WORLDWIDE U.S. MILITARY COMMITMENTS

Hearing Before the
House Armed Services Committee

June 18, 2003

HUNTER: This afternoon the committee will begin an assessment of the state of American military commitments today and in the foreseeable future, and to help us review this important issue we welcome back to the committee, Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense; and General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Today, American military forces are garrisoned in Europe and in Asia, largely where we left them at the end of World War II. As the Cold War evolved, we extended and even increased some of these deployments. When the superpower conflict ended, the ensuing new period of global instability led the United States to deploy some 2,000 troops to Bosnia, 3,000 troops to Kosovo, and conduct short-term operations in Somalia, Haiti and Panama.

Most recently, the demands of the global war on terror have required U.S. forces to fight swift and successful wars against two states, Afghanistan and Iraq, while supporting governments struggling in their own battles against terrorism around the world. As a result, today roughly 19 of the Army's 33 combat brigades are deployed overseas. Similarly, 19 of 24 active-duty Marine Corps infantry battalions and four of nine Reserve battalions are not within our shores.

HUNTER: On the Navy side, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, seven of 12 carrier battle groups were deployed simultaneously. Approximately 180,000 troops are in Iraq and 9,000 remain in Afghanistan.

While our military did remarkable work in defeating two terrorist regimes in short order, events in Afghanistan and Iraq make it clear that we have a ways to go in both countries. The terrorist elements have been defeated, but they haven't been destroyed.

Unfortunately nobody knows for certain how many troops we need in Iraq or Afghanistan or how long they'll be there. The administration has stated that we will maintain troops in these two countries as long as it takes to get the job done, and not one day longer. I agree with that sentiment. It's certainly the right mindset to use in successfully waging the global war on terror, but it's not very useful as a planning guide.

And so, because we have long-term commitments in Europe and Asia and long-term requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan and don't know how long the global war on terror will last, or for that matter, whether it will ever end, we face a future security environment loaded with uncertainty. And uncertainty of this sort generally leads to increased risk for U.S. national security. Specifically, we face uncertain risks associated with the possibility of having to react to a future contingency while the bulk of our forces are already committed elsewhere.

HUNTER: The question before the administration, Congress and the American people is how much risk we're willing to assume, how much uncertainty must we tolerate, and what are the best ways of reducing the risks to our national security.

We can manage risk through several means. First, we can increase the size of our forces to deal with the increased demands. Second, we can accelerate transformation in our armed forces with the development of new information technologies. And third we can develop improved defense relationships with allies and potential friends. And finally, we can adjust our global footprint by shifting some of our forces deployed overseas toward crisis areas.

We're already discussed transformation in several hearings. Today, Secretary Wolfowitz and General Pace will help us understand how the department proposes to sustain the dramatically increased level of military operations, while ensuring an acceptable level of risk across the spectrum of other possible military contingencies our nation could face in the months and years ahead.

And let me recognize -- before we ask our witnesses to commence, let me now recognize our ranking member, my partner, the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Skelton, for any remarks he'd like to make.

SKELTON: Mr. Chairman, first let me thank you so very much for holding this hearing. I think it's very important, a most timely and important subject.

Secretary Wolfowitz, General Pace, thank you for joining us and thank you both for your continued service to our country.

Mr. Secretary and General, Monday's Boston Globe carried a remarkable statistic that more Americans have been killed in Iraq since April the 14th than have died in year we've occupied Afghanistan.

This morning, like most recent mornings, we awoke to the news of another servicemember killed in Iraq. That makes 51 deaths since May the 1st; in other words, one dead American each day.

SKELTON: I know this must disturb you as much as it does me.

Now, I've been arguing for careful postwar planning to secure Iraq since I've been running for president on September 4th of last year. I reiterated these concerns in another letter on postwar planning on March the 18th; two days before the conflict began. The realities to date do not indicate that the planning that occurred was sufficient.

General Garner was quoted in the press as saying he was given only two months to plan for controlling postwar Iraq and he was recently relieved of his duties. Change that had to be made on the ground to adapt to security dangers, including retaining the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq to now take on a stabilization mission. Certainly a truism that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy, but now that we've seen what the first two months of occupation have wrought, we need to understand the planning that is going forward and the benchmarks for success that can be measured along the way.

Without additional planning and general confidence in the way forward I feel we may really end up as Napoleon Bonaparte did in Spain in 1814 and the French military did in Algiers in 1962. In both these conflicts, sustained guerrilla action was the central reason for the withdrawal of the troops. This does not have to be the outcome for us in Iraq. But political and military planning is the best way to ensure it will not be.

SKELTON: One of the best ways to ensure this is to involve allies more deeply, as we've come to do so in Afghanistan, as we've done in a sustained way in the Balkans. Given the challenges we're facing, we need our allies and their troops more than ever. We must not let our failure to agree before the war become an argument for a failure to achieve peace now.

We need to turn our attention to the effect our mission in Iraq has on our overall force posture. One look at our force structure shows we can benefit from additional forces. The fact that we are undertaking missions in so many places is a testament to the strength of our military and the commitment of each soldier, sailor, airman and Marine.

But they need help, in my opinion. They need a lot of help. And this committee has received testimony since 1995 about the need for additional end strength, and we've fought to get some increases along the way. But to continue these missions with the occupation of Iraq makes the case even more critical. We must recognize the new realities of our global missions and plan our forces to match them.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

HUNTER: Thank you, Mr. Shelton.

And before proceeding, I'd like to point out to my colleagues that some of today's discussion could involve sensitive, classified information in order to get a full response. And therefore, we are prepared to proceed with the classified session at the conclusion of today's open hearing if that's necessary.

I believe it's the secretary's intent to attempt to cover the subject matter in open session, but we have the option available if needed.

So, Mr. Secretary and General, thank you for being with us today. This is an Armed Services Committee that's watched our force structure reduced since the first Gulf War -- between the first and the second, from 18 Army divisions to 10; 24 active air wings to only 13 today; and 546 naval vessels to right at 300 vessels.

So understanding that we have a much smaller force structure than we had before, and understanding also that the forces that we utilized in Operation Iraq Freedom performed with extreme effectiveness, we would ask you to look at the world today and the American military posture and force structure and give us your ideas on where we should be going.

And, Mr. Secretary, again thank you for being with us and thank you for your hard work on behalf of the country. And the floor is yours.

WOLFOWITZ: Mr. Chairman, thank you and Congressman Shelton and this whole committee for the enormously valuable support you've given to our armed forces over many years, including many of the important requests that we made in the current defense authorization bill. I know it's taken hard work and difficult decisions. We appreciate it very much. And I thank you for holding this hearing.

We are engaged in a probably long war against terrorism. Our military forces are being used in some ways that we never imagined they would be used.

WOLFOWITZ: But I think what we are seeing is the total force concept applied in the way that it was envisioned with the use of both active and reserve forces in a serious way.

And I think the questions that you've asked us to address in this hearing are questions that we address on almost a daily basis in the department, and I appreciate the opportunity to discuss them here with the committee.

If I might go back to the summer of 2001, when we were working on the Quadrennial Defense Review, I believe that was actually an initiative that Congressman Skelton had a major role in introducing into law and I think it was a very valuable exercise. This time it led to an unprecedented degree of debate and discussion among both the military and civilian leaders of the Department of Defense, and already by the end of summer, end of August we had formulated a new strategic direction for the department.

We agreed, both military and civilians, that there was need for some significant changes in U.S. defense strategy to take account of both the changing threat and the changing nature of our capabilities.

I might, I guess, just two summary points: The threat increasingly looked to be an asymmetric one from adversaries seeking to avoid U.S. strengths and to target our vulnerabilities.

But on the other hand, our asymmetric advantages were enormous and growing. And the increased importance of knowledge, precision, speed, lethality and surprise in the conduct of 21st-century military operations gave us potential for large asymmetric advantages over our enemies.

Of course, before we published our new defense strategy, terrorists attacked the United States. That attack largely confirmed the strategic direction and planning principles that we had already developed, particularly the emphasis on uncertainty and surprise. And it confirmed our focus on preparing for asymmetric threats and on the consequent need to respond with agility in unfamiliar places around the world.

Indeed, Mr. Chairman, I can't imagine what a hearing would have been like in the summer of 2001 if we had come up here to talk about basing forces in Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan or talk about going to war in Afghanistan.

WOLFOWITZ: And indeed there was no war plan on the shelf for Afghanistan when the terrorists attacked on September 11th.

Nevertheless, on October 7th, 2001, I believe only 20 days after the president first gave General Franks the order to start planning, we were at war in Afghanistan, a place for which, as I noted, we had no previous existing war plan of any kind. Just 12 days later, on October 19th, our first special operation forces were deployed in that country. And on November 9th, with remarkable speed, Mazar-i-Sharif had fallen to our forces, followed by the fall of Kabul just four days later.

That astounding chain of events, I think, aptly demonstrates both the unpredictability of this new era and the importance of being able to respond with remarkable speed and agility to unpredictable events.

I'd like to emphasize for this hearing what I think were the three most important new directions set out in the QDR. First, the senior civilian and military leaders agreed that we needed to look at risk in more than just the conventional way of the risk of a war if one takes place.

