

And you also have to have the power, at least in Congress in certain cases, to approve the appointment of certain people to senior

positions and you can press them on those occasions as well.

Ms. BORDALLO. Well, after hearing the two of you, I think I agree

that it is important that we continue to pursue this.

Do you believe, my next question, the National Guard and the

Reserve Commissions findings and this committee’s passage of the

National Guard Empowerment Act are remedy enough in solving

DOD’s cultural avoidance of embracing the homeland defense and

civil support? Civil support mission?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I have to confess that I am not familiar——

Dr. HAMRE. I know some about it.

But first of all, we have to start with the premise that the National Guard is forward deployed for homeland security. They

should be the lead for the Department of Defense in working on

homeland security issues.

I think a good deal of the legislation or a good deal of the recommendations however deal a lot with the internal dynamics and

politics in terms of the reserve components and the active. And

that is a sensitive complicated issue—first of all, Andy and I would

need to study it. I would be happy to come up and talk with you

about it. But to the basic point you are raising, isn’t the role of the

reserve components to be the forward deployed leading element in

homeland security

Ms. BORDALLO. The reasons I brought these questions up, Mr.

Chairman, is the failures of Katrina, and I remember the guard responded but the integration with the home department of Homeland Security was poor, and I would very much like to meet with

you and further discuss this if it could be possible.

The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentlelady.

Mr. Hunter just mentioned to me that the two of you are so good

that we hate to let you go.

With that, Mr. Hunter.

Mr. HUNTER. Thank you Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen, thank

you for having some endurance here today and, again, for your

great contribution to our deliberation. It has been great.

Let me ask you a question, Mr. Hamre.

You talked about the threat of the nuclear device. And what that

would tend to lead me to, and I think the logical conclusion that

most folks would derive, is this: That because that amounts to

enormous leverage for a rogue nation or even a group should they

acquire such a device, that a policy of pre-emption should be very

42

carefully considered. That is, if this is the age of leverage where

just one or two people or a small group of people can hold a nation

literally in terror by the delivery—hiding of a device in an urban

area in a city, and then a series of blackmail demands, that the

policy whereas we have always recoiled in a cultural way from a

policy of pre-emption, that that is something that civilized nations

don’t do. They don’t go in and take out things before they occur.

And probably on the heels of the Iraq operation, there will be even

more political pressure never to do that.

But don’t you think that that should invite a new discussion on

the policy of presumption?

And my other question—I would like you, Mr. Krepinevich, to

talk about that.

But the second question is, a big piece of this, and the ability of

on your enemies to gain leverage over us is something that the

military can’t control and that is technology transfer. And what a

civilian company can do to this country in terms of moving technology that lends itself to weapons of mass destruction in many

cases or a community of companies, for example, like the A.Q.

Khan network, is much more dangerous than a military operation.

And it is something that the military is not in a position to avoid

because the regulations and the system that constructs the flow of

killing technology from our shores and from the shores of our allies

is basically a domestic policy.

It is a policy in which security interests regularly collide with

commercial interests, the interests and the need to make a buck.

And typically the security interests lose.

I mean, that is why we have shipped tons of dual use capability

to China, and there has been almost no review of the end use of

that dual use capability. And I think one time I checked on the

super computers that had moved over ostensibly to benign organizations in China, and I think out of something like in excess of a

hundred shipments, there was precisely one determination that the

end use was, in fact, had been—as had been described on the initial application for transfer.

So do you think we need to have a new regime of technology control, not only for the United States but for our allies?

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, you really should have a dedicated hearing just

to this subject. I think this is a huge, very important subject. And

it is so much more complicated today because, you know, 50 years

ago when we were doing technology control, our manufacturing

processes were limited, so basically our engineers and scientists

had to be close to where we made things. So you found it concentrated and it was easier to put controls around it.

We are now living in an era where things are done virtually

around the world.

So designing a regime of technology control that really does stop

bad things from happening and doesn’t stop good commerce from

happening is extraordinarily more difficult today. And I really

would like to talk with you about it, and I think it would be useful

for you to think about doing that as a hearing.

But it is very hard.

And especially in an era where 50 years ago, 85 to 90 percent

of all of the advanced technology was in the United States, and

43

that is just not the case anymore. So it is a much more complicated

problem today.

So I would love to talk with you about that.

Sir, I will be very brief on the issue you said about pre-emption.

If we really did know who and where a group got an illicit nuclear device was, of course we would do that. It is a risky issue now

because of the question of salvage fusing. In the attack will they

simply detonate on location, and that is a real complication that we

have to think our way through very clearly.

It has to be part of the strategy, but it can’t be the only part of

the strategy. We need to do a lot more to reduce the amount of nuclear material and its loose stewardship around the world.

Russia continues to have over 10,000 warheads. For what purpose? You know, they could easily—one could easily fall in the

wrong hands. We have got to get the get nuclear material in control, we have got to get better forensics so that we can get accountability if something goes off, whose was it. So that you can hold

them accountable.

The best way to stop diversion of nuclear material is for a country to know if it is diverted from their country they are going to

be held accountable. There are so many things we need to do. And

I include the pre-emption where we have the capacity.

But our current capacity to detect is very limited. We can’t go

into it in a public setting. It is very limited.

We need better detection capability and tools, and then we need

to integrate that into a broad strategy.

