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Policy Impact Panel on US Defense Priorities
October 27, 1995
Dr. LESLIE GELB (President, Council on Foreign Relations): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Leslie Gelb. I'm president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and I welcome you to our fourth, now, Policy Impact Panel, the idea being, take on a major public policy issue in foreign policy, national security policy, lay out the problems and issues and get a clear sense of the alternatives.
We put together a panel of esteemed experts, statesmen and women, and a series of witnesses to address the issues and the options. I'd like to take just a moment to introduce the chairman of our panel, and he will take care of the rest of the proceedings.
The Chairman is former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Mr. Haig was also Chief of Staff at the White House and Supreme Allied Commander in NATO, among his many other services to the United States.
Thank you, Secretary Haig.
Former Secretary of State ALEXANDER M. HAIG, Jr. (Panel Chair, General, USA (Ret.); Chairman, Worldwide Associates Incorporated): Thank you very much, Les.
Let me say how pleased I am to participate as chairman of this morning's very distinguished panel, convened under the auspices of the Council of Foreign Relations to examine US defense priorities. Perhaps no other area of public policy today is more confused and is replete with as much fog content. So this is a very timely and worthwhile examination.
Now I've worked with each of our panelists in the past, and I'm delighted that the Council has been able to assemble such a knowledgeable and experienced group. In alphabetical order, we have Patricia Derian, former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and adviser to Human Rights Watch/Middle East. We have on my near right Rozanne Ridgway, former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada and Co-Chair of the Atlantic Council of the United States. On my far right is my old friend John W. Vessey, US Army, (Ret.), former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and currently Chair of the Advisory Board of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Now this morning's hearing will be conducted in two 1 1/2-hour segments. The first segment will look at the threats facing the United States and world peace in general in the so-called post-Cold War era. The testimony of our witnesses in this session should look at potential threats from the broadest perspective: political, economic and military. In this session, the panel also hopes to examine how, again in a broader sense, institutionally, organizationally or otherwise, we should shape our policies and priorities.
For this purpose, we've assembled two equally distinguished groups of expert witnesses, representing, as does our panel, diverse viewpoints and backgrounds. For session one, in alphabetical order--not the sequence we will follow--we will question Barney Frank, a member of the US House of Representatives and a Democrat from Massachusetts; Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, US Marine Corps, (Ret.); former Deputy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is currently Director of the National Security Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; and finally, the Honorable James R. Woolsey, former Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency and, earlier, Assistant Secretary of the Navy and currently a Partner in the Shea & Gardner law firm in our nation's capital.
For session two, we will hear from another group of witnesses. This panel will focus on our future defense needs to include the optimum level of defense spending and the various categories of spending and priorities we should establish. During this more detailed session, we will hear from Eugene J. Carroll Jr., Rear Admiral, US Navy, (Ret.), Deputy Director for the Center for Defense Information; Mr. Jan M. Lodal, Principal Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Department of Defense; and Mr. Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy and currently a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington.
Now I would again remind our panel and our witnesses that each session will begin with a five-minute opening statement from each witness, followed by questions from our panel. This will permit each witness to elaborate on their introductory remarks and, if necessary, respond to the comments of other witnesses. Before inviting our witnesses to deliver their opening statement, I will remind them that we will be following the Lyndon Johnson rules of order. He used to say to his loquacious Vice President, many times in my hearing, when introducing Hubert, the following. "Hubert, you have precisely five minutes by the clock, and at four minutes, 59 seconds, I shall bring out the hook."
We will now hear from our first distinguished witness, the Honorable R. James Woolsey.
Jim, it's yours.
Hon. R. JAMES WOOLSEY (former Director, Central Intelligence Agency; Partner, Shea & Gardner): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me--let me say, just conceptually, that many people hunger in the national security arena for a clear statement of national objectives such as one might be able to have during--as we did have during the Cold War. That is not the world we live in today. Nothing immediately is going to come forward to replace the defeat of, essentially, the Soviet empire and international communism and to preserve the way of life of the West that gives us the kind of focus that we had during the Cold War.
I said in a speech several years ago--and I'm afraid I've made myself something of a bore by repeating it rather often--that it's as if we had killed a large dragon but found ourselves in a jungle full of a large number of poisonous snakes and that, in many ways, the snakes are harder to keep track of than the dragon ever was. But it's important to realize that this lack of specific focus does not mean that we are free not to be vigilant, free to focus entirely on our domestic concerns, free to ignore foreign and national security policy.
