trained and ready Army in our Nation's history in the vain quest for a utopia which has yet to arrive.

General, your message of "no more Task Force Smiths" is one that should ring true for every American. It is a theme which I have taken up repeatedly on the Senate floor in warnings to my colleagues. While there are legitimate domestic needs that must be met, there can be no substitute for a strong national defense. Maintenance of the national defense is the first duty of every government, and I for one will not contribute to its wholesale dismantlement. The Army must never be forced to draw down so rapidly that it again sends a tiny, ill-prepared and ill-equipped force into harm's way.

Let me assure you that the President's recommendation that we reduce our defense spending by a further $50 billion through 1995 will receive scrutiny by this committee in the months ahead. The Army's fiscal year 1993 share of this proposed reduction spans all accounts, but is particularly pronounced in its procurement budget where a reduction of $3.7 billion is proposed. I believe that this is a much larger percentage reduction than your sister services.

The Army's fiscal year 1993 reduction is 18 times the size of the Navy's proposed $200 million reduction, and is in glaring contrast with the Air Force's $3.7 billion increase. Under the President's proposal the procurement program has been reduced so much that the Army will field no new equipment in the next several years, other than a smattering of Black Hawk helicopters, trucks, and communications equipment.

Mr. Secretary and General Sullivan, the subcommittee looks forward to hearing your views on these and other subjects. Before proceeding with your opening statements, I am pleased to have with us Senator Kasten.

Senator Kasten has another appointment to keep, so may I call upon you for your statement, sir.

Senator KASTEN. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Mr. Secretary, welcome. Let me join Senator Inouye in welcoming you and say that we on the committee want to work with you during the next few months.

HEAVY EQUIPMENT TRANSPORT VEHICLES

I want to thank you, first of all, for coming to Wisconsin recently, for taking time out of your schedule to go to Oshkosh, WI, to visit the Oshkosh Truck Co. I was happy to have visited the plant too. But I want to thank you for the kind words that you said to the people in Oshkosh.

Having said that, let me say that I am surprised that the Army's budget for fiscal year 1993 does not include funding for heavy equipment transport vehicles, for the HET's. It is my understanding that last summer, that the Army, in fact, approved a new mission for the HET. It will now serve a dual function: to recover immobile tanks and also to transport its main tanks and other tracked vehicles to the front lines. The Department of the Defense is now requiring each HET Army company to field, I understand, 96 vehicles, which is 60 more than were originally planned, which would mean a total of an additional 720 HET's.

But last year's appropriations, however, does not sufficiently cover that additional 720 HET vehicles. So I cannot understand why the Army has not asked for additional funding to procure these needed vehicles. Last year during these hearings you applauded the performance and reliability of the HET in Desert Storm, and repeated that again in Wisconsin.

Last year you indicated, at the beginning of Desert Storm the Army lacked sufficient means to transport its main battle tanks to the front lines. That is exactly what the HET is for. Let me also add that the HET is a true cost saver from a budgetary perspective. It can haul the Army's M-1A1 tank for $500 per mile less, I am told from your studies, than driving the tank on its own power. It is important to remember that we have got to be fiscally responsible, but I think we can also be concerned about our national defense at the same time as being fiscally responsible. And that is the balance you are always trying to work. So as we begin the process of reducing the size of our military, our mission will rely more and more upon a highly mobile fighting force and the HET will help us get there.

And I simply want to work closely with you over the next several months, and with the chairman and the ranking member, to see if we can work through this apparent inconsistency in the budget request and some of the statements that we have been making.

GUARD VERSUS ACTIVE FORCES

Let me finally say I had gone through the charts with you last year, but also with General Powell and others, with regard to Active versus the Guard. And that is probably one of the biggest challenges that you are going to have. Whether or not we can start to shift some of those Guard roles, whether we can do things dif ferently, I am not sure. It is of great concern in Wisconsin with the 32d.

I intend to meet with you to talk in more detail about this, but I look forward to working with you and trying to work through this very difficult problem with regard to the Guard forces versus the Active forces. And whether it is possible to start to alter or upgrade some of the missions of some of the Guard forces in order that they can be more closely compatible with the missions of the Active forces.

