for each active force manning level considered in the range of possible mixes of active and reserve forces, consider the level provided for the Selected Reserve in this Act for fiscal year 1993, levels significantly higher ..., and levels significantly lower Senator GLENN. Thank you, Dr. Rostker. Thank you very much. We will go on the 6-minute rule this morning. I want to compliment you on your briefing. I gather that considerable resources are being applied toward delivering an objective method, including specific criteria, as you've outlined, for evaluating a range of active-Reserve mix options as we make our decisions on the size and composition of our military forces. I have been pushing DOD to do this kind of thing ever since I became subcom mittee Chairman some 5 years ago. We want to work very closely with you as you work on this study and do whatever we can to assist you in your work. Let me ask something about the different sizes of the forces. We will go from 2.1 to 1.6 million with the active forces as what is projected now, and from 1.1 million in the Reserves down to 920,000 as what is being proposed. Now, are you taking into account different potential end strengths down the road? The reason I ask that is this: I think that if we work from the combat end of things, and how many people we may have to deploy for another Persian Gulf or whatever, I think we would say that 450,000 people or something like that would be a figure that would probably be something we would agree on. To actually deploy that number, if you use the old military school solution from times past, you can deploy about a third of your force. You have another third that is training and getting ready to replace that force that is actually in the field doing the shooting, and yet another third that is going to be in base commands and headquarters and so on. Now, I don't know whether that is still a valid concept or not. But if you use that as sort of a rationale, that we would want to provide the capability for deploying 450,000, which I think is reasonable, some time in the future, you then would reduce to, say, instead of 1.6 million regulars, maybe 1.4 million eventually. In other words and I am not proposing that we cut more rapidly now-I think as things stabilize in the Soviet Union, as we get more confidence that there is not going to be a remilitarization of the Soviet Union, we probably would be cutting additionally in the out-years 1996, 1997, at about the same rate in the Reserves. Now, will your study be such that it is adaptable to end strengths, changing or is it something that is going to be pegged to 1.6 million for the regulars and 920,000 for Reserves, and we would need an additional study if we were going to change in the outyears? Dr. ROSTKER. As we envision it, the methodology would be very flexible and allow you to do that type of case. The key is, frankly, the acceptance of the DOD scenarios as the appropriate yardstick to measure the performance of the force. Ultimately the committees and the Department have to be the judge at how stringently that will be maintained, but any force of a smaller amount would still be measured against the deployment schedules as presented in the DOD work. So, the question really then becomes one of risk and uncertainty as we reduce forces further. Senator GLENN. In your work thus far, have you come across any existing methodology we could use now to evaluate effectively the force mix in DOD's base force proposal, or are you developing the methodology to do this? Is there any existing methodology that will do it? Dr. ROSTKER. Not that we are aware of. The critical part of the methodology is to understand the time it takes to bring different forces to a level of combat readiness so that they can be deployed, and that is the hardest analytic portion. The Department is struggling with that. We are trying to gain an understanding of that process and that is not available at this time. |