The situation we find ourselves in, if I were to grope for an analogy, is perhaps somewhat the situation that the West--Britain, the United States, France--were in in the 1920s and early 1930s, before the clarity of the rise of fascism, Nazism, Japanese militarism, during a rather inchoate period of international affairs. But the failures of the West--of Britain and, to some extent, the United States and France--to confront threats early and strongly during those '20s and early 1930s led inexorably to the disasters of the late '30s and World War II, of the Holocaust and the rise of fascism and Japanese militarism.
So we must do our best, in these somewhat imprecise circumstances, to focus on the matters that are of particularly serious importance to the country in the international arena, and I will focus on that aspect.
Let me say very briefly, there is sort of a seamless web of three types of problems: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction--chemical, bacteriological and nuclear weapons, the ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that can carry them; the role of rogue states, and here I would put at the top of the list Iran, Iraq and North Korea--certainly, there are other rogue states, but those three seem to me to be the most dangerous for the foreseeable future; and the problems of international terrorism.
Different ones of these rogue states play differently in different ones of these threats. For example, in the near term, North Korea is probably ahead of the other two with respect to the development of ballistic missiles and certainly of the nuclear weapons, and certainly with respect to the size and power of its armed forces, in spite of the weakness of its economy, that are concentrated on the South Korean border. In the field of terrorism, Iran, of course, stands front and center, because although many of the international terrorist groups, some of which operate and plan to operate in the future in the United States, would be doing some of what they were doing without the support and encouragement and financing by the government of Iran, they would not be all--doing all of what they are doing with Iranian support. Iran, in a sense, has an accelerator but not a brake on many aspects of international terrorism.
Certainly the potential instability in northeast Asia from North Korean aggression against South Korea, the potential instability in the Mideast by way of Iraqi or Iranian aggression against any of their neighbors, are matters that ought to be a very serious concern to us.
In the military arena, I suppose I would put at the top of our list of priorities the development of effective theater ballistic missile defenses and defenses against cruise missiles, because the events of 1991, when we saw Iraqi Scuds raining down on Riyadh and on Tel Aviv in fear that they might carry weapons of mass destruction, were but an hors d'oeuvre to what we may see at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. We need to be quite concerned that Iraq, Iran, North Korea, would be able to keep the United States from effectively putting together international coalitions to stand against regional aggression of any kind, by the threat of using weapons of mass destruction, and particularly, we need to be concerned about this because of the irrational nature of the leadership of those three countries.
Let me close these opening remarks by saying just a brief word about China and Russia. Today China is an aggressive trading partner, a decrepit Communist political structure and, in many ways, a booming but somewhat disorganized economy. Historically, China has not, except for poor Tibet, tried to rule non-Han peoples, certainly not to the degree that the great Russians have ruled as imperialists over much of the Eurasian landmass. But China has a history of centralized power developing into chaos, and although it is our great hope that China will be an excellent market for the United States and the West and a valuable partner in economic development for many years to come, the possibilities of this tension between political instability and the nature of the sclerotic Communist regime on the one hand and the booming, somewhat overheated economy on the other raises serious possibility of instability over the long run in northeast Asia.
Finally, to my mind, the biggest long-term concern of all: Russia. President Yeltsin's myocardial ischemia may or may not suggest that he will be unable to run again, but whether he does or not, the possibility of a transition this winter to a Russia dominated even more than it is now by nationalists and hard-line political parties from the far right and the far left and, by next summer, by a president who is far more of a nationalist and imperialist and autocrat than President Yeltsin, has to be seriously considered. Perhaps we will not get Mr. Zhirinovsky; he wants Alaska and Finland back. Perhaps we will get General Lebed, who, at least, compared to Zhirinovsky, is a moderate. But with respect to the citizens of such states as Ukraine and the Baltics, I can guarantee you, General Lebed is not viewed as a moderate.
The role of organized crime in Russia adds a major aspect of potential instability to that terribly important country, because the organs of state power--the security ministries and intelligence organizations, much of the Russian economic structure--banks, international trading companies and the Mafia organizations in Russia are involved with one another deeply and, in many ways, tragically for the future of the Russian people.
So these, Mr. Chairman, members of distinguished panel, are some of the major concerns I see that require a substantial degree of vigilance and involvement by the United States in the world of foreign affairs, a strong defense, strong intelligence capability and a strong international structure in the State Department and the rest of our international affairs for the foreseeable future. Thank you.