I would love to talk with you about it both issues.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. On pre-emption and then on technology transfer.

Another thing that is somewhat similar to the 1950’s, and right

now is in the 1950’s, there was an enormous amount of intellectual

effort devoted to understanding what I would call the first nuclear

regime, the United States and the Soviet Union having large numbers of nuclear weapons. We are in an entirely different regime

now and moving to in every way, every day it seems, a multi-polar

nuclear world, a broad range of nuclear powers, potential, as Dr.

Hamre says, for some non-state entities.

In the case of non-state entities we might be able to make the

argument that we are already at war and so pre-emption is something that we can do and not define it as such.

But I share your concerns.

For example, North Korea sells everything that they can lay

their hands on. Why wouldn’t they at some point begin to sell

fissile material, and what would they do if we found that out?

In terms of the grand strategy element, one that we have been

encouraged to think about is not only trying to prevent this, but

how does the world change after an event like this?

Things that the American people would never sanction prior to

the kind of nuclear event that Dr. Hamre talks about would, I am

afraid, become all too plausible once it did.

The strategic degrees of freedom if you will would expand dramatically, and we saw that after 9/11. We saw it after 12/7, which

was even bigger event in history, December 7th.

44

But in World War II, once we were hit at Pearl Harbor, we began

unrestricted submarine warfare, something we went to war over

against Germany in World War I. And we had condemned the German Luftwasa for bombing Warsaw and Rotterdam, and we did it

ten times over against Japan and Germany.

You have to think about the consequences in that context, too.

There may be a much broader latitude on the American people for

pre-emption but the strategic question becomes who do I go after?

How do I pre-empt? What capabilities do I have now to execute this

new strategic degree of freedom?

In terms of technology transfer. One of the big differences from

this era in the Cold War era is the fact that so much of the advancing technologies is occurring out in the open in the commercial sector. Not in weapons labs. When you think about nuclear weapons

and ballistic missiles, there were weapons laboratories and they

really did have the keys on this technology and they had it locked

up pretty well, and we could have regimes like COCOM.

The other thing is the ubiquitousness of information. The Internet, that we developed, spreads information around at a fantastic

rate in ways you can’t put your fingers in the dike. Contrast that

with what happened after Einstein sent the letter to Roosevelt

warning about the dangers of what is going on in physics development. All of a sudden, discussion in the physics literature just goes

away about these kind of issues.

It would seem to me inconceivable that you could block that kind

of information today about biotechnology, which gets me back to

my earlier point which is if you can’t compete by restricting technology, then you have to compete based on the ability to exploit it

more rapidly than your enemies.

This gets back to time base competition. So it is not just competition just in terms of reacting to particular problems, but it is the

ability to translate very quickly technology that is broadly available into military capabilities that can help us defend our security.

More quickly than our enemies can.

Dr. HAMRE. Mr. Hunter, would you let me offer one further——

Mr. HUNTER. I sure will.

The CHAIRMAN. Go ahead.

Mr. HUNTER. Before you do that. I want to note one. You mentioned the letter that Einstein sent Roosevelt.

Edward Teller told me one time about a story about when he—

was it Enrico Fermi? Was Fermi a great physicist?

They went to try to find Einstein to sit down to talk about the

letter they were going were going to send to Roosevelt, and I think

he lived in Long Island and Teller said that he had to drive because Fermi couldn’t drive or else he couldn’t drive so Fermi drove.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. What actually happened, Teller was a Hungarian refugee, so was this fellow Leo Szilard, who was a physicist,

and it was the summer of 1939 and Einstein was vacationing on

the south shore of Long Island, and Zolard didn’t drive. So they got

in the car and drove out there and they sat down with Einstein

and they convinced him this he needed to write a letter to President Roosevelt. Only his stature would get the attention of the

President. That is how the Manhattan Project got started.

45

Mr. HUNTER. That is how Teller told me how they found him.

They said they saw a little blond girl jumping rope, and Teller said

they pulled up and he rolled the window down, and he said little

girl, and she stopped jumping rope, and he said, where is Professor

Einstein with that very heavy Hungarian accent to the end, and

she said I have no idea and then he said, where is the old man

with all of the white fluffy hair. And the little girl said, right over

there. And they went up to the—they went up to the door and

knocked and said Einstein came out in his bathrobe and invited

him in and went over the letter.

So sometimes it pays to know little girls that are jumping rope.

The CHAIRMAN. It is also nice to see my California friend becoming such a historian.

Mr. HUNTER. I am following your lead here.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.

Ms. Davis, please.

Mr. HUNTER. Did you want to answer something else?

Dr. HAMRE. Just to drive a point about how crucial this issue of

nuclear terrorism is and how it relates to responding as a Nation.

When I was at DOD, we did an exercise, we simulated a terrorist

incident destroying a major urban city in the United States. And

the issues you have to confront there are just mind numbing. How

do you dispose of 16,000 radioactive corpses? Within the first hour

there is a lethal plume of radiation that has been laid over a population. You have got to get those people out. Where did it go? You

can get a theoretical calculation on where it went, but how do you

know for sure where it went, and how do you tell people they are

in that area?

You have got another plume where it is not lethal and people

need to leave and how do you tell those people where to go? Who

protects their homes after you tell them to leave? Do they take

their pets with them? Or what are you going to do?