But, Mr. Secretary, I simply want to say this to you personally, and I look forward to working with you with regard to both issues. I thank you, and Mr. Chairman, I thank you.

Senator INOUYE. Thank you very much. Mr. Secretary, before I call upon you, I would like the record to show that at this moment the following committees are meeting. This would give you an idea why the turnout seems to be rather sparse.

Members of this subcommittee are members of the following committees that are meeting at this time: Veterans Committee, Armed Services Committee, the Environmental Protection Committee, Children, Health, Family, Drugs and Alcohol of the Human Resources Committee, Post Office Committee, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and State, and the Banking Committee. So you will see people going in and out. I hope you will understand, sir.

So now it is my pleasure to call upon you, Mr. Secretary.

SUMMARY STATEMENT OF SECRETARY STONE

Mr. STONE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I think both your opening remarks and yours, Senator Kasten, touched on some extremely important issues for the Army. I think both my remarks in my opening statement and General Sullivan's will echo some of the concerns that you have both already touched on.

This is my third appearance as Secretary before your committee, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to be here. As before, I am pleased to have a chance to talk to you about some of the matters that relate to the Army's 1993 budget. With your concurrence, sir, I would like to submit a written statement for the record.

Senator INOUYE. Without objection, your full statement is made part of the record.

Mr. STONE. Thank you. In these introductory remarks, I would like to talk a little bit about what the impact on the Army would be if there should be further cuts to the Army's budget. The record of this morning's hearing already indicates the disparity that the Army finds itself in. There is much talk today of further budget cuts. There is much talk today of further force structure cuts. I would like to have a chance for a moment to talk to you about what those cuts would mean to the Department of the Army.

The written statement that I am submitting, and the one that General Sullivan will be submitting with your concurrence, talks to the validity of the base force as it has been proposed by Secretary Cheney and by General Powell. Our statements also talk to the need for balance in the budget. The 1993 budget, as we have submitted it, is balanced, but we need to proceed slowly and carefully before accelerating change and going any faster in some of the changes that are proposed in that budget. What I would like to do in the next few minutes as I make these remarks is talk to you about the framework that dictates the architecture of that balance and reflects the inherent instability of the balance in the Army's budget.

The Army is, more than any other service, a people-oriented institution. If you look at just our manpower appropriation, the appropriation consists of a little less than 50 percent of the total Army budget. But if you add all of the civilians that are associated with the other appropriations in our budget, the research and development appropriation for example, the analysis will show that the Army budget is 67 percent people; that is two-thirds people. We are a very people-intensive service, so any adjustment to the budget affects people and it affects them immediately.

The dynamics of that 67 percent are reflected in the following dimensions, and I would like to mention a few numbers. These numbers, I am sure, will come out again in your questions so I would like to get them immediately before

The Army, at the beginning of this fiscal year, the 1992 fiscal year, consisted of about 710,000 soldiers, the Active component. By the end of this year, we will be at about 640,000 soldiers. We will be reducing the Army this year by about 72,000 soldiers. The pace will continue at that rate throughout 1993 as we work our way toward the base force goal of 535,000. The civilian component of the

Army started this year a little under 400,000. We are working our way down toward a goal of 300,000, a cut of 25 percent.

In Germany today-a subject that I am sure will come up—our force structure at the beginning of this year reflected a policy that has served the United States well for 40 years. Our force structure consisted-and I am talking here only of the Active component, of course of approximately 200,000 soldiers, a little under 200,000. By the end of this year, we will be at about 140,000 soldiers. We will be taking out of Germany this year approximately 60,000 soldiers and 72,000 dependents, including all of the household goods that those soldiers own. We will be closing the facilities that those soldiers occupy. We have already announced that we are closing 331 facilities in Germany. We have already vacated 155 of those facilities.