Gen. HAIG: Thank you very much, Mr. Woolsey, for that very tight and yet comprehensive overview of the threats.
We'll now turn to our next distinguished witness, Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.
The floor is yours, Barney.
Representative BARNEY FRANK (Democrat, Massachusetts): Thank you, General.
I believe that we are suffering here from a cultural lag which has us putting far too much of our energy and too many of our resources into the wrong problem. From the late '30s till the early '90s, we did face the possibility that we could be destroyed by a very powerful, maligned set of enemies. First Hitler and his allies, and then Stalin and his successors, had both the intent and the potential to inflict serious physical damage on the United States.
Fortunately, we now live in a world where there are no combination of adversaries that threaten our physical security. And I would agree that there are a lot of snakes out there in the forest, but from the standpoint of the United States, they're not poisonous. There are people who are running countries these days who, in a rational scheme of things, wouldn't even be allowed to drive cars. There isn't any question about that. But they do not, individually or collectively, present the kind of threat physically to the United States that we faced first from Hitler and his allies and then from the Communist empire.
What that means is that we should be, I believe, significantly reducing the resources that we put into physical security. The reasons for that are several. First, you do it because you have to, and that doesn't mean that we should not be, by far, the strongest nation in the world, but the margin of safety we need to build into that seems to me to have diminished, because there is a qualitative difference between facing countries that mean ill to other people, that threaten oppression and chaos in other parts of the world, and, on the other hand, facing an enemy that threatens our own ability, physically, to live as we want to live. And that, we are now--we hope for a long time, but certainly for the present we're not in that situation. There is no enemy comparable in power to that in the past.
And I think that makes a real difference. When you are facing potential threats to your very physical security as a nation, then your margin of safety is pretty small. Now there are situations we don't want to see. There are people out there who we would like to restrain, and we should be strong enough to do that. But we do not have nearly as strong an enemy as we had for that 50-year period: the fascists and the Communists.
And there are two other problems. First, we are now in a zero-sum situation with the federal budget. People might make economic arguments against the need for balance, but as a political reality, we're there, so that every dollar spent for the military is a dollar than cannot be spent to alleviate poverty, to fight against crime, to improve our environment. Overspending on the military, spending more than we have to, will take away our ability, given that we're going to balance this budget, either to reduce taxes or deal with other important social problems.
And it's especially a problem because I think there is a new, more important threat to us than to our physical security. Yeah, there are nations out there that threaten things that we would like to stop, but they don't threaten our security. The biggest threat to the American way of life now, in many ways, is the globalization of the economy. We live in an economy today where you can make almost anything almost anywhere and sell it almost anywhere else. What this means is that we have a situation in the United States where many working Americans, white-collar and blue-collar, find a situation where they read in the newspapers about how well the economy is going, how satisfied the Federal Reserve is, how they just think everything is just so wonderful with the soft landing. They read about great growth, they read about great profit for their company--and they're losing their jobs. It is one thing to feel economically insecure when you read that there's a recession going on or your company is hurting; it's quite another to be feeling economically insecure in the midst of what you read are very good times.
What that means is, an anger within the American public and a sense of unhappiness and a feeling that they are being unfairly put upon that, I think, causes us serious problems so that we have an economic situation which causes us some problems, because there are difficulties in maintaining the standard of living that a lot of working- and middle-class Americans have had. The ability to go out and work hard without any particular special skills has always stood Americans in very good stead. It no longer does, and there's a very real social problem.
In other words, our number-one problem today--the number-one problem the international community presents to us today is, how can we maintain our standard of living, our environmental standards, our wages, our working conditions, in a world in which we are competing with people who do not follow those standards, who have a much lower standard? How do you prevent the kind of leveling down? And we already see it happening.
The problem with overspending on the military is that we take resources away from our ability to deal with those consequences. We misidentify our number-one problem still as if it was our physical safety, and it is not. That doesn't mean there are no problems out there, but the physical safety of the United States is no longer the problem that it was, in a dominant way, for that 50-year period. Instead, we have this problem of, how do you deal with the economics of this situation? And it has several negative effects.
First of all, it just takes away resources. Secondly, we have had an argument that says the United States should not be pressing its economic interests, lest it endanger our ability to continue to be the leader of the free world. When various presidents have pushed the Japanese to open up more to American goods, people say, `Be careful. The Japanese may decide that they won't continue the security alliance.' Well, for the Japanese to announce that they will no longer allow us to defend them at a very substantial discount seems to me an unlikely thing for the Japanese to do, but that's the last point I want to get to.