How are you going to feed 150,000 people who are displaced for

3 months from their homes while you are waiting for the radiation

to die down? What do you do with the 500,000 cattle that have

walked down in the water shed and died in the water shed because

they have been exposed to radiation poisoning?

How are you going to keep a father from not going down to find

his kid in a day care center because it is in that plume where there

is lethal radiation?

What are you going to do? These are frightening ideas, and all

of that is very real. There is only one way we can avoid that horror,

and that is to prevent that. We have to find a way to make sure

that we never have a nuclear terrorist incident in this country.

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Snyder has a question.

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Hamre, in your opening statement you said that

defense agencies don’t have good oversight. I think you were using

a broader definition of oversight. I assume what you meant was the

management within the Pentagon. Did you also mean congressional oversight or were you primarily talking about Pentagon

oversight?

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I think, in general, congressional oversight depends on good management oversight in the Department; and if

you don’t have good management oversight in the Department, you

46

probably are not going to have good oversight from Congress because you don’t have as much that you can work from.

Right now, every defense agency reports to the Secretary of Defense through an Assistant Secretary; and those guys are staff

guys. I mean, I was one of those guys. I had finance and accounting

service reported to the Secretary through me. I was the comptroller

at the time. I wasn’t the guy that should have been overseeing the

business management in that sense. I took an interest in it.

But most of the guys that really have oversight of the defense

agencies, it is a small, irritating part of their duties. They would

rather be doing policy. They would rather be doing policy oversight

and guidance than they would overseeing how you run a commissary or how you run a depot or how you run a contract administration office.

So I believe that we need to have real management overseeing

those things so that you can hold them accountable, just like we

hold the Secretary of the Army accountable for what goes on in the

Army. That is why I believe an Under Secretary for Management

that has line responsibilities would be good.

Dr. SNYDER. I wanted to ask you a very specific question, and

then I will be done.

You all have both taken a very broad picture of kind of the upper

level management kind of issues that we are talking about here,

and where does the issue of foreign language skills for our guys

and gals on the ground right now that are going door to door in

Baghdad—we are now over four years into this war, and I think

our Arabic language training is—I mean, the number of people that

we have that speak Arabic is still infinitesimal from what I think

it ought to be.

Where does that type of skill—you say the core competencies are

very good. I would argue if you still have, after this length of time,

pretty poor ability to communicate with the level of language that

we ought to have this far into the war, I would argue that our core

competencies are not as good as they ought to be. I mean, where

does that fit in y’all’s analysis of where we are at?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. As I mentioned, I think, earlier, I think a core

competency that the U.S. military might want to consider developing is the ability to operate on complex cultural terrain. And of

course this war has highlighted the fact that in many ways, particularly in this part of the world, we are deficient in terms of not

only in terms of the language but how well do we understand cultural mores, taboos, this sort of things.

Dr. SNYDER. That shouldn’t be a new lesson. That is a lesson

that we should have learned——

Dr. KREPINEVICH. We are learning it, and there are changes. I

sat on a board last year reviewing the U.S. Marine Corps’s professional military education, and there is a much stronger emphasis

that we recommended not only on language skills but also in terms

of understanding culture. You can pick up 500 words of the language, but you really need to understand the culture as well. As

least that was the result of our efforts. There were about eight of

us.

But, also, you need to understand—you need to understand the

profile of who the leaders are in this particular part of the world.

47

You may need to know in parts of the world where they have tribal

and clan structures, what are the relationships among them? Because those may be your allies in that part of the world in that conflict, and they have their long-standing animosities and relationships and so on. And you have to understand how being the ally

of one is influencing your relation with others.

So there is that issue, as well as identifying leaders. You would

like to be able to find a charismatic leader. In the Philippines, for

example, we came upon——

Dr. SNYDER. Excuse me, you moved that way up the food chain.

I am talking about the guy on the ground in terms of foreign language skills.

It just seems like the kind of urban warfare and the things that

we need to be doing, I don’t expect a Private First Class (PFC) in

the Marine Corps to be identifying a foreign leader, but it is a reasonable expectation of the American people that they should be

trained—I would think that we would have a greater number of

people with the kind of Arabic language skills that they could keep

themselves from getting into hot spots that they might be able to

avoid if they could just communicate.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. The short answer is that particularly the Army

and the Marine Corps are working on it and making improvements, but they have a long way to go.

Dr. HAMRE. Mr. Snyder, there is another dimension to reinforce

what you are saying. Because we did not have language skills in

depth, we tended to bring in and trust anybody who spoke English;

and that is one of the reasons why we have got spies throughout

the operation.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.

I did an article quite some time ago on the frontier wars and

asymmetrical warfare, and what you mentioned about tribalism

can be traced back to our earlier days when there was tribalism in

the frontiers and trying to have one or two tribes on your side as

opposed to the Shawnees or whoever else was out there on the

other side. As well as studying that era, it was asymmetric warfare

at its height with a different set of weapons systems called tomahawks, bows, arrows, knives. But it is the same thing.

I would hope our war colleges would take to heart that type of

study. Whether they read my article or not does not make any difference, but I think you learn an awful lot from reading of yesteryear.

Mrs. Davis.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman; and

thank you all for being here again for a second round and hopefully

a quick round on my part.

