DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS

FOR FISCAL YEAR 1993

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1992

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS,

Washington, DC. The subcommittee met at 1:30 p.m., in room SD-116, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Daniel K. Inouye (chairman) presiding.

Present: Senators Inouye, Hollings, Leahy, Sasser, DeConcini, Bumpers, Stevens, Kasten, D'Amato, Rudman, Cochran, Specter, and Domenici.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

GLOBAL OVERVIEW

STATEMENT OF GEN. COLIN L. POWELL, U.S. ARMY, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR INOUYE

Senator INOUYE. Today the subcommittee continues its review of the fiscal year 1993 defense budget request by hearing from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell. General Powell will present an overview of the national security environment, and we have asked him to discuss the base force, manpower and equipment requirements, total force concept, and restructuring of our Reserve forces.

We are pleased to welcome you again, sir. Much has changed in the international security environment since you last testified to the_subcommittee. Although it seems difficult to believe, the pace of change continues.

Following the rapid changes of 1989 and 1990, 1991 was another year of historic events which affect our security requirements. On a global scale, the actual demise of the Soviet Union has brought with it new opportunities and new challenges with respect to our defense planning. In Europe, NATO has taken the first concrete steps to redefine itself. Nevertheless, the end of the Soviet Union raises new questions about the alliance's post-cold war planning assumptions. These may already be out of date.

In the Pacific region, the United States departure from its bases in the Philippines and the events on the Korean Peninsula raise new challenges for Pentagon strategists. Security conditions in the Middle East and in Southwest Asia remain a continuing concern.

Against this background, the need has increased for the Defense Department to provide a more convincing justification for its future force structure and acquisition programs. Fiscal challenges to the base force concept are growing in strength. The military rationale for base force is also being questioned and doubts have been raised whether the planning scenarios contemplated by the Pentagon are plausible and realistic.

The Department's new acquisition strategy prompts uncertainty about the health of the defense industrial base. Specific weapons programs, such as the B-2 bomber, the Sea Wolf, the V-22, the F22 advanced tactical fighter, and the SDI, remain controversial.

So, General, you have a very difficult task of convincing a skeptical Congress and a skeptical American public that the Pentagon's current plans and programs are the most effective way of preserving our national security. We have a similar responsibility. We will have to explain our own defense budget recommendations to the Senate and to our constituents.

We look forward to your candid comments and insights as our Nation's top military leader.

Before you begin, Senator Rudman?

Senator RUDMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I have no comment. I expect Senator Stevens might. I guess he will probably put that in the record.

Senator INOUYE. General, it is yours, sir.

General POWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Rudman. It is always a pleasure to appear before the members of the subcommittee, and I have a prepared statement which I would like to offer for the record.

Senator INOUYE. Without objection, it is part of the record.

General POWELL. Mr. Chairman, you are absolutely right, we are engaged in something of a historic debate. We are engaged in a historic debate to shape our post-cold war defense strategy in light of the revolutionary changes that I need not go into detail on because we see them on our television screen every night, and we have had more than one occasion over the last couple of years to talk about these changes.

REALITIES

Despite all of the noise that you hear out there, besides all of the skepticism that you alluded to, there is a surprising degree of agreement among the various proposals that are floating around with respect to our strategy and our future force structure. Among these areas of agreement I think are, first, that the United States has to remain a world leader. Like it or not, history has given us this role. We have power that can be trusted. People around the world trust us. Our friends in the Pacific trust us. Our friends in Europe trust us. Our old enemies trust us.

The ones who are asking us more than anyone else right now to stay engaged and be a world leader are not the Western Europeans, they are the central and the Eastern Europeans, because they have seen, finally, that American power is power that can be trusted: America, please be part of the new international security environment.

I think most Americans would agree with that. I think most Members of Congress would agree with that.

I think it is also an area of agreement that we have global responsibilities, that we cannot withdraw back across our broad ocean frontiers to Fortress America, lock the doors, and forget about the rest of the world. We cannot do that. We will continue to have responsibilities across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, in our own hemisphere, in Southwest Asia, and around the world. The base force, as I will try to explain in a moment, is designed to meet these global responsibilities.

I think it is also agreed that, notwithstanding some changes that have recently taken place in NATO strategy, NATO will remain, as will our other major international alliances. And the United States has to be prepared to play a leadership role in all of these alli

ances.