Even to the extent that there are threats in the world, we make the mistake of assuming, still, that it is somehow the obligation of the United States to take on a disproportionate share vis a vis our wealthy allies. We don't do enough to alleviate poverty in Africa. We don't do enough to deal with the problems of the poor nations of this world, in part because we are so busy subsidizing the military budgets, and therefore, the overall budget of our wealthy allies. There is no reason why there has to be a theory that says America has to fight two regional wars--two full-scaled, conventional, regional wars, largely by itself without the aid of the western European and wealthy Asian allies.
I have an aside that I would hope the Council on Foreign Relations would address. I understand that we have this argument that says, given how badly Germany and Japan behaved during the '40s, they must not be allowed ever again to be substantial military powers. Punishing people for really bad behavior by telling them that we will subsidize their budgets ad infinitum seems to me rather an odd way to punish people. I think we have to find a better way to punish them for this. I don't think the rule ought to be that if you behave badly enough, you will never again have to really support yourself and the American taxpayers'll pick up the tab.
So we overestimate the physical threat. That leads us to take resources away from dealing with the much more potent threat to our society, the economic threat. How do you maintain our standards in a world where you have a globalization of the economy without being protectionists, which isn't going to work?
And finally, we continue to subsidize our wealthy allies to allow the western Europeans and the Japanese and some of the other Asian countries to maintain military budgets as a percentage of gross domestic products far below ours, which, in fact, helps them compete better with us and further deprives us of the resources of dealing with our major problem.
I would just close and say we have to worry about the potential of our future allies, but when, as I see in the October 20th AP stories in The Newark Ledger--with the Russians now trying to sell their last aircraft carrier to India because they can't afford to maintain it, I do think that allows us more ability to reduce military spending and free up more resources to deal with the much more pressing social and economic and racial problems of this country. And the more we spend on the military, the less we are going to be able to spend on education and the environment and crime, and I think those, collectively, pose a much greater threat to the American standard of living today than the possibility that we're going to lose a war.
Gen. HAIG: Thank you very much, Representative Frank, for raising some issues that must be considered in our establishment of national priorities this morning.
The floor is now turned over to General Trainor for his presentation.
Lieutenant General BERNARD E. TRAINOR (US Marine Corps, (Ret.); former Deputy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Director, National Security Program, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, distinguished panelists.
During the past year, I had the honor of being a member of the Roles and Mission Commission to look at what the US military should be like in the post-Cold War world. Well, the first question that I asked myself is, what is different in the post-Cold War world than was during the Cold War, and what are the new potential threats that did not exist during the Cold War period?
And I came up, basically, to satisfy my own considerations, with three; two resulting from the end of the Cold War and one resulting from the advances in technology. The one related to technology is the manipulation of information, which is commonly called today "information warfare." It's a cybernetic threat, if I can use that term. The second was the likely proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and, in particular, nuclear weapons, a point that Mr. Woolsey has keyed on.
And the third and, again, the result of the breakup or the end of the ideological conflict between East and West, was the breakup of the nation state, as we traditionally know it, which leads to a great deal of disorder and anarchy. The pressures that kept ethnic, religious, tribal, racial and minor ideological differences in tow during the Cold War are gone, and so there's a certain centrifugal force that seems to be loose in the world which is breaking up states, and, of course, we have classic examples of this here within the last year or so--Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Yugoslavia. And, indeed, coming on Monday, we might see it up in our northern neighbor in Canada.
Now all of these are disruptive and they also are very costly to react to. The glue that's held the nation state together is dissolving, and there is, with this breakup, regional instability that it may not be as catastrophic as a terrorist nuclear weapon going off in Baltimore Harbor, but in the long run, could be the major threat, not only to the security of the United States, but to the security of the international community. And I would submit that we, as a nation, really don't know how to deal with this changed world. We're so used to being in a confrontation status with a very clearly defined threat that this somewhat amorphous threat is difficult to deal with.
We are children of the Westphalian, the principle of sovereignty, wherein what goes on within a nation state is the business of the nation state itself, and we are geared towards dealing with aggression so that you see the UN charter has a provision for peacekeeping forces to assist keeping peace within a state if they're invited in, and they have a Chapter 7 dealing with aggression, but they don't have anything called a 6.5 to deal with this new type of situation that is the result of the breakup of the nation state. And it's not only the concept of sovereignty that is changing and dissolving, but you also have the transnational aspects of that, which don't deal with a sovereign state at all, but rather common interests between elements that are within sovereign states, such as we see down in Rwanda and Burundi, with the Hutus and the Tutsis, which are transnational in nature.