But I wanted to just go back to the issue of leadership and developing that. You mentioned, as we all know, there is just no substitute for experience and for the length of time that an individual

has been exposed to any particular problem. What else can you tell

us about how we begin to try and train people in that kind of crossjurisdictional way, taking what is good from military training and

develop that more in the civic sector? Do you have any thoughts

about that that we might glean that perhaps has not been said?

48

And the other question really just goes to the heart of some of

the issues that you are talking about in terms of the role that the

armed service department plays vis-a-vis the intelligence, either

committee, community, et cetera.

How do you feel in our role as oversight that we can play a

more—I am not sure it is a central role because we are not trying

to overstep one’s jurisdiction. How do you think the Armed Services

Committee can be better apprised as we deal with these issues that

are so critically, critically important?

And, finally, is there anything you haven’t said today that you

would like to say?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. Oh, goodness, I will try and be brief.

A few additional things with respect to leadership. One is, in periods where you do have this large-scale change and you do identify

a critical leader, senior person, exceptions are often made to keep

that person in that position for an extended period of time because

it does take a while to overcome a lot of the friction that Dr. Hamre

talked about.

More specifically, and this is sort of in the role of posing questions, take the Army, for example, right now. The Army is going

to reset itself and modify itself based on a number of factors. The

Army has a critical decision to make: Is it going to reset itself and

orient itself on major conventional warfare or reset itself with an

emphasis on irregular warfare?

Depending on the answer to that question, you are going to need

a different set of leaders. Different people will excel in one particular kind of warfare that won’t in the other. You are going to need

different training, different education, different career progression.

We are engaged in some work on that right now. I would be

happy to come and brief you on it. But it does really lead to a different career progression path, different kinds of education, and

what is most interesting from an analytic point of view, it really

changes the cultural hierarchy within the Army in a way that has

not been changed for nearly a century.

And this is profound. This is as important in resetting the Army

as the anywhere between $60 and $160 billion it is going to cost

to replace the equipment.

With respect to intelligence, again, I think from my point of view

that is a very perceptive comment, particularly when you are looking at irregular warfare which is confronting us in the immediate

sense. It is very much an intelligence war. If we know who the

enemy is and where the enemy is, the war is over.

The Army that I grew up in, it was always, ‘‘Do we have enough

tanks to stop the Soviets? Do we have enough planes and ships and

artillery and submarines?’’ That is not the problem here. The problem is identifying who these people are and where they are.

So the intelligence dimension of this kind of competition is extraordinarily high in a relative sense to what we are used to; and

it is part of the oversight responsibility of this committee to understand what the military is doing to win that intelligence war that

can, as much as any weapons system or program, to achieve success.

The CHAIRMAN. May I interrupt right there, Mrs. Davis?

49

Are you saying that we don’t give enough personnel or assets or

attention to the military intelligence?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I am saying, Mr. Chairman—I don’t know the

answer to that question. My sense, though, given our own admission, our own admission being the Department’s admission of how

poorly we understand the cultural terrain we are operating on, I

think in the areas of human intelligence (HUMINT) in particular

we are almost certainly deficient; and, of course, it is an area that

is absolutely essential in irregular warfare. It is dominated by

human intelligence. Lesser so signals intelligence (SIGINT), and

then you go on up the chain there. But certainly in the area of

HUMINT I think we are incredibly deficient.

The CHAIRMAN. Mrs. Davis go ahead. Thank you.

Dr. HAMRE. I will be very brief. We don’t do well in developing

operational leadership skills in civilian agencies, and I would suggest that there are three things we should explore.

One, there aren’t enough civilians. They just buy enough people

to fill every single job they have. They don’t have extras to send

them off to training or send them off for a year in another agency

for experience. There aren’t enough people in leadership positions

that we can afford to train them well. So that is one thing we could

do.

Second, DOD does a very good job with war games and simulations; and if we could find a way to bring more simulation, war

gaming into civilian agencies, the kinds of problems they are going

to confront when they are involved in an unanticipated emergency

and let them think it through in advance. We do this all the time

in DOD, and that is good.

Of course, that means you have to have the civilians that can

take the two weeks off to go to a war game; and, right now, we can

don’t have it. But if we do fix that that would be a good thing.

The third thing we need to do is encourage them to build a lessons-learned capability like we do in DOD. We have an office in

DOD that after every exercise—this is in our culture—we say,

what went right? What went wrong? What went well? What did not

go well? How do we learn from this? And we systematically capture

the lessons of previous experiences and bring them forward to future planning.

Other agencies don’t do that. And if we could do those three

things: buy more people, do more war gaming and simulation, and

great create an explicit lessons learned process—right now, lessons

learned in the domestic agency tends to be as people get older they

have lived through more experiences. It would be good to systematize that. We have done that in DOD. I think that would be helpful.

And if I may, briefly, on intelligence in civil society, obviously,

this is the hardest question. Americans want to be protected by the

government, and they want to be protected from the government,

and the only way to reconcile those two is through strong congressional oversight of the intelligence process. We have to have stronger domestic surveillance in this country, but none of us will trust

it unless we know that you are watching out to protect us.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much.

Mr. Jones.

50

Mr. JONES. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much; and, Dr.

Krepinevich—I hope I did not do too poorly with the name. I have

been practicing. That is the reason I came back. I did not do well,

I apologize for that.

I want to ask you and Dr. Hamre—I want to go back just briefly.

My comments about spending, very little control, the agencies, the

DOD being more efficient. But I want to go a little bit further this

time. You gentlemen are experts in your fields and probably other

fields as well.