That was one dimension of risk, but after a lot of discussion, we concluded that we needed to be judging the defense program based on how to address four categories of risk: what we call the force management risk, which deals with how we sustain our people and our infrastructure; the operational risk, which is that classical war- fighting risk; what we call the future challenges risk, which is the risk associated with investment or under-investment in providing the capabilities that our military will need in the future; and finally, institutional risks are the risks that come from having inefficient processes and inefficient use of resources.

What we concluded was it is very important, as we develop our defense program, to carefully balance among those four risks and not simply sub-optimize against a single one at the expense of serious risks in another area.

Secondly, to confront this world where we had to expect even greater surprise than historically and more uncertainty, we shifted our planning from a threat-driven model, which guided our thinking throughout most of the Cold War, and indeed through most of the decade following the Cold War, to a capabilities-based approach.

In effect, what we said was while it is very difficult to predict who might attack us, or when and where they might do so, we could hope much better to identify the asymmetric capabilities they might bring against us and the asymmetric advantages that we could have in defeating them.

WOLFOWITZ: And third, we shifted from a force planning construct that had been focused for the 10 years after the Cold War on dealing with two major regional contingencies in two specific regions -- i.e., the Persian Gulf and Korea -- to a richer, more detailed and more productive force planning construct that addresses challenges we may face over time.

That new force planning construct, which is elaborated in the 2001 QDR report, guides the shaping and sizing of U.S. forces: first, to defend the United States; second, to deter aggression and coercion from a forward posture in critical regions; third, to be able to swiftly defeat aggression in two overlapping major conflicts, while preserving for the president the option to achieve a decisive victory in one of those conflicts, including the possibility of regime change or occupation; and fourth, to conduct a limited number of small-scale contingency operations.

I should emphasize that this is a force planning construct that's different from a strategy, but it addresses the question that I think is before this committee today of how we decide how large a force to have.

In changing from the two-major-theater-war approach, we do not go to a one-war or one-and-a-half wars, or a strategy of win-hold-win. What we proposed is something entirely different.

The new approach shifts the focus of planning from optimizing for conflicts in those two specific scenarios in Korea and the Persian Gulf, and to instead focus on building a portfolio of capabilities that can deal with the full spectrum of possible force requirements.

The new approach would still enable the United States to prevail in two overlapping conflicts, but the emphasis is on speed and delivering early combat power to overmatch the enemy, rather than slow, deliberate military responses to enemy aggression built up over time.

We do not want our forces in war-fighting theaters to have to wait until reinforcements arrive to blunt an enemy's attack. Rather than trading space for time, that euphemism for taking losses for both ourselves and our allies, and waiting for reinforcements to arrive to recover lost ground, we want our forces to have the capability to defeat attacks early and immediately.

WOLFOWITZ: By removing the requirement to maintain a second win- decisive force, the new force planning construct gives us more flexibility in planning with the force structure that we have.

I might emphasize that we came to conclude -- to stick with the force structure that we had in the summer of 2001, only after careful examination of proposals, both to increase it and to reduce it. It was not a decision that was made unconsciously or inadvertently.

Indeed, after much analysis in the summer of 2001, we concluded that it would be a mistake to reduce our force structure. We were initially criticized in that decision for being too conservative, but we felt very strongly on September 12th that the events of the day before had already vindicated our conclusion. And I think everything we've seen in the year and a half since then reinforces that conclusion.

As we said in the QDR, the force that we are sustaining is about the right size for the broad range of scenarios that we face. Our challenge is to reshape the force, realign its posture and manage the force so that we can maximize the combat power of our existing forces and minimize the considerable stress on our personnel.

Our concern, Mr. Chairman, with proposals to increase our end- strength is that we may not be able to make the investments needed to make our joint force more capable. Without commensurate increases in non-personnel spending, the quality of life in investment per servicemember would suffer if end-strength alone increased. We thus would put our people needlessly at risk and expose them unnecessarily to vulnerabilities.

The forces that we have need to be modernized and transformed. We have made great strides already, as the effects of our recent military operations have made clear, but there is much more to do. The preliminary lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom suggest that on a per-unit basis U.S. forces achieved a level of combat power at least several multiples greater than even the enormously capable forces that we deployed a decade ago in Operation Desert Storm.

But it is my estimate -- I think one that's shared by our military and our civilian leadership -- that we have still a considerable ways to go to fully realize the potential of what our forces could be in the future. Our transformation seeks to capitalize on force attributes that we think are the key to 21st-century combat success: knowledge, speed, precision and lethality.

WOLFOWITZ: Knowledge: The extensive use of small special operations units and ISR -- indeed in Operation Iraqi Freedom we used three times the number of JSTAR sorties that we used in Desert Storm, supporting a force that was only roughly half the size. That knowledge vastly improved our force's knowledge of the location and disposition of enemy forces.

Speed: A number of measures of this. But U.S. forces arrived in theater in less than half the time they did for Desert Storm.

Precision: I note in my written testimony some of the increases in precision-dropped munitions. But I think even more important is the precision that comes from precise targeting. And we saw in Afghanistan, wee saw in Iraq something that's been made possible by the networking that we have introduced into our forces with new information technology that allows brave soldiers on the ground to call in precise targets that airplanes can't see but that they can hit with incredible lethality.

And that is the fourth dimension, which is lethality. Coupled with an air campaign that supported them on an almost instantaneous basis, with about 25 percent of the total ground combat forces we used in Desert Storm, we conducted rapid simultaneous operations that defeated Iraqi forces across the depth of the battle space.

In combination, those advances enabled the force about one half the size to achieve in about one half the time using about one-seventh the munitions, a far more ambitious objective even than what we achieved in Desert Storm.

We began looking at lessons learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom even before the operation began with an experienced multi-disciplinary joint team set up by Admiral Ed Giambastiani, the commander of joint forces command.

While their analysis is still preliminary, they've made four key observations. And at some future hearing, Mr. Chairman, I'm sure you'd like to hear from them, maybe in closed session.

First, the U.S. military applied overmatching power to achieve combat success. Overmatching power focuses on the desired outputs, the goals and military effects we are trying to achieve, rather than the inputs; i.e., marshalling large numbers of forces and personnel that may not be applied at the right time and place.

WOLFOWITZ: Secondly, we focus successfully on applying capabilities to achieve operational effects, instead of simply flowing additional combat forces into the theater. Indeed, we spent a great deal of effort with General Franks on trying to make sure that he had exactly the units he needed, instead of simply those that had been set up in a rather arbitrary plan that might have been drawn up two or four years before.

We discovered, as Secretary Rumsfeld says, that we had an industrial age mobilization for an information age force. That is one of the things we need to fix, and as we fix it we'll be able to reduce some of the unnecessary stress on our reserves.

Third, our approach to Iraqi freedom reflected the concept of a battle space replacing the concept of the battlefield.

And finally, taken together, Admiral Giambastiani's team is suggesting that the basic building blocks of a transformed force should increase increasingly capable networked architectures; more numerous and increasingly lethal small combat formations; precision weapons and precision strike, which, as I said before, is not simply a matter of technical intelligence collection but also a matter of putting brave forces on the ground in the right place; smaller and faster initial footprints; mutually supporting lethal and non-lethal joint fires; and effects-based operations.

In applying the defense strategy, Mr. Chairman, we're trying to align all of our activities and programs with that new strategy, and in an operation as large as ours, doing that alignment is not something that happens easily or quickly.

One area that I'd like to describe in a little more detail for you is our re-examination of our global military footprint: our forces, bases and infrastructure abroad.

Basically, we are seeking to rearrange our military footprint overseas into two key ways: first, to tailor the mix of our military capabilities stationed or deployed in key regions to the particular conditions of each region; and secondly, strengthening our capabilities for prompt global military action when and where needed.

In doing so, it is very important to make the most efficient use that we can of the rotation base of our military personnel, so as to reduce the strain on our men and women in uniform caused by long deployments away from home.

I just came back from a very useful visit to Korea where I had the opportunity to visit our troops deployed up at the Demilitarized Zone, and perhaps more importantly, or equally importantly, to talk to General LaPorte and to talk to South Korean officials about the need to realign our posture in Korea to meet the challenges of the present and to take advantage of the capabilities of the present, instead of being stuck with a posture that was set up 10 or 20 years ago when these capabilities were not even envisioned.

The proposals that we have been working through with our Korean ally will provide us with greater immediate deterrent capability, and if deterrence fails, will provide us with a more robust capability to respond swiftly and flexibly to an attack.

WOLFOWITZ: Those changes include relocating our forces and, as General LaPorte recently announced in South Korea, substantial investments over the next four years to further strengthen our contribution to deterrence on the Korean Peninsula.

It is important that the changes we make should be the product of close consultation with our allies, but it is also important that our South Korean ally do more to contribute to its own defense. As we are increasing our combat power to deter North Korea, we believe that South Korea can and should spend more than its current 2.7 percent of GDP to strengthen its own contribution to its own defense.

Let me briefly discuss our current operations in Iraq, which are critical to this hearing. We currently have approximately 146,000 U.S. military personnel operating in Iraq, and additional personnel in other countries in the region supporting those operations.