So we are faced with what I perceive a very real threat of a--the breakup of the world community as we have known it for centuries now with unforeseen outcomes, and I would argue that the Department of Defense, as an element of the nation, is as ill-prepared as anybody to deal with this. We don't know how to deal with muscular peacekeeping. The US military today is organized along the lines of what I would describe as classical warfare, the sort of thing that we saw in the Gulf and the previous wars that we have been involved in. And at the present time, there is the stress on high technology and high-tech equipment, which served us so well in the Gulf War.
And if you are dealing with classical warfare, yes, I think that it is equipment-intensive and, therefore, can be less manpower-intensive. But if you are going to be dealing with muscular peacekeeping, it's just the reverse of that. It is not classical warfare, and it's going to be manpower-intensive as opposed to technologically intensive, and the costs are going to go up. Manpower costs.
Now this has implications for the military in terms of their organization, their equipment, their education and training, their deployment and employment. There is a tendency on the part of the Pentagon, to wish that all of this would go away and say that, "We just do classical wars," and that the purpose of the military is fight the nation's wars. Well, that's very nice, but they're liable to find themselves as hangar queens in the future, in that the classical war on the horizon doesn't seem to be very likely, but these dirty little messy things like Bosnia certainly seem to be a constant.
And even given that argument, you will find that the Pentagon will say, "Well, peacekeeping is a lesser-included capability of our classical-warfare capability in that if you have well-led, well-trained troops, they can do these things." Well, that may be true, but I think we better test that assumption, because the fundamental nature between war-fighting and peacekeeping or peace operations is different. A war fighter--his job is to use maximum violence in the shortest possible time to bring about a conclusion where his opposition's will has been broken; whereas, if you're in these peacekeeping and peace enforcement-type operations, which we can't even define, the purpose is less as a killer and more as a constable, where you're using minimum force with a great deal of restraint to achieve not a victory over somebody, but some sort of state of stability.
So I would say that, while this threat is not to the vitals of the United States, such as a nuclear threat or even an economic threat, it's one of the messy things that we can't get a handle on, whereas the other threats I do think that we can define it. But this threat is so new, so unusual, and the burden falls primarily upon the United States to come to some sort of solution to dealing with these things if we intend to be--remain the leader of--and the superpower in the world. Thank you.
Gen. HAIG: Well, thank you very much, General Trainor, and I thank each of the witnesses for their very fine statements. The hook didn't have to come out, although I did feel it pressing on my leg on occasion.
Now I do hope that the members of the panel, as well as the witnesses, bear in mind that any member, any witness, should feel free to challenge any of his fellow witnesses' observations during this hearing, and, of course, the panel is going to do the same. I think the very important aspect of this is to keep a balanced assessment of this so-called New World order, and maybe it wasn't the right term to devise in the first place, because, in many respects, we've seen in our testimonies, it's the same old dirty world it always was. There are states that believe in rule of law and peaceful change and states that believe in the rule of a bayonet, and that has not changed, and it has not since the inception of mankind.
Now I would like to turn to our distinguished panelists and ask my friend, General Vessey, to kick off with the questions, and then we'll just continue down the row here to get started. But feel free to interrupt at any time to have an issue enlightened or developed or further expanded.
General JOHN W. VESSEY (US Army, (Ret.); former Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff; Chair, Advisory Board, Center for Preventive Action, Council on Foreign Relations): Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Our witnesses have raised some interesting points. Of course, the policymakers, the administration and the Congress have to translate those points, whatever they are, into action in terms of a defense budget. And the Defense Department has to turn that budget into action in producing some sort of a defense force to meet whatever challenges the nation agrees it should meet.
There are two issues that I'm concerned about after listening to the witnesses. The first is Mr. Frank's suggestion that we should reduce the amount going to defense. I see that next year's defense budget will be about 3 percent of the GDP, which is the lowest it will have been since 1940. And my question is, where do you think it ought to be?
Rep. FRANK: Oh, I would make it about a third lower. I think 1940's an appropriate time. I think the world is a qualitatively safer place for the United States than it was and has been since 1940. Obviously, there are people out there, as I said, who would misbehave, and in conjunction with our allies, we should deal with that. But from 1940 to 1990, there were bad people with a lot of power who were genuine threats to our physical security. That situation, fortunately, does not now exist, and I believe, first, that we could get much more from our European allies.