This Nation right now, according to the Blue Dogs, is about $8.8

trillion in debt. David Walker, the Comptroller General of the

GAO, says the true debt of this Nation is about $53 trillion.

I am asking you professionals, you experts, that when—we had

a classified briefing on China last week. I sit here and listen very

intently and carefully because there is so much I don’t know, and

I am trying to learn. But how in the world, knowing that President

Reagan brought the Soviet Union down because of the arms race.

They tried to compete. They had a weak economy or shaky economy, and they could not compete. How long can this country, knowing that you know about the roles and missions and the different

systems that this country needs to fight terrorism or fight a China

or North Korea, where are we going and how will we be able to

fund what we need if this country does not get serious about being

more frugal and efficient with the taxpayers’ money?

And I am not talking about DOD. I am just saying, I wonder

where we are going. Is this of any concern to you as to what this

will mean to our military at the rate we are going?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I am not sure if you were here when we were

talking about a grand strategy review. But we talked about the review in the early 1950’s, and one of the key elements President Eisenhower gave in coming up with this review was that he would

not support any grand strategy that undermined the economic

foundation of the country because he viewed that as critical to this

country’s long-term success.

And if you look at some of the recent trends in terms of the geopolitical environment certainly relative to the 1990’s, the challenges we face, the threats that we face today are on a much greater scale than the North Koreas and the Iraqs that we worried

about principally in the 1990’s. Radical Islamism, the needs for

homeland defense, concerns about loose nuclear weapons and the

efforts that it will take to develop counters to that, nuclear armed

rogue states, the rise of China, these are problems on a much

greater scale than we confronted in the 1990’s.

And not only that, but we have a number of adversaries who are

pursuing what people in the Pentagon call cost-imposing strategies.

Very simply a cost-imposing strategy is you spend a million dollars

to attack the World Trade Center leading the United States to

spend $40 billion trying to keep you from doing it.

So the increase in scale, the application of cost-imposing strategies and, quite frankly, the decline in support from our allies—either because they choose to act as free riders or because they have

less confidence in our leadership—all of this means that we cannot

afford to take a cavalier approach to our economic foundation, as

President Eisenhower warned us.

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And the fact that we have these deficits, that we are passing on

these problems to future generations, that we have borrowed and

become the world’s biggest debtor nation, not as we did in the late

19th century, to build the infrastructure of this country to improve

our productive capacity, but rather basically for consumption purposes, is really eroding our flexibility to pursue certain kinds of

strategies that could again effectively provide for our security.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I don’t think America can remain a global superpower if it has economic feet of clay.

Mr. JONES. Mr. Chairman, may I ask just one quick question?

How much time do we have, in your opinion, to reverse where we

are going?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. That is sort of like predicting where the stock

market is going to be.

Mr. JONES. I understand.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. A lot of it has to do with the psychology of

Americans, of people who hold our debt. I mean, there are myriad

factors that go into creating an economic crisis of confidence. And

the instability in the oil-producing countries, many of them which

could exacerbate our economic circumstances. But certainly there

are numerous clouds on the horizon, and you know it is coming.

Whether it is coming sooner or later, it is coming if we persist in

this particular path that we are on now.

Dr. HAMRE. If I could just say, I don’t know when we run out

of time, but I do know if we don’t do if this year, it is harder next

year. It will be much harder two years from now, much harder five

years from now.

It is not that hard to solve the Social Security problem. It takes

some courage, but it is not that hard. Both parties have to do it

jointly.

Mr. JONES. Yes, sir.

Dr. HAMRE. It is going to be much harder to solve the health care

entitlement problem, because it is an infinitely more complicated

problem, but we have to start now because it will be impossible to

solve if we wait ten years.

Mr. JONES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Sestak for questioning.

Mr. SESTAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think Mr. Jones asked the defining question. I was going to ask

a different question and probably going to end up making a statement, and I always swore when I got here I wouldn’t do that.

But what I am taken with is—and you kind of said some of these

things—is you have laid out some of the challenges of the future.

And they all were a little different: proliferation, globalization,

loose nukes, irresponsible nation states that harbor terrorists, and

anti-access. If I were to step back and say, okay, what is the one

common theme that is among those, you also then time and again

said fast response. Even in exploiting getting technology quicker

than the other one, you said, Dr. Hamre, detection quickly or words

to that effect.

As I step back and I hear Mr. Jones bring up China, anti-access,

70, 75 submarines. We will probably end up 49, maybe, if we go

the way we are, probably lower.

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You, Dr. Hamre, seemed to throw out the real issue here, both

here in Congress and over there. You said we have got some leftover stuff from the Cold War. I would venture to say we have some

leftover cultural ethos from the Cold War. Everything you just

mentioned, why are we saying we are measuring ourselves in

greatness by the number of ships? Dr. Krepinevich referred to this.

By the number of brigades? By the number of squadrons? Isn’t that

an output?

So are we here in Congress—and, by the way, we know the Services are—holding on to measuring ourselves in capability by actually measuring capacity vice capability? What if we were all of a

sudden not beholden to the past, however we came to the past,

from shipyards or whatever, and were to say, maybe we don’t need

a submarine to find each one of those 75 submarines, maybe we

just need to sprinkle these cheap little sensors the size of a Coke

can out there. They are interconnected, and wherever it goes we

know where that submarine is, and it sends a signal. You fly a

plane over, and it drops a torpedo.