We are pleased that the number and capability of coalition forces pledged to contribute to those operations is growing. As Congressman Skelton emphasized in his comments, we need help from our allies, we are actively seeking it, and I believe we will see increasingly, over coming weeks and months, more and more contributions from other countries.

Mr. Chairman, today marks only 90 days since our troops first crossed the Kuwait border into Iraq and we started major combat operations. It is only seven weeks since President Bush announced the end of major combat operations, and let me emphasize that word major. As we expected and planned for, smaller combat operations in Iraq continue even as we work with Iraqis to establish stable and secure areas throughout Iraq.

Again, as Congressman Skelton noted, there is a guerrilla war there, but as he also noted we can win it. Unlike Spain and Algeria, these guerrillas do not live among a sympathetic population; they represent the elements of the old regime that was responsible for those thousands and tens of thousands of people being discovered in mass graves. We have the sympathy of the population, not the surviving elements of the Baathist regime.

And it's important to realize that the process of stabilizing Iraq is not a uniform one. We've made great progress in some areas of the country, but we continue to face an adaptive and determined enemy, which, while defeated on the conventional battlefield, is nonetheless intent on killing Americans and Iraqis and disrupting the establishment of order in Iraqi society and the process of building a new and free country. We will eliminate those elements, but it will take time. How long is something that is difficult, or indeed impossible, to predict.

But even as smaller combat operations continue in parts of Iraq, we can chart real progress elsewhere.

For example, Basra, the second-largest city in the country in the south, with a population of almost 1.3 million people, almost all of them Shia and overwhelmingly grateful to be free of Saddam's tyranny, is now stable. There are significant other areas of progress, which I cite in my written testimony.

And even in Baghdad itself, which remains, to have pockets of difficulty, we've made a great deal of progress in large parts of the city in stabilizing conditions.

WOLFOWITZ: And we have some 8,000 police officers back at work and 2,000 on patrol; still considerably short of where we want to get to but real progress.

As Ambassador Bremer said in one of our conversations this week, we need to recognize that for every two steps forward, there's going to be one step backward. It's not going to be uniform progress but it is progress and I think we can be confident about it.

We're also making progress in enlisting other nations, including many who were not members of the original coalition to contribute to stabilization and peacekeeping operations.

The United Kingdom and Poland have each made public their intention to lead a peace keeping division staffed by their personnel and personnel of other coalition countries and some countries that did not join the coalition initially. Among those who have publicly indicated a willingness to participate are Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Denmark, Ukraine and Hungary. And we expect a number of other countries to announce their participation in coming days and weeks.

The senior leadership of the department is working together to ensure that we are managing our force deployments in Iraq and elsewhere during this period as effectively as possible, with due regard and particular to both the operation risks, the war-fighting risks and the force management risks -- the risks imposed when our personnel are pushed too hard, too long.

While it is true that our current operations in Iraq constitute a new and important military commitment, it is also true that the elimination of the threat of aggression posed by Saddam's regime has also relieved us of a substantial threat.

As coalition contributions grow and as we help stand up effective Iraqi security forces, our military level of effort in Iraq will diminish. Moreover, with the help of the Congress and notably the help of this committee, we believe we can make progress in a number of key areas that will relieve stress on our forces; most importantly, to rationalize our personnel policies so that military personnel are performing core military duties, reducing and realigning our domestic base infrastructure and, as I discussed in the case of Korea, changing our overseas military footprint.

We live in a dangerous and uncertain world, one in which we could be confronted with a crisis or contingency requiring U.S. forces on relatively short notice. But we have that capability and no one should have any doubts about our capabilities for dealing with adventurism from any direction. If North Korea were to attack South Korea or Japan, the United States and its allies have the military capabilities to defeat North Korea using all of the means at our disposal, including the enormously improved strike capabilities that the world has just seen in Iraq and earlier in Afghanistan.

An important element of our ability to deal with such crises is the mobilization of our reserve component forces. We currently have about 210,000 reservists mobilized; about 18 percent of the reserve component force of 1.2 million. Those reservists are supporting Operations Noble Ego, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.

Our policies strive to balance the risks associated with overuse of the reserve component against the risk present by such threats as North Korea. We're trying to minimize the burden on families, employers and communities through a variety of support programs, and we're actively exploring solutions to redress active and reserve force mix imbalances.

WOLFOWITZ: Some rebalancing is being addressed in the fiscal year '04 defense budget, but more can be done as we further develop our strategy. We will be consulting closely with the Congress on this important issue.

To conclude, Mr. Chairman, while coalition forces are still engaged in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, our efforts constitute an important element in our ability to manage the deployments and operations of U.S. military forces in other parts of the world. We will be able to reduce our level of effort in Iraq as the coalition completes the work of defeating the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and setting the conditions for reconstruction.

Our ability to do so cannot be driven by the calendar, but needs to be determined by conditions on the ground, including the level and capability of coalition contributions, the time and effort needed to recruit and train effective Iraqi military forces, the level of security in Iraq and the external threats Iraq may face.

It would be speculative to try to state the precise duration or quantity of our force presence in Iraq, but our forces will be there for as long as they're needed and not any longer.

More broadly, we put a lot of effort to getting the balance right between our force structure and end-strength on the one hand and our level of investment in future military capabilities on the other. We believe this balance enables us to manage the full range of defense risks effectively.

While it is important to reassess this balance as circumstances change and as we are getting greater understanding of our capabilities and our resources, we need to be careful about changing direction too frequently. There are real costs in moving resources from one area to another.

Our ability to strike this critical balance between force structure and investments, a balance that is so central to managing the range of risks we confront, is dependent on a few key parameters.

First, we need the flexibility to manage our civilian personnel work force; flexibility that this committee has taken a major step to giving us.

Secondly, we also need the Congress to help us move forward with another round of base closures and realignments in 2005.

And finally, we need to rearrange our global military footprint, as I discussed earlier, to strengthen our deterrent posture in regions critical to the U.S., but also to gain maximum efficiency out of our rotation base.

To conclude, we have a military that has earned the admiration of the world. It is a product of the bravest and most professional men and women any country could ask for, armed with capabilities that no country has ever before been able to place in the hands of its fighting people. We need to maintain both of those great strengths into the future as we confront the new and dangerous challenges of the 21st century.

We appreciate the support that this committee and the U.S. Congress continue to give us in that effort, and we look forward to your questions.

HUNTER: Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for a very complete statement. I appreciate your statement.

General Pace, do you have a statement you'd like to make?

PACE: Mr. Chairman and Mr. Skelton, I know you have many questions, so I would simply ask that my written statement be made a part of the record.

I would be remiss, Mr. Chairman, if I didn't take this opportunity, though, on behalf of all of us in uniform to thank this committee and all the members of Congress for your sustained bipartisan support of all of us in uniform. What we have done recently for this country is directly attributable to the actions that the Congress took over the previous years to give us the abilities we have today. So thank you.

HUNTER: Thank you, General.

And I also want to acknowledge that we are honored to have a visit by my colleague, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Warner.

And, Senator, thanks for stopping by and paying us this visit.

HUNTER: We're honored.

Mr. Secretary, we need a broad military capability, obviously. We have to do things that other nations can't do, and we have to have the ability to handle conventional armored attack like the one we stopped in '91, we have to have to have the ability to fight gorilla warfare effectively, carry out the war against terrorism. We, obviously, are concerned about the possibility, in the future, of missile attack on the United States, and we're developing that capability.

It's clear that we have another challenge that arises from time to time and that's presently with us. And that's the challenge of occupation, of using large numbers of personnel to provide that security umbrella that we're providing in Iraq right now as we try to stand that country back up with a government that will be benign with respect to its attitude toward the U.S. and, hopefully, a government that will be representative in nature.

And so, we learning that while we can move the tip of the spear very effectively, as our forces did moving up through the heart of Iraq and driving that armored -- proceeding that armored force with precision munitions that you spoke about, and we can do that with fewer troops and fewer forces than we used in Gulf One, it probably takes about the same number of troops to guard a bridge over the Euphrates River today as it did in the days of the Roman legions, which is at least one on each side of that river.

And so, occupation takes a lot of folks. It probably takes a lot more folks than winning the war.

So my first question would be: As you reflect on this drawdown in force structure that we've undertaken since '91 -- and I'm talking about the reduction of 18 Army divisions that we had in '91 to 10 today, 24 active air wings to 13, cutting air power, tactical air numbers, almost in half, and 546 ships down to right at 300 ships -- do you have any further reflections as a result of the challenges and the challenges specifically on the numbers of troops needed in this security umbrella phase, you might say, in Iraq?

So my first question is: Looking at that added challenge for the military, does that make you wish we had 38 Army brigades ready and committed as we would have had if we had 18 divisions? Instead, we have the 10 today, and we only have about 13 brigades that are not committed at this point.

HUNTER: Second question is, you've mentioned a number of what I would call the enablers, the Joint STARS operation, C4ISR, precision munitions which perform superbly, that coupled with deep strike capability manifested in our bomber force and our tactical air. We had missile defense in Iraq that worked effectively with the Al-Samoud missiles. And, of course, we used that air bridge, the tanker capability in this country, and our lift capability, now principally manifested in C-17 aircraft.