In 1989 and 1990, over the objection of most of the people who make foreign and defense policy--and this was bipartisan--Congress insisted on asking the Japanese to contribute to the non-personnel costs of stationing our troops there, and we were told that this would be a terrible thing to do, but we did it, and we now get several billion dollars a year from the Japanese because of that. We ought to do that for the Europeans. I think the B-2 bomber was a grave error. I think the two-war strategy is a mistake. I think the United States ought to be stronger than any conceivable combination of countries that might make war on us by a significant margin, and we ought to have the ability to fight a full-scale conventional war and to work with our allies in other ways and to maintain a nuclear deterrent. And I think we could do that, getting there gradually, at less than two-thirds of the current budget.
Gen. VESSEY: In 1940, we were spending about 2 percent of the GDP. Two years later, I and a whole bunch of other people went to war in North Africa and we watched many of our comrades die and buried them there because we were too ill-trained and too ill-equipped to deal with the force we had to meet. So one needs to look beyond simply...
Rep. FRANK: Well, General, I'd have to ask you who--yes, and that's because we all made a mistake. I think Jim Woolsey was right. I wasn't quite here. I didn't arrive until 1940, so I'll absolve myself in this case. I'll take part of the blame for other things. But the United States and the others were ignoring Hitler, and by 1940, yeah, we had been too late, and I think Franklin Roosevelt was right and his critics were wrong about that.
But I also have to say, one-to-one analogies with history will almost always mislead you. Things have changed enormously. We have a different GDP; we have different technology; we have different enemies. Looking at a 55-year-old percentage of GPD doesn't tell you anything. The question is, what are the real needs and what are the real enemies? And I think it is indisputable today that we have far more military power than we will ever be called upon to use, and that's partly because we have told the rest of the world--and here's where I disagree with some of my colleagues and with General Trainor, who said if we want to be the leader of the free world--well, if that's what it's costing, I'll share the leadership.
I think the most popular book in the world is "Tom Sawyer," and a lot of very wealthy people have figured out how to get America to paint the fence. We act as if, when we go to people's aid, they are doing us a favor by allowing that to happen. And I think if we said realistically to our European and wealthier Asian allies, "Look, yeah, North Korea's a problem, but it's probably going to be a problem for you before it reaches us; we will work cooperatively with you," we would not have to pick up quite as much of the load. Everybody, including us, is used to the United States paying a disproportionate share of what the wealthy countries are expected to pay, and I think we could save a substantial amount there.
Gen. VESSEY: So the answer, as I dig it out of what you gave, is that you would go down by a third.
Rep. FRANK: Yes.
Gen. VESSEY: Mm-hmm.
Rep. FRANK: Not in one year, because you've got a transition period, but after a three- or four-year period.
Gen. HAIG: All right. Roz.
Ambassador ROZANNE L. RIDGWAY (former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada; Co-Chair, Atlantic Council of the United States): I'd like to--thank you, General. I'd like to ask Mr. Frank a quick question and then address some broader questions to Mr. Woolsey.
Is there any evidence that moneys saved on the military budget went, ever, in fact, to the domestic budget, that the necessary policy choices and the necessary consensus has formed around a domestic program that could...
Rep. FRANK: Oh, of course. Sure.
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...benefit from defense savings?
Rep. FRANK: Yes. In the 1993 budget, which the president proposed and Congress enacted and the president decided he wasn't really for it but he came back in favor of it, we did spend less on the military and had more to spend on some domestic programs--there isn't any question--and going in the future. But I would also make this point, too. We are now, I think, much more in a zero-sum game with federal spending. I believe that the country has now told its elected officials that it wants people to arrive at a balanced budget. And it is one thing to be dealing with a somewhat flexible goal of reducing the deficit; it's another one you have mandated you're going to get to zero, as we have defined it.
So I think that that trade-off is even more sharp for the future. But I would say the '93 budget is an example of some reductions in the military that went to domestic, and we're getting the reverse now. The budget that passed the House yesterday reduces domestic spending more than it otherwise would, and some of my Republican colleagues said, "Yeah, if we had more money, we would do more of this, but we don't." And that's probably because they've wanted to increase the military.
Amb. RIDGWAY: Well, I think you're right when you say that at present, this is perceived as and probably is a zero-sum game, and so, in the competition for resources, the cases for one way of spending over another have to be made rather convincingly.