My issue is, if you could comment on it, are we measuring the

wrong thing? If you now have the tool in the Defense Department—and I know those simulators. They have shown it is not

more ships, it is more C4ISR that is needed. And you come over

here to Congress and you want to find a committee that does

C4ISR, you can’t. I looked.

So my question is how do we change that? If I am not wrong,

it is knowledge. What if we had known Saddam Hussein was going

into Kuwait? What if we had known Japan was going to strike

Pearl Harbor? And what if we know someone is about to launch a

loose nuke? To my mind, you all touched on it, but what is the real

role that we should start a mission that we have to change to and

how do we measure ourselves for that? It seems to me that measuring in numbers of ships ain’t the answer. Dr. Hamre? Dr.

Krepinevich?

Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think the common theme in terms of—one

common theme, anyway—is that we have gone from a century

where the principal threats to our security looked a lot like us: the

Kaiser’s Army, the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Wehrmacht, the

Soviet military. We had ships, they had ships, and so on down the

line. It was a symmetrical threat to a great extent.

The three challenges that I mentioned: radical Islamism, modern

insurgency warfare, rogue nuclear states and China, particularly in

light of the ‘‘Assassin’s Mace’’ literature, is all asymmetrical. We

have done so well we have driven everyone else out of the business.

As you point out, if the competition changes that much, then the

metrics by which you measure success typically change on a great

scale as well.

As you are familiar from your Navy experience, on the one hand,

we continue to measure the number of ships, but, on the other

hand, we also know that even though the fleet is smaller that the

Navy is a much more powerful instrument. It can strike far many

more targets than it could even 15 years ago, almost in multiples.

So I think the answer to how do you define the new metrics is the

new problem set and how do you see yourself solving that problem?

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Just very quickly, you mentioned Pearl Harbor. The way the

Navy saw itself solving the problem of the Japanese navy leading

up to the World War II was the battle line, and the metric was the

weight of the broadside. How many shells in how many minutes

and carriers couldn’t compete because they did not have that kind

of throw rate, that kind of firepower?

After Pearl Harbor, the metrics changed dramatically. It became

could you find the enemy fleet before it found you and how many

bombs could you drop at an extended range using aircraft? So the

metrics changed rather profoundly.

But the history of transformation is the search for the new opportunity or identifying the way to solve the new problem, and in

the process of doing that you begin to identify what the metrics

are. At least that has been the history of it.

Again, I think that is where the committee in its oversight role,

if it can get to the point where it says these are the problems that

this committee is worried about, these are the problems that the

country is worried about, and, quite frankly, if you put them in scenario form, these are the problems that your constituents can understand best and you can find out just what resonates with them

and then put it to the military to give you answers as to how they

intend to solve these problems and use your expertise to begin to

say, well, if that is the way, then these are the metrics that begin

to emerge and these are the sorts of things perhaps we could evaluate you on in terms of what you are buying and what kind of forces

you are fielding and what scale.

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, I think you are right. I mean, we tend to measure things that were measured in the past and we carry it on

through inertia. We haven’t thought about how we should be thinking about our power in this era and how it could change the way

we choose to invest. I think you are absolutely on the right direction.

I am afraid I haven’t thought enough about it deeply enough to

be helpful to you right now. I would like to see a change in how

we think about it. I think very much oriented toward outcomes,

less toward input would be quite constructive. I hope that you will

define this quest broadly.

America’s power has always been based on both its powers of intimidation and its powers of inspiration, and we have let our inspirational powers atrophy. 9/11 changed us from being a confident

and proud Nation and now an angry and frightened Nation, and

I think that did more damage to us than anything. If we can recover the foundations of America’s confidence and optimism in addressing the future, it will be doing more for our national security

than anything I can think we will buy in the defense budget.

The CHAIRMAN. Your last comment is of great concern. How do

we restore this country as an inspirational state? That is what we

grew up with. And being transformed into a state of concern or, as

you mentioned, fear does cause that to atrophy tremendously. How

are we doing? How do we reverse that?

Dr. HAMRE. We all have to work on this together. I mean, I think

this is about—it is so profound. The way we treat foreigners when

they come to get a visa in our embassies. The way we project a fear

when a new idea comes up. Dubai ports and the way that just ran

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away in fear. We are spending too much of our effort on homeland

security with muscle, not brains.

Let’s think our way through this security problem. Let’s just not

just fearfully embrace brute force to try to stop this problem. Let’s

think our way through it. We are a smart, capable, sophisticated

country. We can do better than we are doing.

The CHAIRMAN. A special thanks to each of you. This has been

one of the best hearings that this committee has experienced, and

we are deeply grateful to you, and we hope you will make yourself

available in the days ahead for us. It has just been fantastic having

you here, and we appreciate it very much.

[Whereupon, at 2:06 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. SKELTON

The CHAIRMAN. I am intrigued, Dr. Hamre, about your suggestion in looking at

the problems rather than creating the fistfight that we anticipate in roles and missions within the Department between the services. May I make a request of each

of you to give us a list of five—and for the record, not today—but make a list of

five of those unanswerable questions that should go into the roles and missions mix?

And I realize—I don’t want you to just fly them by the seat of your pants today,

but think about them, and within the very near future give them to us for the

record.