This committee, and I know the Senate Armed Services Committee also has, a result of lessons learned, put extra money into those accounts, as a result of looking at the operation in Iraq and understanding the need for those enablers.

And I would just ask you to comment on one of those areas, and that's deep strike. We have less than 100 bombers that are combat coded at this point. Obviously, deep strike capability, especially stealthy capability, coupled with precision munitions is an enormous performer for the United States and certainly enables the combined arms operations like the ones we had in Iraq.

We're going to need to develop a new system. We need to have a blueprint for new follow-on deep strike capability. The last administration had none. We're proceeding apace with a bomber fleet that is largely based on B-52 aircraft, the youngest of which was built in 1962.

What do you think about the validity of the proposition that we move forward with a new follow-on deep strike program? And I know some folks have talked about unmanned. Some folks have talked about manned systems; maybe a variant of B-2.

But clearly that has been a major winner and enabler for us, and has enabled smaller forces to do more in this operation, and is something that we rely on greatly and yet is a force which is relatively small at this point and relatively old.

Thank you.

WOLFOWITZ: There's a lot in that question. Let me try to answer some of it, and maybe General Pace can help me with some of the rest.

HUNTER: I tell you what, answer one of them, we'll move to other members.

WOLFOWITZ: You know, I think an important point to stress is let's take the proposition that you still need two soldiers to guard a bridge, one on either end. And, of course, that assumes the bridge needs guarding; we would hope at some point you get to a situation where even that isn't necessary.

But there is no reason why that soldier has to be necessarily an American soldier. And, in fact, a major part of our strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan is to get other countries to help us in the initial phase and in the follow-on phase, in the longer-term phase, to get the Iraqis or the Afghans to take care of themselves.

In fact, if I can make a request, we actually asked the Congress to give us some $200 million in authority -- not funds, but just authority -- to spend out of our accounts to equip indigenous forces that fight along with us, which would mean people like the Afghan national army or the Iraqi security force that we're training now. And that authority was at least initially denied and we would love to see it restored.

I think it is much more efficient and much -- beyond just efficiency -- more politically the right thing to do to train Afghans or train Iraqis to protect their own country than to leave Americans there indefinitely doing so.

WOLFOWITZ: And I think it is -- you used the word "occupation." It's not a semantic quibble I think to say that what we're about in Iraq is the liberation of the country. And I think that the kinds of horrific discoveries that we've made, which should not have come as a surprise to anyone -- these killing fields, these mass graves, these gallows and torture chambers -- are testimony to the fact the Iraqi people have been liberated. It doesn't mean that everything is suddenly perfect there, and it doesn't mean that the enemy has gone away.

We've only been at this for 90 days. We're engaged in combat operations in some parts of the country, and that probably does require the special capabilities that we bring to the party.

But I think the medium and long-term solutions in both places is, first, to get coalition contributions, as Congressman Skelton suggested, but even more importantly to train indigenous forces.

On this issue about critical enablers, I think it is a very important area. Secretary Rumsfeld has frequently commented on the fact that somewhere in the Pentagon someone invented this terrible phrase, "high demand, low density." And the secretary says, "That's just another word for saying, 'These are things we didn't buy enough of that we need.'"

In some respects, the defeat of the Saddam Hussein regime -- the end of major combat operations -- has relieved some of the stresses on a few of those key enablers, which, I think, certainly helps us with respect to a possible contingency in Korea.

We have been concerned about the stress on the tanker fleet, and, with permission of the Congress, we are trying to take some extraordinary measures to begin recapitalizing that fleet.

You raised, specifically, the issue of deep strike capabilities. It's something we looked at very closely in the QDR. We made one painful decision that you and I have talked about, which was to retire 30 of our B-1s in order to have the remaining 60 be fully capable. And I think they are fully capable and delivered enormous capability in this recent operation.

It may be a smaller strike force, but it is able to deliver probably in order of magnitude more capability pound for pound. And that is where the early investments have gone.

I think the issue you raise clearly needs to be one in the next defense planning guidance and the next QDR.

HUNTER: General Pace?

PACE: Sir, thank you. Mr. Chairman, each of the topics that you've raised deserves a great deal of study, and we are, in fact, embarked on that.

Just to give you one example of the many studies we have ongoing, as the chairman of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, I sit with the vice chiefs of staff of each of the services. And we are doing what we're calling an operational availability study. It's been ongoing now for about a year based partly on lessons learned from Afghanistan. Now the lessons will be folded in from Iraq.

It basically seeks to answer the question, "How much U.S. military combat power do we want to be able to deliver for the United States anywhere in the world, and in what time line?"

And as you look at the mixes that are involved then, you start looking at platforms, stationing, pre-positioning -- and to give you just one example from the U.S. Army, right now we have 10 active divisions. There are six heavy and four light. And as the Army transforms to its objective force, if we have an Army that has 10 divisions that have the footprint of the current light force and the striking power of the current heavy force, that will transform the Army in a way that will give us great flexibility and will impact the number of C-17s that we need, the number of tankers that we need, the number of bases and stations. And there are hundreds of data points like that that we're looking at, sir.

HUNTER: Thank you, General.

Mr. Skelton?

SKELTON: Mr. Chairman, let me join you also in welcoming our friend and colleague from the Senate, the gentleman from Virginia.

Senator Warner, we thank you so much for being with us today.

SKELTON: Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to put my letter of September 4 last year, and my letter of March 18 of this year into the record at this point.

HUNTER: Without objection.

SKELTON: Senator Wolfowitz and General Pace, thank you very much for being with us today, and I appreciate your testimony and your forward-looking recommendations that you're making.

Secretary Wolfowitz, as I understand your testimony, you have put to bed any discussion about reducing the numbers or the size of the United States Army from 10 divisions or less. Am I correct?

WOLFOWITZ: Certainly, for any foreseeable time frame, yes.

SKELTON: Thank you.

You mentioned the overmatching power that we have, and it is true and it's remarkable the capability of the Americans at arms and how much they have done. And through the years the House committee, the Senate committee have been hard at work, apparently successfully, in arming the young men and young women in doing their job, resulting in the overmatching power that you talk about.

However, along the lines that our chairman has raised, overmatching power does not occupy or pacify an enemy nation, or an enemy -- or a nation at which we have had a conflict.

So let me use that as a background and discuss a couple of issues and ask a question of you.

First, American troops are being killed daily. Some American family awakens to the news, as I did yesterday morning, this morning, finding that another American has been killed and that family that day will have its hearts broken.

On top of that, according to press reports, Sunni Arabs, fearful of a less-prominent role in a new government relative to the Shia majority, have begun recruiting Sunni Arabs from other countries to join in the guerrilla battle against the American occupation.

And I'd like to understand the plans that are in place for improving security in the regions of the country now facing unrest, and to address these potential emerging threats.

SKELTON: So two quick questions: How many American troops will be required to implement your plan? Number two, when will additional countries begin to contribute troops and how will they be incorporated into the new security efforts?

And I thank you again for being with us.

WOLFOWITZ: If I might, Congressman Skelton, start with this issue about overmatching power doesn't pacify a country. Understanding the chairman's comment about guarding a bridge, that's probably true. As I said that's guard duty; doesn't have to necessarily have to be done by Americans.

But in a very engagement in just the past week, our troops took on a terrorist training camp in northwestern Iraq; as far as we can tell -- and we only captured one of them alive -- killed a large number. These people who appeared to be foreign terrorists of the type that we fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.

We killed them with overmatching power. We got in there with a very small ground force and heavy attacks from the air and basically obliterated that terrorist unit.

This is part of the war on terrorism and I know there are sacrifices --- enormous sacrifices, and we're just very lucky as a country that we have these kinds of brave men and women who will take on those risks.

But they are fighting this war on terrorism. The victory in Iraq is a victory on the war in terrorism. It's not an accident, I think, that the terrorist in there are trying to help destabilize the country and try to make us lose but they are the ones who will lose.

I think we are still in a phase where we need some significant combat power to take on these remnants of the old regime. And I can't tell you -- I hesitate to predict. I may ask General Pace in a minute if he wants to try to predict how long that phase will last. But I think these people are the last remnants of a dying cause. I don't think they have the support of the population. I don't think they have significant support from outside, although there has been some infiltration through other countries. And I think they're going to be beaten. And when they're beaten it'll be much easier for others to take over the task from us.

But even as we sit here, the British are mobilizing a multinational division, the Poles are mobilizing a multinational division. We're in conversation with a number of countries who are considering offering us forces or have actually offered us forces. So I think -- I don't know at what point -- it's got to be driven by conditions and not by the calendar -- but we will be getting more help and the task should become simpler over time.

General Pace, do you want to elaborate anymore?

PACE: Sir, I would just simply add right now that the major area of concern for attacks on coalition forces is in our triangle that goes from Baghdad, west to Ramadi and then northeast to Tikrit in that region where most of the Baathists or most of the religious extremists and where a lot of the criminal elements that have been attacking our forces are. And, as you've seen in the papers in the last several days and will continue to see for the next several weeks, Central Command has a series of operations ongoing and planned to go after those targets as they puddle up and are able to be recognized and focused on.