And I would like to say to Mr. Woolsey, I think that those of us who may not quite agree with what Mr. Frank is saying have yet to make the case for the new security situation, have yet to describe it in a way that's convincing. I believe, as you have said, that there is no specific focus, no enemy that can be defined as sharply as the one that has just receded from the national scene. And I noticed in your statement, you began with listing threats--proliferation, rogue states, terrorism--but threats to what? What do you see as being the US national interests that are threatened? If it's not a physical threat to our continent, to our country, is it a threat to our currency? Is it a threat to the energy sources that move our industry? What is it out there that is being threatened by these forces to which we should respond, in some fashion, through defense policy?
Hon. WOOLSEY: Well, I think the most immediate and serious physical threat to the United States is through terrorism. Certainly, we have our own domestic breed of terrorists, as Oklahoma City demonstrated, but we also import some from overseas, as the World Trade Center demonstrated. And I believe we have seen only the beginning of foreign-sponsored terrorism in the United States. We are a society with very intricate and interdependent networks of transportation, information processing, oil and gas pipelines, electricity distribution and the rest, and we were able recently to invite to the United States to be prosecuted Mr. Yousef, a very skillful terrorist bomber from the Mideast.
If one had a Yousef hacker--Mr. Yousef who, instead of being a skilled bomber, was skilled at penetrating data processing networks and the like--the amount of chaos that can be--could be visited on either the United States or any other modern Western society is substantial; let's put it that way. If you add to that the possibility of, let's say, biological-warfare terrorism--the events in Japan following the activities by Aum Shinri Kyo there with the sarin gas in the subways--are a pale, pale copy of what even the simplest biological compound might do in a terrorist situation.
So if one is looking at physical risks to the United States now, I think that is what you have to put front and center. I would say that much of the solution to these types of problems is probably not in spending vastly greater amounts of money. It has to do with attitudes of vigilance; it has to do with cooperation between various government agencies; it has to do with, frankly, being willing to spy on such organizations overseas by the CIA and by the allies of the United States and domestically by the FBI. There are a number of things that need to be done rather vigorously, and most--many of them are not all that expensive.
If you take the next step and say, what are the next things that might physically damage the United States? I would say that the first ballistic missile threats from a rogue state would come probably to Alaska and Hawaii and come from Korean--North Korean ballistic missile developments, particularly since North Korea clearly already has weapons of mass destruction.
But it does seem to me that the physical danger to the continental or the 50 United States is not really the main point. The reason General Vessey's forces that he fought in as a young infantryman in--at the beginning of World War II were so ill-equipped and ill-trained was precisely because of the attitudes that were maintained in the United States toward national security, in spite of everything late in the '30s that Franklin Roosevelt could do, during the interwar years.
So this problem of rogue states that may get out of hand, of international terrorism, of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of potential instabilities in China and Russia, are something that one always needs to be working on. And it is a shame if people are not able to be persuaded of that, by historical analogy or otherwise, because it doesn't state a single, concise case with a single specific threat. But that is not the fault of the people who are stating the case. That's the way the world is. If you are not persuaded that a messy and uncertain world, such as we live in now and such as we lived in in the 1920s and early 1930s, requires substantial efforts by the US in the fields of foreign policy and international affairs, I don't know how anyone would be able to change your mind.
Amb. RIDGWAY: Thank you.
Gen. HAIG: Recently, Oliver Stone, a great Hollywood movie mogul, sent a scriptwriter to me to run over his impressions of what really happened in Washington during Watergate and the Nixon administration. And I sent him back a message. I said, "He who never studies history or reads history is doomed to create his own." And I think we, in this New World order and all of the rhetoric associated with it, are perhaps inclined to be creating our own history, which may prove to be very dangerous and disappointing to us.
Now I'd like to ask our witnesses, individually or collectively, to comment on an observation that I made to my old friend and a very distinguished American, Les Aspin, when he chaired the Armed Services Committee and ran through his staff the first bottom-up review from a legislative point of view. As I read over the analysis of the various threats facing our country, which was sort of a contemporary exposition on what could happen in this New World order, I found that there was a tendency to use the systems analysis approach. In other words, you put a lot of threats out, and then you say, "Oh, I need A, B, C and D to deal with them," and that's our defense requirements process. Well, that's not a requirements process.