Dr. KREPINEVICH. 1. Grand Strategy: Today, a decade-and-a-half after the Cold

War’s end, the United States is in a position comparable to that which it confronted

in the Cold War’s early days. The tranquil years that characterized the decade following the Soviet Union’s dissolution have been succeeded by troubling times presenting formidable new dangers that may grow only more threatening in the coming

years. Unlike the early Cold War period, however, when the Soviet Union stood out

as by far the greatest danger to U.S. security, there are now three major endurings

challenge to U.S. security-radical Islamism, a rising China, and nuclear proliferation

in Asia. These challenges are sufficiently severe, their potential to threaten the

American people’s security, institutions, and way of life is sufficiently great, and

their character suitably enduring as to require a comprehensive strategy similar to

that which emerged out of the Truman Administration’s NSC–68 and the Eisenhower Administration’s ‘‘Solarium’’ effort in the early Cold War period. The objective

of such a strategy should be to place the United States in the best possible competitive position. Given the character of the competition, the strategy must be sustainable over an extended period, as long as a generation or two if necessary. Consequently, it is imperative that the strategy be the product of a bipartisan effort.

CSBA is exploring grand strategy options and I would be happy to brief you on our

efforts.

2. Army Reset: Congress and the Defense Department must decide how best to

‘‘reset’’ the Army for an era in which irregular warfare is likely to dominate its operations-while retaining the capability to fight a major combat operation (albeit one

quite different from either of the Gulf Wars), if required. The Pentagon’s 2006

Quadrennial Defense Review took an initial step to address this problem when it

called for a strategy that emphasized ‘‘building partner capacity’’ training and

equipping indigenous military forces in those countries threatened by radical elements, and doing the same for the militaries of those countries that stand by us

as allies and partners. The idea is to acknowledge America’s manpower limitations

and to work with allies and partners, to include indigenous forces, to generate the

forces required for sustained irregular warfare operations. Unfortunately, there has

been little in the way of action to back up this noteworthy idea, aside from mandating a significant increase in our special operations forces (SOF).

The Army plans to utilize its 65,000-troop end-strength increase to expand the

number of its active brigade combat teams, which are oriented primarily on conventional warfare operations. I am aware of no plans the Army has to create training

and advising organizations to build ‘‘partner capacity’’ by enabling America’s allies

and partners to ‘‘scale up’’ quickly to meet the challenges that might be posed by

irregular warfare contingencies. In its defense, the Service cites the need to maintain a rotation base of brigades for such conflicts and the need to ‘‘hedge’’ against

a major combat operation characterized by conventional warfare. While the Army

is right to see the need to address these issues, as noted above, the way in which

it is doing so appears highly imbalanced in favor of conventional warfare contingencies.

Put another way, given the overwhelming success of our ground forces in conventional warfare operations, and the shift of rival militaries and nonstate entities toward irregular warfare, orienting 48 active Army brigades, 28 National Guard brigades, and three Marine Corps divisions primarily on conventional warfare operations would appear to reflect a desire to prepare for the kinds of challenges we

would prefer to confront, rather than those we will most likely encounter. The Committee would be well-served to exercise its oversight role in reviewing the Army’s

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reset plans before moving forward with a program that may consume as much as

$100 billion or more.

3. The Nuclear Posture: The United States today exists under a Second Nuclear/Strategic Strike Regime, which emerged as a consequence of the major geopolitical and military-technical changes that have transpired over the past 15 years.

These changes have dramatically altered the competition with respect to strategic

strike operations in general, and nuclear weapons use in particular.

There has been a blurring of the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear

forms of strategic strike, stemming from the rise of precision and cyber strike capabilities, and the shift toward post-industrial economies, which has made the target

base more susceptible to non-nuclear forms of attack. The new strategic strike regime is further complicated by the growing number of states possessing strategic

strike capabilities—nuclear weapons in particular—combined with our lack of understanding as to how they calculate costs and benefits, and their relative tolerance

for taking risks.

Owing to the growing number of nuclear-armed states and the potential for

nonstate entities to possess nuclear weapons, the probability of nuclear use and ambiguous nuclear aggression is increasing. If nuclear weapons are used, there is a significant likelihood that the United States will survive the attack as a functioning

society, with all the consequences that entails. Whether the attack occurs at home

or abroad, the nation will likely be confronted with a massive stability operations

challenge for which it is currently ill-prepared.

Despite the dramatic change in the character of the military competition with respect to nuclear weapons and strategic strike, comparatively little study has been

given to the matter-especially when measured against the analysis undertaken in

the first decade or so of the First Nuclear/Strategic Strike Regime. The United

States has yet to develop a comprehensive strategy for the Second Nuclear/Strategic

Strike Regime. Given the consequences of failure in this aspect of the military competition, high priority should be given to this matter.

4. Post-Iraq Strategy: It is important to realize that while Iraq is the ‘‘central

front’’ in the war with Radical Islamists, it is also one campaign in a ‘‘long war’’

that may stretch out over decades. If we withdraw the bulk of our forces (or all our

forces) from Iraq without achieving our minimal objectives, this defeat may be our

‘‘Dunkirk,’’ but it will not likely be our ‘‘Saigon.’’ We will not be able to ‘‘call it a

day.’’ The war with the forces of instability and radicalism in that part of the world

will almost certainly go on, just as Britain’s war with Germany continued after it

withdrew from the Continent.