PACE: As the secretary mentioned, there are two divisions that are being put together by coalition forces right now to add to the 12,000 coalition forces that are there currently in-country. The last information I have on that, sir, is that in the August-September time frame, those two additional divisions of coalition forces will begin flowing into the theater.

There's also a third division, and one other country yet to be made public, that is looking at being the core of an additional division. So those coalition countries, of which about 17 are currently engaged and a total of about 49 are actively in consultation with our military and our State Department, will, in fact, continue to grow the size of the coalition contribution to stability, sir.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Saxton?

SAXTON: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.

Mr. Secretary, General, thank you for being here with us. I'm interested in your thoughts on an aspect of transition. It's easy to think about transition in terms of technology, transition in terms of additional speed offered by technology, transition in terms of precision offered by technology, transition in terms of various capabilities that we might develop because of technology.

But many of us perhaps have not focused on another aspect of transition, which has to do with force structure. And I'm interested in your thoughts in, kind of, a specific sense on that about what our plans might be in terms of force structure.

And let me just use two examples of where I think having given perhaps a little different force structure and a little bit different battle plan, we may have ended up with a little different result, Afghanistan being one.

We believe we had a great victory in Afghanistan -- and I agree -- because we freed the Afghan people, we put kids back in schools, we provided for a level of freedom that didn't previously exist.

However, victory in terms of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan may have been something a little bit less than what we would like to envision, because as we carried out the action in Afghanistan, as far as the terrorists are concerned, we captured a few and dispersed the rest. And I don't mean that in any kind of a critical way. I mean, it just seems to me that that's pretty much a fact.

And another concern that I have with regard to Iraq is that, again, we experienced, from our eyes, a great victory. But again, in terms of the war on terrorism, the way that action was carried out, with a huge logistical force and a significant but small -- which I think you referred to, Mr. Secretary -- as a relatively small military fighting force, it seems to me that we had a vulnerability there, vis- a-vis terrorism/weapons of mass destruction with that huge tail that we had strung halfway around the world, actually.

SAXTON: So I'm wondering if given those two examples, if transitional force structure changes are needed, and if they are needed, how do you envision them?

WOLFOWITZ: First of all, I mean, I do think that what we accomplished in Afghanistan, which is clear we're much further into that operation than we are in Iraq -- I mean, you were fair and generous in describing what it's done for the Afghan people.

I would say we've done a bit more than just captured a few terrorists and dispersed the rest. We killed or captured hundreds of terrorists, not just a few, and among the ones we dispersed we have now captured people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the mastermind of September 11th. We would never have captured him if he still had a sanctuary in Afghanistan.

So by driving them out of their sanctuary we have created enormous opportunities to pick them up elsewhere, and there have been big victories in that shadow part of the war on terrorism that the CIA has the main responsibility for, huge victories that would not have been possible if they still had a sanctuary in Afghanistan.

And I think there'll be an additional set of victories because they no longer have sanctuary in Iraq. I think that's one of the reasons why they are fighting to try to get us out of Iraq.

So I think the accomplishments are big, but I think also implied in your question -- or maybe you didn't imply it, but I, sort of, heard it elsewhere -- "Gee, if we only had a bigger force then we would have been able to guard the Pakistani border."

SKELTON: If I might just, I'm not advocating for a bigger force.

WOLFOWITZ: A different kind of force structure.

Well, look, there are lessons we're trying to learn from things like that famous battle at Tora Bora. But the fact is, I think, it leads you in the direction -- and maybe this is what you mean -- in the direction of trying to have more combat capability from a smaller force, because if anything what you look at in Tora Bora is the need for more speed to get more combat power there more quickly.

And, I mean, I'd like to throw a bouquet in the direction of General Shinseki, who's just retired. I think what he's been trying to do with what he calls Army transformation is absolutely in the right direction. If anything, we're trying to move faster in that direction.

We have great armored forces, they've just shown, our mech forces have just shown what they can do, especially integrated with air power. Our special forces are amazing.

And, by the way, I think that answered your question, they get significant, in Operation Iraqi Freedom we deployed more than 100 special forces A-Teams all around the country. I don't know what the comparable number would have been in Desert Storm, but it was trivial. I mean, we have been able to take that small combat unit and make it a significant piece of force structure.

What needs the most work is that middle piece that General Pace referred to, of taking a light infantry formation -- it's probably going to be something different from anything we've traditionally had -- and give a lot of the combat power that normally you'd only have if you had a much heavier force.

And if that's what your question points at, I think that's exactly the way we need to be going. I think we can think of force structure in different ways so that we get actually much more combat power from the same number of people organized differently.

SKELTON: Frankly, that is what I was getting at. And my time has expired, but I think it's a very interesting thought process trying to figure out how to get there faster with significant force. And we have seen over the past decade or so the tremendous use of air power and the advances that we've made technologically in order to increase our effectiveness vis-a-vis air power.

SAXTON: But I'm not sure with the threat that we face today that that's going to be sufficient given the amount of time it takes us to get our conventional ground forces into the theater and in the fight. And so that was exactly my point, to get your thoughts on how we are looking to restructure our forces to accomplish this jointness that is really necessary to win...

WOLFOWITZ: General Pace has initiated a very important study called the Operational Availability Study. And I guess we're out of time on this round -- this particular question -- but maybe on the subsequent question he'll get a chance to talk about it. It goes in exactly the direction you're talking, Congressman Saxton.

HUNTER: Go ahead, Mr. Secretary, if you want to comment on that, and then we'll take the next question. Go ahead.

PACE: Sir, thank you. If I may, then.

Mr. Saxton, you're absolutely correct, sir. There are some things that we did very well that we need to do more of, for example, special operations. And in that case, the department has put into its new budget to request the assets required to do that.

But there's a piece of special operations that we have just been involved with since 11 September, and that is the part that the U.S. military does in manhunting one by one, these terrorists. And we are learning as we go, but that's a whole area that we need to get better at.

Deployments: If you have an Army division that is the footprint of a light division and the firepower of a heavy division and you have a 40 knot or a 50 knot ship, for example, you can make decisions in your war planning that significantly impact how much you have to have overseas and/or how much prepositioning equipment you need to have overseas or how much ammunition you need to have available to move forward.

So there are -- as I mentioned, there are just hundreds of these data points that we are chasing one by one as we learn the lessons, absorb the lessons and then try to transpose those 15, 20 years into the future.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Spratt?

SPRATT: Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony.

Mr. Secretary, it appears that we are going to have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for some time to come. The current estimate of the cost of maintaining the troops in Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom is, I believe, about $1 billion, $500 million a month. And the estimate for maintaining troops in Iraq is about $3 billion a month.

The best of my understanding, the bill that we just marked for fiscal year 2004 does not include any provision for the maintenance of those troops in those two places, certainly not at that level. Does this mean that you're likely to have a supplemental? And if so, will it be as large as $54 billion, to maintain the troop deployments we have in those two places?

WOLFOWITZ: Congressman, I think it's very possible that we will need a supplemental. But I think until we get closer to the end of the year, it's going to be hard to estimate what the size is, particularly with respect to Iraq. They're just huge imponderables.

And I think the situation can change a lot over the next few months, hopefully change for the better. But at this point, it's hard to predict.

I do think, and if I can take this opportunity again to stress what I said earlier, I think we need more help from the Congress in allowing us the flexibility to train and equip an Afghan national army and train and equip an Iraqi security force, because I think one of the keys to bringing down our numbers and our costs is to equip indigenous forces that are probably a tenth or less the cost of ours to do somewhat the same jobs that we're doing now.

SPRATT: In 1990, we were able to solicit and obtain contributions from lots of participating countries: Japan, Germany, all of the Arab Emirate countries. Today, I think we have only accounted so far for about $3 billion in contributions. Is any prospect of additional contribution, particularly from Arab countries that are contiguous or in the region of Iraq toward the cost of the war?

WOLFOWITZ: Certainly they're not going to be on the scale they were in 1990. That was a remarkable effort. I was deeply involved in it myself, and it was gratifying to see that kind of support. But I think that was a simpler case.

I do think one of the things, on the other hand, that is positive in this case is that there are significant resources available for Iraqi reconstruction that come from the billions of dollars of frozen accounts, the $12 billion or so that's in the U.N. escrow account in Paris, and of course the potential of significant revenues from Iraq's own resources.

So that money is all going to get applied to the effort of reconstruction, but that should help a lot. Whether as things improve politically it may be possible to muster more international support, certainly the U.N. resolution that was passed a few weeks ago is a big help. And the World Bank and the IMF are now involved.

SPRATT: The one thing I found lacking or missing -- it may have been simply a matter of emphasis in your otherwise very thorough testimony -- was the role that allies are going to play in different regions of the country. Surely, we can't sustain the burden of being the world's only superpower, protecting region after region without some kind of systematic and well-developed alliances or allied participation.

What role do allies play in the future in contingencies like Korea?

WOLFOWITZ: Absolutely critical. In fact, I think I did mention -- in any case, I'd be happy to mention it again -- when I was in Korea just a few weeks ago, I was not only talking to them about what we can do and what we think we need to do to change our posture, but also what I think they need to do for a country with South Korea's very substantial GNP, to be only spending 2.7 percent of it on their defense in these circumstances I think is inadequate, and frankly, a good many Korean officials are inclined to agree with that proposition.