It is also agreed that, whatever level we are going to, we want to make sure that at that level our Armed Forces are able to deter any potential enemy who might wish us ill and defend against any attack on the United States, on our interests, or on our alliances. We must be strong enough to win any conflict we face.

Now, that is a fairly simple statement I do not think anybody would disagree with. But we have had fuzzy notions over the years about deterrence, about being able to defend ourselves. Our new strategy, our new concept, our lessons from Desert Storm, say to me and I think say to the American people that if we are ever challenged and if we ever have to go in harm's way to defend the Nation, we go to win, not just to defend but to win.

And by being in a position to win, I think we serve the purpose of deterrence. Nobody will challenge somebody who looks like, sounds like, acts like, and is able to be a winner, and I do not shrink from that concept.

Our strategy is also no longer a strategy of global war, and I think this is generally recognized on all sides of this debate. Nobody in the Pentagon is trying to fight World War II again or World War III. We have fundamentally changed our strategy to that of a regional orientation. The debate really is about what regions and what level force is required for those regions.

I think there is also general agreement that we have to have ready forces, the very best and brightest of young Americans in those forces, the right equipment, the right training, the right operations and maintenance funding to make sure that they are welltrained, well-equipped, that the supply bins are full of material if we have to send them into combat. We need the ability to respond to a crisis, the ability to reinforce, the ability to reconstitute our forces, if this brave new world we are hoping for is not there and we have to get even larger and even stronger in the future.

So defense can be cut and still meet these agreement areas that I talked about just a moment ago, and it is being cut. We are making major fundamental, historic cuts in the defense budget already, and I will talk to that during the course of my stand-up presentation.

The disagreements that we are having are familiar ones: How much is enough? Do we have a common view of the future? Should we do it on the basis of threat or on the basis of capability? Are

you doing it from the bottom up or are you doing it from the top down?

I would submit, Mr. Chairman, and I hope I will cover in my presentation, that we have a view of the future that is as enlightened as anybody else in town, anybody else in the Congress. We are looking for a hopeful future. I am not looking for demons. I am not looking for enemies. I want this to be a world of hope and promise.

But I also know it is going to be a world of challenge and danger. So I have a hopeful view of the future. I am not looking for a resurgent communist threat or any other threat to come along.

With respect to threat versus capability, this is a false, phony argument that is being used by opponents of the Defense Department for the sole purpose of cutting the President's budget. We have based our base force on a clear view of the potential threats out there.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE

But we have to design our force for more than just the easily identifiable threats. It has to be a capability-based force. We have responsibilities for forward presence in Europe, in Southwest Asia. Admiral Kelso today has 218 ships at sea and nobody is firing at any one of them, but it is important to our national interest to have those ships and to have those ships at sea for a variety of purposes, whether it is moving refugees in and out of Guantanamo from Haiti, whether it is intercepting ships headed toward Aqaba for the purpose of sending forbidden cargo into Iraq, whether it is providing stability in the Persian Gulf, or whether it is conducting exercises with our friends in Asia.

There are many more requirements than would be given to you by a simple, historically incorrect threat-based analysis. We have not called the threat right yet. Nobody told me 2 years ago that you better be ready for war with Iraq. Nobody told me about Just Cause in Panama and the force was in the structure just for that. Nobody was able to anticipate what would happen in Korea, during World War II, or lots of other times and places, where if I had used this threat-based analysis we would have been in even worse shape than we turned out to be. What the Nation needs is a solid general purpose force capability that is prepared to deal with the unknown, the uncertain, the crisis that nobody told us was coming, the contingency that pops up.

That is the kind of world we live in today. I long for the daysand I say this in jest, Mr. Chairman-my life would be a lot easier if the days were back from when I was a second lieutenant through a corps commander, when there was a nice, comfortable Soviet Eighth Guards Army on the other side of the Fulda Gap, an army I looked at as a second lieutenant and I looked at it again, the same army, the same place, as a corps commander 28 years later. Now, poof, it is gone, and my life is a lot more confused and unstable.

The one thing I am sure of is that there is still danger out there. We cannot see it quite like we used to. We are sort of looking through a glass dimly now, but it is still out there. Every time America has said to itself, there is no danger, we have discovered