But we need a strategy, lest we be left grasping for one as we did during the onset

of Phase IV operations in Iraq in the summer of 2003. The strategy must acknowledge that the conflict has multiple dimensions, and the primary theater runs from

the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. The war is certainly

seen in that context by Iran. We need to think in strategic terms how we might

shape events in our favor over the longer term. We can, to a significant extent, still

shape our future. The Committee can do much useful work here by encouraging a

strategy for the theater of war—not just the ‘‘central front.’’

5. Dissuasion Strategies: Dissuasion is defined as actions taken to increase the

target’s perception of the anticipated cost and/or decrease its perception of the likely

benefits from developing, expanding, or transferring a military capability that would

be threatening or otherwise undesirable from the U.S. perspective. In simpler terms,

dissuasion can be viewed as a kind of ‘‘pre-deterrence’’ in which the target is discouraged, not from employing the military capabilities it possesses, but from creating such capabilities in the first place.

Dissuasion, like deterrence, is a means of shaping the behavior of prospective adversaries. Unlike deterrence, however, allies can also be targets of dissuasion. For

example, during the Cold War the United States vigorously pursued dissuasion

strategies to discourage a number of its allies from developing nuclear weapons. Indeed, while it has gained increased attention in recent years, dissuasion is not a

new strategic concept. The Cold War era was also characterized by thinking about

how the United States might shape Soviet behavior. Channeling the ongoing competition with the Soviet Union into more stable and less threatening areas than

those in which they might otherwise be inclined to engage, or into areas where they

functioned relatively ineffectively, was an explicit goal of U.S. defense strategy in

the mid-to-late 1980s. The Cold War ended, however, before it could be firmly institutionalized within the Department of Defense.

Some dissuasion strategy initiatives are best pursued in the light of day, where

the target (or targets) and others can readily discern their presence and effect. On

the other hand, some dissuasion strategies are best pursued covertly, such that a

rival cannot easily discern a direct link between U.S. actions and their intent. This

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is especially useful when an acknowledged link would serve to increase the target’s

resolve to pursue the course of action that is the object of U.S. dissuasion efforts.

Dissuasion strategies should be the province of the Secretary of Defense, a small

number of senior defense decision-makers, and a small analytic staff. Some aspects

of a U.S. strategy will need to remain covert. Thus the fewer people who are aware

of these efforts, the better. Consequently, the Committee might most usefully conduct its oversight role with regard to dissuasion through discrete discussions with

the most senior defense officials.

The CHAIRMAN. I am intrigued, Dr. Hamre, about your suggestion in looking at

the problems rather than creating the fistfight that we anticipate in roles and missions within the Department between the services. May I make a request of each

of you to give us a list of five—and for the record, not today—but make a list of

five of those unanswerable questions that should go into the roles and missions mix?

And I realize—I don’t want you to just fly them by the seat of your pants today,

but think about them, and within the very near future give them to us for the

record.

Dr. HAMRE. I have listed below the five areas where I believe the precise mission

remains opague, and the relative service and/or agency roles undefined.

• Military support to domestic civilian authorities—the creation of U.S.

Northern Command has not resolved fundamental questions about how

the Defense Department will function in coordination with other federal

agencies in times of emergency. There has been considerable attention devoted to hard defense missions (e.g., intercepting commercial aircraft in

flight) but far too little attention to the Defense Department’s role in, and

planning and capabilities for, consequence management and civilian law

enforcement.

• Space management—Despite the Rumsfeld Commission’s recommendations, space management remains troubled in the Department. Mission

advocacy is divided among multiple voices, and there is no clear structure

to coordinate space management on an interagency basis.

• Detection, mitigation and response to domestic nuclear terrorism—This is

the most serious threat we face from terrorism. Indeed, I believe this one

threat vastly overshadows everything else we do in homeland security.

We do not have a coherent plan as a nation to deal with this threat.

There are perhaps a dozen discrete steps or phases in the progression

from a terrorist cell acquiring a nuclear device to its potential detonation

in the United States. The United States government can apply its capabilities at each step of this process, yet we are hampered by the lack of

coherence in our approach. No one entity in the government oversees the

whole, and insufficient coordination is taking place among the many

agencies and bureaus with counterterrorism and counterproliferation responsibilities. Disproportionate resources go into tactical detection within

100 feet, but virtually nothing in other areas. This entire mission area

needs urgent attention.

• Cyber operations—This is an especially difficult mission area because the

most serious and likely threats may well be attacks against non-military

assets. Normal defense missions involve threats to military or governmental assets or the population itself. In this instance, 99% of the cyber

infrastructure is in the private sector. So what is the appropriate role of

the Defense Department—and indeed the entire Federal Government—in

protecting against hostile cyber operations?

• Security, stabilization, reconstruction, and transition (SSTR) operations—

Our armed forces can win any battle, but when it comes to rebuilding

civil society in a conquered nation, we do not do well and we struggle

with basic organization responsibilities in our own government. After four

years, we still lack a reliable structure to integrate the full capabilities

and resources of the Federal Government.

There are undoubtedly more missions for which structured, disciplined study and

oversight are needed. But I would ask you to give high priority to these five issues.

I and my colleagues would be pleased to follow up with you and the Committee at

any time. I also believe you will find an Executive Branch that will accept the need

for work in these areas.

Æ