I think we're going to be able to work together with the South Koreans to shift even more of the defense burden in their direction. And I say more of the defense burden because over the years they have increasingly picked up -- I want to give credit where it's due -- more and more of their share.

In Japan, we get enormous support from the Japanese for the stationing of our forces that provide a contribution to the whole stability of the region. If I went sort of back around the other way in Europe, I was in Bosnia not long ago, and I think it's noteworthy not only that we're down from I believe we were in the neighborhood of 15,000 U.S. troops when we first went into Bosnia; we're down to only 1,200 today and our allies continue to bear clearly their share of the burden.

Allies are crucial. In the Persian Gulf, historically, the allies that have been with us have been relatively weak. One of the things I think we can look forward to in a future for Iraq is a country that's able to contribute substantially to its own defense without hopefully going back to the kinds of military capabilities that scare all its neighbors.

SPRATT: One last question if I could, Mr. Chairman, Tuwaitha (ph) -- that was a nuclear site, WMD site that we knew about. It was conspicuous. It had been I think inspected before by the IAEA. And it reportedly had 500 tons of uranium oxide, natural uranium and maybe 1.2 billion tons of low-end enriched uranium stored at it.

How is it we didn't secure that facility when we passed it by on the way to Baghdad, and how did we allow it to be ransacked and looted, and what's the disposition of those radioactive materials?

WOLFOWITZ: I'll ask General Pace to correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that we, in fact, thought we were guarding the site. It is a huge piece of real estate.

WOLFOWITZ: We thought initially that the materials of concern were inside the berm, which is a relatively small piece of that. And for reasons I'm not clear on, the Iraqis have moved that stuff outside the berm and that's where the looters got to. I think most of the material has been recovered but there was, I think, one canister that's missing and that's the cause of some concern.

Is that basically correct, sir?

PACE: That's exactly right. We're still learning lessons around why and how exactly some of that facility was left to where it could be looted. The IAEA is there now. They're very satisfied with the support they're getting from coalition forces. I was told this morning that all of the material that had been accounted for prior to this attack had been accounted for, and that there were some amounts that had been spilled on the ground and need to be cleaned up, but that the vast majority of what was there is still there and accounted for, sir. But that's an oral report from the theater this morning.

SPRATT: I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Hefley?

HEFLEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Paul, you mentioned our reserve forces, and I think you've done a wonderful job of integrating the reserve forces into the overall structure, and I think they're probably better trained and more ready to go than they ever have been. But I'm worried about our reserve forces. I don't think the way we're doing it now is going to work over the long pull, because we're deploying too often.

If I'm a Reservist, one of the reasons I'm a Reservist is because I am patriotic and I want to continue to serve my country. But one of the reasons I'm not a full-time, uniformed person in the armed services is because I have other commitments and responsibilities: I want to coach my kids' little league football team, I want to pursue a career. And if I'm an employer, I'm patriotic but, by gosh, I can't afford to have the same people pulled out of my employment force year after year, or maybe more than one time a year. I think we're deploying too much and relying too heavily on the reserves as we made things -- let's just use military police as an example. We need a lot of military police in the operations we're doing nowadays, but where do they come from?

HEFLEY: A lot of them come from the sheriff's departments and from the police departments, and we're pulling them out.

Have you done any thinking about this and the need to think differently about how we use our Reserve? Yes, they're there for emergencies, but I just wonder if it makes any sense for them to be there for all kinds of contingencies that we have around the world which are not really emergencies. Shouldn't we plan for those contingencies with the active duty force? And when we have an emergency, then we use the backup.

WOLFOWITZ: Of course, I mean, we have an emergency worldwide today, which is calling up a lot of Reservists to do force protection for bases both here in the United States and elsewhere.

I think one of the big questions that your question focuses on is particularly those Reservists that are in units that are, to use that terrible phrase again, low density, high demand. And those particular units get called back over and over again because we don't have enough of them.

And in some cases, I think it's the results of conscious decisions made some years ago to have certain parts of our force, either entirely or predominantly, in the reserves. And I think that notion sort of stems from an almost World War II-like notion that we'd only call the Reserves up if we went to global war again. And we're in a kind of global war, but it's not that kind of global war, and we can't keep coming back to the same people over and over again and expect them to stay in the Reserves.

But I do think if you look at the total size of our Reserves, we ought to be able to manage better. The Secretary's office is doing an active component Reserve component mix study. General Pace is leading this study on operational availability, and the individual services are looking at how they manage reserves.

I think clearly we need to make some changes. We also need to make some changes on how we call up Reserves. Again, this sort of old system, which was you'd have a time-phased forced deployment list and you'd turn on the switch and you'd call up everyone on that list. And it didn't matter if they waited 60 days or 90 days before you actually used them. It was sort of a big clumsy, as Rumsfeld says, industrial- age kind of call-up system.

In the age when we can do inventorying and delivery of things at the time they're needed, instead of two months or three months in advance, we ought to be able to be smarter about how we call people to active duty.

Those are big issues, and we've got to come to some important changes fairly quickly, I think, in order to avoid the problems you are talking about.

HEFLEY: Well, I would agree, and I hope we will look at that. What I think we're going to have -- we're going to begin to have a drop-off in people who are willing to go into the Reserve. Because they are willing to commit some time, but they are not willing to commit all their time.

And I know, I hear, when you go out in the field and you've got these Reservists and they're enthusiastic and they're happy to do the job they're assigned to do, but they want it to be over and to be back home doing their life most of the time. And maybe this needs in strength in the active duty. I don't know what it means, but I'm glad to hear that you're looking at it seriously, because I think we've got a problem on the horizon.

WOLFOWITZ: Although let me emphasize too what you just said. When I visited Bosnia a few weeks ago, the division that's taken over our assignment in Bosnia for this six-month period as a Reserve division, in fact, it's Harry Truman's old division from Missouri and Kentucky and Oklahoma.

And those people, I mean, they're away from their families for a six-month period in a foreign country, but they believe in the mission they're doing and they're happy to be serving. And I think that is the prevailing view throughout the reserves. What we're talking about is overusing those people, not using them for what they volunteered for.

PACE: Sir, while I just use one example just to make your point for you: 97 percent of the civil affairs capability in our armed forces is in the Reserves, and some of these folks have been on active duty for almost two years. By definition, we have an active component reserves component mismatch on that.

There are several areas like that, just getting the current balance correct. And then as we go out and look at the new war plans that the secretary of defense has the combatant commanders ranging, he has asked them to do two things: one, to come in with a plan as they normally would that looks at total force, and two, to look at a plan that might be executable with just the active force, to see what kinds of tradeoffs there might be in the way we arrange ourselves.

HUNTER: Thank the gentleman.

The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Ortiz.

ORTIZ: Thank you, Mr.Chairman, and Mr. Secretary, General, thank you for testifying before our committee today.

You know, as a member of Congress, we get many letters from our constituents, and sometimes we find some of them very hard to respond to. Let me read a letter to you that I got, and this is one of many that I have received.

And it says, "Dear sir, I know that you are very busy and this might not seem very important to you, but my husband is in the United States Army, and he was in the war on Iraq from beginning to end, and now they are being told that they will now will have to be moved to another location in Iraq, this coming just as they were about to start the process of coming home.

"I feel that after all that they went through and saw, that they deserve to come home, just as the Navy and the Marines got to do. To be honest, our men saw more than both the Navy and the Marines.

I might not live in Texas as of now, but I was born and raised in Corpus Christi for 25 years, and my husband signed on with the Army after 11 September.

"I know that this might not seem important to you, but I fell that it is important for the morale and welfare of the men to come home like they were planning. We don't need a repeat of the men freaking out, like what happened when the war was starting.

"A lot of the wives feel a little jerked around, like holding a carrot in front of the turtle and pulling it away.

"Thank you for your time."

This is one of many letters that I get, and I know that we're going through a transformation period. But what are the plans to bring some of these soldiers who have been there for a long period of time?

And I know some of my friends have been to Iraq, and they tell some of the committee members who've been there, please get us out of here. We came to fight a war, we're not police officers, we're not law enforcement officers.

Maybe you could enlighten not only this wife, but some of the members of the committee as to what do we expect with those who have been there when the war started, planning on coming home, but then they have moved around to another place in Iraq. Maybe you can help us on that, Mr. Secretary.

WOLFOWITZ: My guess is that that's a letter from somebody from one of the units like the 3rd Infantry Division that have been there for a long time. In fact, there's one brigade, the 3rd Infantry Division, that I think deployed back last year, ask General Pace in a minute to give the exact time. I think that brigade is actually in the process of coming out, and Secretary Rumsfeld has asked General Franks to give him a plan for what to do with the whole division, because that's a division in particular that for whatever reason came to conclude when the statues came down in Baghdad that their job was finished.

Clearly, our job as country is not finished, and clearly these brave young men and women understand that they have a job to do and they're prepared to do it.

I think we do owe them some certainty about what the time period they can expect to deploy, and it's something that we're working on. General Pace?

PACE: Sir, there is one brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division that deployed to the region on a normal deployment, trained up on the equipment that was pre-positioned there, came home, and then about a month later went back.

