that we are putting in place the fertile ground for danger to arise. And that is what we must avoid.

BOTTOM UP VERSUS TOP DOWN

I will show you in a moment, Mr. Chairman, that our analysis I believe was a solid bottom-up analysis. But I live in a top-down world. I am not writing on a blank piece of paper. There are 4 million Active troops, Reserve troops, and civilians who are in the structure. There are thousands upon thousands of installations, facilities.

There is an infrastructure out there in the defense community, in the industrial base, that is there now and has to be taken care of, has to be shaped in a sensible way back down to a balanced force.

So when I hear people come out and say, well, you are just reshaping from the top down, it really burns me a little bit, Mr. Chairman, because we did it bottom up. What we are trying to do in a very sensible way is to bring the force down gradually, patiently, over time, down to what I believe is the correct bottom line.

If there is one message I would like to leave the subcommittee today, it is that if the subcommittee or the Congress or the American people insist that we do it any faster than we are planning to do it, we are going to put this great force we have at risk, [deleted].

What I would like to do, Mr. Chairman, is to describe the President's program and how we came to the conclusions we came to. And you have seen some of this before, but I have added to it to give you a better flavor, not only for how we did it from the bottom up, but how we did it from the top down.

Mr. Chairman, with your permission, can I take my blouse off, now that the Staff Director has seen to its destruction?

Senator INOUYE. Please do. [Laughter.]

Have we got a seamstress here?

General POWELL. Next.

THE BASE FORCE

- A TOTAL FORCE

THE RIGHT COMBINATION OF FORCES FOR:

- DETERRENCE

- FORWARD PRESENCE

- CRISIS RESPONSE

- RECONSTITUTION

THE BASE FORCE

The base force is a total force, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. We are talking about Active force, we are talking about Reserve forces, we are talking about the great civilian employees that work for the Department of Defense, and I am also talking about the industrial base that supports the Department of Defense. We believe what we have put together and presented to you in the President's fiscal year 1993 budget submission is the right combination of forces for the following purposes: deterrence, forward presence, crisis response, and reconstitution, if we guess wrong.

DETERRENCE

What does deterrence mean? Deterrence is something you put in the mind of a potential opponent that says you do not want to fool with the United States of America.

There are two concepts with respect to deterrence. One is strategic deterrence, so that we have within our nuclear forces adequate nuclear forces, offensive, defensive, command and control, so that no other nuclear power in the world-including the former Soviet Union, which everybody is saying is gone, but still has 27,000 nuclear weapons-or any other combination of nuclear powers, would ever think of threatening the United States of America with their nuclear weapons. This is the crown jewel, strategic deterrence, so that nobody ever thinks they have got the edge on us with respect to our strategic nuclear capability.

But the other part of deterrence is conventional deterrence. That is making sure that you have such a robust conventional force that that force is seen by your friends as comforting and seen by your enemies as chilling.

I firmly believe that if forward presence and deterrence were concepts that were in being in the late 1930's, what might history have looked like at that point if the Japanese Empire, if the German Empire, had seen American forces in a position to deter and also, moving on to our next concept, forward deployed and in a position where they could actually defend themselves and protect our interests, more so than they were able to do in 1939, 1940, 1941?

FORWARD PRESENCE

As part of deterrence to make sure that our friends and our enemies see this concept, we have to have troops in Europe, in Southwest Asia, in the Pacific, exercises with our friends in this hemisphere, exercises with our friends in Africa and elsewhere in the world, in order to show that we are engaged, we are part of the international community, and we are not stepping back across the Atlantic and across the ocean of the Pacific.

Similarly, we have to be able to respond to a crisis. If deterrence does not work, if conventional deterrence does not work, if forward presence in and of itself is not enough to deter, we have to be able to respond, respond promptly, respond with overwhelming force, respond with the purpose of winning

RECONSTITUTION

Finally, reconstitution serves the purpose of keeping in place reserve structure, industrial infrastructure, the industrial base, if it is necessary to rebuild.

Now, some of my critics will say: What are you talking about? The Soviet Union is gone. We have had a second revolution in Moscow and, Mr. Cheney, you and General Powell still are thinking about the first revolution and you have not adjusted to the second revolution. My question is: When is the third one coming, or the fourth? Can you tell me Mr. Yeltsin will be a Jeffersonian democrat next summer? Can you tell me Mr. Yeltsin will be there next week? The answer is we cannot, and until we are absolutely sure of that, this land of 11 time zones has to be taken into account. A land of 11 time zones that still has 27,000 nuclear weapons, or 30,000 depending on who's estimating, and still has the capacity to regenerate to some extent cannot be wished away without any consideration whatsoever.

I think over time we can put less and less of an investment in reconstitution if the world continues to go in the way we see it going and hope it is going.

Let me go into the individual components.

First let me show you all the components of the base force at one time. What we said we had to do was first ensure that from the bottom up we had the right mixture of strategic forces. Then we looked at it from a geographical conceptual way: We need forces to deal with our interests across the Atlantic, we need forces to deal with our interests across the Pacific, we need contingency forces to respond here, here, backing up forward presence forces or to deal with the crises elsewhere in the world that we did not anticipate. Then, undergirding this we need basic military support capabilities. Space, the new frontier of warfare. Reconstitution I mentioned. Research and development, I know Mr. Atwood has spoken to you about this week. And transportation. One of the things we have never done as well as we should have done was transportation.

We have sent to the Congress a good solid package that I hope will be supported by the Congress. It is called the mobility requirements study.

STRATEGIC FORCES

Let me now go to each one of these packages and describe them to you in some detail. First we have the strategic forces package.

It's traditional purpose is to deter nuclear aggression. We will also continue to support our arms control objectives. We are going to retain the triad. The triad has held us in good stead for the last 40 years. We see no reason to eliminate it now. And we will be incorporating strategic defenses and the GPALS aspects of strategic defenses as contained in the President's budget.

Let's examine the various legs of the triad: First, SSBN's. We can stop at 18 new Tridents, phase out all the old Poseidons. With respect to bombers, as you know, we are going to go to a mixed fleet of B-52's, B-1's, and 20 B-2's. We have told the Soviets in the recent initiative that a substantial portion of this bomber fleet will be converted entirely to conventional purposes and taken out of the strategic role. Even though they may count as strategic systems because of the difficulty of physically converting them we will operate them in a way that the former Soviet Union will see they are only being used for conventional purposes.

With respect to our ICBM fleet, we have a force of 500 Minuteman III's and 50 Peacekeepers, and if the Soviets accept our recent initiative we can get rid of the 50 Peacekeepers and convert all the 500 Minuteman III's from a three-warhead to one-warhead missile. We have canceled the SICBM. You also know that we capped the advanced cruise missile and we are accelerating the retirement of the Minuteman II.

We will restructure SDI and GPALS. As a result of our Desert Storm experience, we are putting a lot of money and energy into the theater ballistic missile defense system.

Now, just since I saw you last fall, Mr. Chairman, we have made some adjustments to the base force strategic force package, and that had to do with our willingness to give up the 50 Peacekeepers, complete cancellation of the SICBM, and accelerate retirement of