General Sullivan likes to say that every day a 747 takes off from Germany and brings soldiers home. I would like to put it in a slightly different way. It is curious he talks in terms of a civilian example, I will use a military example. Every working day of this fiscal year-220 working days is the normal measure-one full battalion comes out of Germany, a full battalion of soldiers. And by that I mean roughly 500 people, soldiers and their dependents, come out of Germany.

That is a complex management task, Mr. Chairman. I have the utmost admiration, as a civilian, for the military commanders who are running that redeployment. It is an extremely complex assignment, to bring that number of people home in 1 year. As they come home this year, that pace will continue.

In 1993, in our budget year, as we work our way down to the objective force that General Galvin has been testifying about in Washington during the past week, what effect does this dynamic have on the Army? I would like to hold up this week's issue of the Army Times. The word "shock" there is in very large print.

Soldiers who served this country well, and as you say have served the United States expecting to have a 20-year career in their professional lives if their record justified that, are wondering what is going to happen to them. The emotion is running very high. The question of shock, as they see the dimension of some of these changes, is a reality of life.

I submit to you that it is not possible for us to conduct this withdrawal any faster than what we are already doing. Mr. Cheney's instructions to me and General Sullivan are that we should continue this redeployment as fast as we can, but not to the point that it would create shock, not to the point where it would begin to damage human beings. And that is what I am trying to do. I am seriously concerned that if we are asked to change these dynamics in a way to accelerate these changes, we are not going to be able to follow Mr. Cheney's instructions and we are going to cause serious harm to the force.

Switching a moment from force structure, Mr. Chairman, because I am sure that your members will have some questions about it and I will leave further comments until later, let me deal with another dimension of the Army.

"All right, Mr. Stone," you may ask, "if we agree with you in this subcommittee that we should not take force structure down faster,

we may have to look at other parts of the Army. What are those other parts of the Army that comprise this one third that remains after our manpower accounts?"

Let me give you a few examples of the instability of that portion of our budget and the precarious nature that we look at as we decide whether there are other parts of our budget that could be pared. I will just give you a couple of examples. Our backlog of maintenance and repair, which is really evident in two different aspects, one in the facilities that we have, and by facilities I mean barracks, motor pools, all of the structures that the Army needs to carry out its business.

I am from the private sector, although I have been with the Federal Government now for almost 10 years. In the private sector, the practice is far different in its replacement of assets. In the private sector we would look at replacing assets every 40 years, a 22-percent per year replacement cycle for buildings of the nature that I am talking about.

In the Army, our replacement cycle is today over 100 years. We would like to get it down-and this is our objective-to a 57-year cycle. We are a long way from being able to do that. So this is not an area which is conducive to any further reduction. We would be making an already bad situation worse. It would impede our efforts to try to take care of soldiers better and create the type of work environment we think that we should. A 100-year replacement cycle for buildings is simply not enough.

The equipment side of the equation is not much better. Our backlog of maintenance and repair and here I should acknowledge immediately that congressional efforts to help us are deeply appreciated, and each year Congress does look at this problem and has tried to help the Army-but nevertheless, our backlog of maintenance and repair was $21⁄2 billion in 1989 and in the 1993 budget that we are submitting to you the backlog of maintenance and repair has increased to $4.3 billion, so that is not a healthy trend. In the civilian reductions, I have already talked about it a little bit, we are trying to make sure that our reduction plan works as well as possible. We have taken action recently to tighten the hiring freeze that we have in the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense yardstick is two hires for every five vacancies. You have to have five vacancies before you can rehire two people. I have just tightened that recently to four to one. We have to have four vacancies before we can hire one new person.

I do not know where we could take further civilian cuts, because it affects so many of these things that I am talking about. We have 50,000 people in the Corps of Engineers running the waterways of the Mississippi River and running many other assets that serve the Nation, such as recreation lakes and many other things. Does the Congress want us to cut the Corps of Engineers? That is largely a civilian force.

Walter Reed is one of the finest medical research institutes in the United States. We are doing extensive work there on research on an AIDS vaccine. It is presently being tested on human beings. My estimate is that if there is a breakthrough in this area-and I am not saying either that there has been or that there will bebut if there is a breakthrough in this area, I think Walter Reed will