So their time away from home has been just about one year. The vast majority of the troops that are on the ground right now arrived in theater in January and February of this year.

That does not mean that there's a particular time line, good or bad. It just means that for the most troops, they've been there since January, February.

And, of course, families watching on television, seeing the great victory, hearing that the major combat operations have been concluded, are looking to see their families come home.

I was in the region two weeks ago, had lunch and breakfast with troops from the 3rd ID. They're wonderful soldiers. They do look forward to the day they can come home, but they also understand that there's a mission to complete.

They are first in the queue to come home. General Franks is working right now several initiatives to include working with Ambassador Bremer to train up Iraqi police so that some of the static positions can be taken over.

Right now we have U.S. forces, coalition forces defending over 500 specific fixed locations. They're conducting about 2,300 patrols per night.

PACE: All of these activities are important, but there are pieces of it like security for oil fields, security for specific buildings, that can be transitioned either to Iraqi indigenous forces that have been properly trained or to coalition forces.

That doesn't help the individual writer of that letter to understand completely why his or her loved one isn't home yet, but we are very much aware of the time that folks have been away from home. And we're working diligently to get those who went first to come home, sir.

ORTIZ: Are you satisfied with the troops, the total force that we have in Iraq? Or do you think that we need to increase that?

PACE: I'm sorry, sir, I did not hear your question.

ORTIZ: I think somebody said that we have 146,000 troops. Is this adequate for what's going on now, since we are still seeing young soldiers killed? Or do you feel we need to increase the number?

PACE: Sir, General Franks and his commanders do what we call a troop to task analysis of the peak number of U.S. forces that we had on the ground in Iraq was 151,000. So we're about 4,000 shy of that peak number.

We have stopped the number of people who are coming out, specifically because of the analysis had said that about a month ago that when 3rd Infantry Division was scheduled to come out on the original lay-down of potential rotations, that the situation on the ground in Baghdad was such that we needed both the 3rd Infantry Division that was there and the 1st Armor Division that was joining it to stay in place. That was the assessment at the time.

This morning there was a briefing to the secretary from the Ambassador Bremer and from Lieutenant General Abazade (ph), who is currently in theater as a senior person in theater right now, U.S. military, laid out for him the projections between now and the end of June, beginning of July as far as coalition forces taking over and training up of Iraqi police and security forces.

So there is a very systematic process that the commanders go through where they lay out of a number of tasks they have and the troops that they need to do that.

General Franks has been told repeatedly by the secretary and by the president that whatever number of forces he needs to get the job done they will be provided to him. General Franks has responded repeatedly that the number of forces he has right now are sufficient to get the job done, given what he has to do and what he knows about coalition forces that are coming to join.

ORTIZ: Thank you. Thank you very much, appreciate it.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

The gentlelady from Virginia, Ms. Davis.

DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And thank you, Mr. Secretary and General. And I can't stress enough how proud we are of the job that you all and our men and women in the military are doing for us in Iraq and other parts around the world.

DAVIS: I have three questions for you. One, what is your assessment of the veracity of the remarks that have been made in recent articles, such as The Washington Times yesterday, where I think with regards to the quality of life of our men and women over in Iraq. And I think the quote on one was, "The 101st is burned out, plain and simple." And that was from one officer in an e-mail.

Second, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Navy searched seven carrier strike groups to support the effort. And some of these groups, as you know, such as the Abraham Lincoln, was already deployed. And they were extended. And others were sent out later. Some were deployed early to meet that contingency. In the recent past, our Navy non-deployed readiness has been low because of a lack of funding. And I'd like to know what you think the affect of this surging has had on our readiness of our naval force.

And third, regardless of any prior estimates from the QDR or from the base force, what is your estimate of how many carrier groups and amphibious ready groups will be needed, given what we can reasonably expect from our global projection and presence in the future?

PACE: Ma'am, I might try the first two, and perhaps ask the deputy secretary to take on the third.

I was in Iraq for two days about 10 days ago, had a chance to be in Basra with the Brit forces in Baghdad, with the U.S. forces in Mosul, with the U.S. forces. And the 101st is in Mosul, and I spent a half a day with those troops up there.

Ma'am, there's no doubt in my mind that out of 150,000 troops on the ground, that some of them are going to write the kinds of letters and make the kinds of comments that you just recited. But that truly does a disservice to the wonderful young men and women who are over there doing the job that our country has asked them to do, and they are doing it willingly, they are doing it with energy, and they truly understand the value of what they are doing.

If you expect to be getting three meals a day and sleeping in air conditioning, you're not going to be happy in Iraq right now -- three hot meals a day and air conditioning. But the troops understand, especially infantry troops like the 101st understand.

So this is not to make light of that individual's concerns, but it is a fact of life that Iraq is a tough environment right now, and that the soldiers and Marines on the ground over there are doing a wonderful job.

With regard to seven carrier battle groups, one of the things that Admiral Clark, the CNO, is doing for the United States with the Navy that he's been entrusted, is making it so that we are able to surge anytime six or more of those carrier battle groups.

And thanks to the funding that Congress has provided over the last several years, the bins -- repair part bins -- and the like for the Navy have been kept full so that the carrier battle groups coming home from deployment have equal or within 1 or 2 percentage points readiness from when they deploy. So that piece is working very well.

And the way that the Navy is looking at restructuring itself to always be able to surge six or seven carrier battle groups at any time we need them will hold us well in the future. And in fact, today, as we sit here, I know for a fact that if we needed the same Navy combat power that we had in Iraq for another place in the world, like Korea, that those carrier battle groups, or ones just like them, are ready to go.

With the regard to the QDR, Ma'am, if I may, I'll defer to the secretary.

DAVIS: Let me just make a comment on -- I think you are correct, that the articles such as that in the "Times" and the comments that are made do a total disservice to our men and women in the military. That's why I asked you to comment on it, because the men and women that I know don't complain.

DAVIS: They just are proud to be in the service and doing what they can for our country.

WOLFOWITZ: Thank you, Ma'am. I think all the comments that you made and others have made emphasize the importance of looking at our global presence posture in a new light and in a much more rigorous way, and not to simply measure our presence by the number of men and women we have in a particular place or the number of men and women we have afloat. That's a sort of old-fashioned, kind of input-oriented way of measuring things but those inputs are our people. And being deployed on a one year or on a company tour of Korea or being away six months on a naval deployment is a huge burden on those people.

And I think we have an opportunity now, not only because of our technology and what it's demonstrated, but because of the incredible military power that our forces have demonstrated in Afghanistan and in Iraq, to look more at the output, of what a Marine based in Okinawa can deliver today. It's much, much more than what it could deliver in the past. And that's part of the way in which we're looking at our whole Korean posture.

Just to give you one example, when I was in Korea and went up to the DMZ, the Marines were engaged in the exercise of the Army. These Marines had come from Okinawa on fast sea lift ships or commercial ships that we were leasing from the Australians actually; they got there I believe in two days, where previously it would have taken them 10 days. They were able to use their full month for exercising instead of deploying. And more importantly, they could be there in two days if there was a war. That makes that Marine presence on Okinawa much, much different than it ever was in the past.

And we need to re-educate people to a different way of thinking about presence. And I think we have a real opportunity now because of the stress on our force, actually, and because of the capabilities we've demonstrated to do that re-education process, and not just get stuck with deployment patterns that are 10 or 30 years old.

DAVIS: Do you think we have enough with the 12 carrier battle groups and amphibious groups?

WOLFOWITZ: I think it's about the right force structure. Like other pieces of our force structure, it's being stressed, but unlike the Army they have the opportunity, as General Pace said, now to start to recover and I think in a few months without a major requirement in the Persian Gulf, we'll probably be even more capable relative to the potential threats than we were before.

DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

(UNKNOWN): I thank the gentlelady.

And Mr. Secretary, a number of us came back a couple of weeks ago from Iraq and my impression or I think the impression of Mr. Abercrombie and others -- having met with our troops there, reservists and active -- that these folks are tremendous. And they did an incredible job, one that was extremely difficult and in some cases extremely dangerous. They did it very effectively. And perhaps our greatest asset right now in this country, if we can retrieve it, it must be patience. Because I think we're going to have to be patient with this hand off.

Mr. Meehan?

MEEHAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary General, so if we are to understand your testimony, neither one of you believe we need more troops in Iraq right now. Is that the case?

WOLFOWITZ: I think I stated that General Franks has not indicated that he needs more troops, and we're relying in the first instance and primarily on the commander's judgment.

MEEHAN: It's really hard to find anyone either former general, military, those members of Congress who have been over there that don't think that we need a greater presence of troops, whether they be getting our allies involved or whether they be forming coalitions. Losing an American a day and in many instances where these men and women are serving have been there for a long time. Many of them don't have adequate places to sleep. It seems to me if they're going to be for years, they're going to need barracks. We're going to need some place to put them. We need to get water and material to them.

And I just hear from a lot of people we need to have more of a presence to keep the peace and to keep our people safe that are there now.

MEEHAN: And as I see it, Mr. Secretary, the United States paid a small percentage of the cost of the first Gulf War, and again in Kosovo and Bosnia we deployed roughly 5,000 troops, which was just a relatively small portion of the peacekeeping force.

MEEHAN: Today in Afghanistan the United States forces make up over half of the troops within the coalition. Now, in each of these instances broad international coalitions were built by careful, extensive diplomacy, and because of the success of that diplomacy, American troops were joined by our allies, and the costs were shared among many nations.

Mr. Secretary, roughly what is the percentage of peacekeeping forces in Iraq today that are American? And I understand that we're always looking to get more people involved in the coalition, but today what percentage of the peacekeeping forces are American?

And if you could also tell the committee what the percentage of Operation Iraqi Freedom that other members of the coalition of the willing are paying or have paid?

WOLFOWITZ: I agree with you very strongly on the importance of trying to get other countries to contribute, and we are working hard to get more coalition contributions. These are very different circumstances than either of the two that you cite. The Gulf War was something quite unique, and it wasn't just diplomacy, it was the political circumstances that made it possible to put together that kind of coalition. I was involved in it and I know a lot about how it was done.

Bosnia and Kosovo as contrasted with Afghanistan, or part of Europe, or on Europe's doorstep. I'd say on the whole we've gotten a fairly substantial contribution from our NATO allies to the effort in Afghanistan. And as we look to expanding the provincial reconstruction teams out to more towns and cities in Afghanistan, we've had several allies volunteer to take the lead in forming some of those teams.

But the key over the medium-term in both Iraq and Afghanistan is, in fact, going to be getting the Afghans and the Iraqis themselves to be able to perform the peacekeeping missions in their countries. That is an effort that, frankly, would be helped and I will say it now for the third time, if we had the kind of authority we asked for from the Congress to permit us to use some of our money to train and equip Afghans or Iraqis, because it's much, much cheaper -- incomparably cheaper -- to have an Afghan soldier doing a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, or an Iraqi soldier guarding a bridge in Iraq, than to have an American doing it.

You alluded correctly to the fact that some of what we're doing in Iraq is not peacekeeping, it's combat. We're fighting terrorists. We're fighting the surviving elements of a incredibly brutal regime, and we are capturing and killing them at a pretty impressive rate, and that is a real combat operation.

But when it comes to peacekeeping, I agree with you, we need to get more contributions from the international community, and I think most importantly, and we are working at it, we need to train up Iraqis to do the job for themselves.

MEEHAN: Mr. Secretary, I would agree that the situation was different, but from my vantage point I think part of the reason why the political situation was different is the fact that Secretary of State James Baker literally went around the world before the first Gulf War and talked to all the countries, and conducted diplomacy in a very extensive way.

Now, I understand diplomacy was conducted, but I think that we contributed to our own success in the first Gulf War, before the first Gulf War, by the diplomacy that was conducted by Secretary of State Jim Baker.

I still haven't heard the percentages. It seems to me -- isn't it true that we're paying about 90 percent of the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom? And it seems to me that you can draw a correlation between these other operations, where it seems to me the diplomacy that had been conducted before, during and after the first Gulf War contributed to our ability to bring in a broad coalition.

MEEHAN: And while I agree with you if we can get the Iraqis to keep their own peace, it'll cost a lot less, the same thing in Afghanistan, but it will also cost a lot less if we have broad coalitions, where our troops are only 40 percent or 30 percent.

Isn't it about 90 percent of the cost that we've ...

WOLFOWITZ: I wouldn't dispute you on the percentages, but I would dispute you on the notion that what's at issue: The difference has to do with diplomacy.

I mean, we have, Baker was an extraordinary secretary of state; so is Colin Powell. The difference is not in the quality of our diplomacy, which is outstanding in both periods.

The difference is, and I can't fully explain this to you, but to start with the Arab countries were much more concerned about the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait than they were concerned about Saddam's brutalization of his people, which I think was an order of magnitude worse than what he did in Kuwait.

But it didn't fit quite the same parameters, so the political attitudes that we're dealing with were less supportive. On the other hand, from our point of view, in both Afghanistan and Iraq we're dealing with real threats to American security, and we view it differently from some of the potential coalition partners.

But I think as time goes on, and indeed as these mass graves are uncovered, and as the torture chambers are uncovered, and as the real voice of the Iraqi people comes to be heard, I think more and more countries are going to want to contribute, because Iraq really is one of -- many Arabs would, in fact, tell you that Iraq is the most important country in the Arab world, the real potential leader of the Arab world.

And I think what we are engaged in there is, the stakes are enormous, not only for our country but for many others. And I think, hopefully sooner rather than later, we'll get the kind of support that that calls for.

MEEHAN: Last question, if I may, Mr. Chairman. I guess, let me ask it this way: Did we have a goal or a plan in terms of burden- sharing going in, and up until today have we met that goal or plan in terms of burden-sharing in terms of our commitment with Operation Iraqi Freedom?

WOLFOWITZ: I think our goal in burden-sharing is always more, which means we're not, we want a goal that's more than we're going to achieve. We recognized going in that we didn't have the contributions of money or forces from other countries.

We did have a great many countries who were part of that coalition, who identified themselves that way. We just had talks recently, last couple of days, with senior representatives from the Turkish government, and the Turkish foreign ministry.

Turkey is eager now to assist us in the reconstruction of Iraq. Turkey has a huge stake in that effort, and I think we can get help from Turkey.

That's just one example of a country that's begun to move in our direction.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman. Mr. Wilson.

WILSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Secretary. General, thank you for your tremendous service.

And I am especially in particular interested in the National Guard. I'll be completing in six weeks my service with the National Guard, but I have two sons who are in the Army National Guard, another son in the Navy, and with the tremendous success -- I had the opportunity to be with Congressman Ortiz in February, we were in Kuwait, and I saw first-hand, again, the troops that we have, the equipment that we have, but certainly a credit to you, the leadership, the military leadership that we have, and I believe that with Iraqi Freedom, with Enduring Freedom, with Operation Noble Eagle, that the military is held in higher repute now than ever in my lifetime.

But with the Guard in particular I share the concerns that have been expressed about the current use of the Guard, the longevity of the use, and I know there's been references to transformation and steady-state requirements, and studies underway.

If you could go over what you anticipate, what we've learned, even at this early stage, as to what we can do to expect in the Guard?

PACE: Sir, I'll start, if I may, first of all, as you pointed out, you don't know who a Guardmember is, who a Reserve member is, who is the active member is unless you ask them, because their performance on the battlefield and elsewhere in the region is just superb across the board.

Second, we should, as I pointed out, ask our Reserves to do only those things that are truly Reserve missions. That if it is a consistent requirement day-to-day for more than a year, it's probably an active duty mission.

And we're about the business of culling those out and looking at our force mix. In addition, because we do have some really wonderful Americans in both the Guard and Reserve.

PACE: We owe them missions that are actually attainable, that they can train to and that they can execute. So for example, some of our older war plans, which are now being rewritten, call for Reserve units to show up at the six-month mark.

So we have Reserve units and Guard units that are training to be ready to go to war at the six-month mark. Yet our new war plans, correctly so, are capitalizing on our ability to deploy quickly and to use precise precision weapons. So we expect to have combat completed before the six-month mark.

Therefore, we have a mismatch between what we are asking our Reserve and Guard to train to in some cases and what we expect them to do on the battlefield.

All of this is being looked at in great detail in two studies, one of which is being done by Dr. Chu, the undersecretary of defense for the secretary of defense. And the other that's being done by joint requirements for oversight council by myself and the vice chiefs of the service for the chairman, so he can provide that data to the secretary.

But this is receiving very close attention across the board in DOD so we can utilize our reserves and Guard properly and ask them to be prepared for missions that our country is going to need them for over the next 10, 15 years.

WILSON: Excellent.

And Mr. Secretary, I noted in your testimony about the global footprint. And I'm particularly interested in the success that we've had in our newly hopefully to be admitted member of NATO, Bulgaria, at Burgas, the air base. And what do you anticipate in terms of forward deployment into Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe?

WOLFOWITZ: We're still in the, I'd say, early to middle stages of looking at what the appropriate adjustments of force posture would be. General Jones has talked to Secretary Rumsfeld about some possible proposals and had some direction to go back and do some more looking.

But clearly, we think that the trend is going to be toward getting more effective use of our forces through rotational deployments and exercises. I think the trend is going to be toward somewhat shifting our footprint in the direction of those threats outside of Europe that can be usefully sustained from the troops in Europe.

And clearly there's an eagerness to have us in some of the new member countries like Bulgaria, as you cite, which I think is an asset that we ought to take advantage of.

But with all of that said, I mean, that's the trend of the thinking. But we have not made any decisions yet. And we have a lot of consultation to do with our affected allies, too, before we come to any conclusions.

WILSON: Thank you very much.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

Dr. Snyder?

SNYDER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding this hearing.

And thank you, gentlemen, for being here today.

General Pace, if I might carry on a bit of this discussion about the Reserve forces. I have always been under the impression that once our forces got to Iraq, our Guard and Reserve forces, that they were essentially treated the same as the active forces, including the equipment they used and those kinds of things, including body armor.

It's my understanding that in the last few days we had one of our Guardsmen killed because of penetration of the body armor that turned out to be years old.

Do you know what the, if that's just rumor, or if you know what the facts are in that situation?