I happen to believe that we sacrifice for our defense needs, not simply to prevail in the event we have to confront one of these very diverse threats, as has been so astutely laid out this morning, but more importantly, to prevent the outbreak of conflict in the first instant. Now that's a measure of something very different than war-fighting or threat analysis. It's a very sophisticated integration of the political, economic and security dimensions of international peace and stability and acceptance of rule of law. And so, in light of the statements that each of our witnesses has made--and very good ones--I wonder if you would comment on whether or not you believe that American relevance contributes to international stability and that the military dimension is a contributor to that, a very, very important and sometimes non-quantifiable content. Would you care to comment?
Gen. TRAINOR: Well, yes. In terms of American relevance, yes, we are relevant. We are the superpower, and I would agree with Congressman Frank that it's well to have others with us. It's always cheaper and more effective if you have the international community on your side. But that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility that has fallen on our shoulders in which we have eagerly sought in the past: to be the leader.
When you think of what happens when we back off that role--we had that in the post-Vietnam period and there was all sorts of mischief in the world, particularly in the area of terrorism. And when we decided that we would not involve ourselves in what we viewed as a European matter--the breakup of Yugoslavia and the problems that came from that--we saw that others were not able to do it. So by default, this role falls to the United States. Now it's the choice of the American people whether they want to be isolationists or internationalists, and obviously, that debate isn't a new debate. But I would simply say that if we do not take the role as an interventionist, given the transnational aspects of today's world--it's different than the 1930s, although even in the 1930s, that proved to be a fatal mistake--that we can't back off from the world. We have to be in it, and because of our power--our economic power, our cultural, our political power, our military power--we have to be the leader. And if we don't, shame on us, because the consequences are going to be on our head.
Rep. FRANK: I disagree very sharply with that. Obviously we should be relevant, but I reject the notion that the choices are this stark, that either we have to be doing 90 percent of the heavy lifting or we're total slackers. That made sense in 1945. I think cultural lag is our continuing enemy here. In 1945, we came out of World War II strengthened. Obviously, we had a lot of personal tragedy, but our economy, our coherence, a whole lot of things in America were strengthened. We had a degree of dominance over most other societies because of the damage they suffered in the war compared to us; that was unsustainable and unrealistic. The problem is, we're still acting as if that set of power relationships was there. The United States still does the same kind of disproportionate share of the spending vis-a-vis our European and Asian allies.
As far as isolationism, of course not. That's not a realistic option that anybody that I know of is advocating. I want us to be spending more to alleviate poverty in Africa. One reason we can't is that we're paying too much in NATO of our--we're paying an unfair share of NATO, so we cut back on Africa. We cut back on the World Bank and International Development Association. We cut back on what we ought to be doing in Latin America. I want to do a good deal more in the terrorism area. If we want to really be serious about drug reduction in Latin America, we're going to have to come up with some money to take care of the people who will be put out of business when they can't grow drugs anymore. And we could do a lot more if we were prepared to put some more money into alleviating the social problems that some of these drug reduction efforts are going to take.
As far as the 1940 analogy is concerned, if we were spending two-thirds of what we are now spending, we would have a degree of military dominance over any other combination of powers, quite different than the situation in 1940. Plus, you, perhaps, have noticed, I am for an intelligence budget; I am for keeping track. If someone starts building the way Hitler started building in the '30s, then you act.
But again, I have to come back and say, yeah, it's relevant for the United States to be involved, but as long as we continue to act as it's still the late '40s and we are not just the leader, but the only adult, and everybody else can sit back and wait for the United States, we will continue to have a situation where our own domestic social problems will be exacerbated. And the average American today is much more afraid, unfortunately, of crime in his or her own city than of disorder elsewhere in the world. I want to deal with both, but I believe we have put ourselves in a situation where we use far too many of our resources on potential international threats to the point where we ignore very real domestic problems.
Gen. HAIG: Jim.
Hon. WOOLSEY: Let me put it this way. In the international arena, I think for two reasons, the United States really is, for all practical purposes, the glue that holds together the alliances and international operations against tyrants or potential tyrants. If you look at someplace like Northeast Asia, for all sorts of historical reasons--and ending with World War II, Japanese colonialism and Korea and all the rest--it is simply not feasible that the Japanese and South Koreans, without our leadership role, could cooperate effectively in deterring--hopefully deterring and defeating, if it occurs, a North Korean attack.
Much of the same has been true in Europe for all sorts of historical reasons for a long time. We've been engaged in a rather substantial reduction in forces. We now have two divisions in Europe, two brigades in Korea; we have two functioning fighter bases in Europe. We have made very substantial reductions in our overseas forces over the course of the last number of years.
Now I agree with Barney that the social problems, particularly of our inner cities--drugs, crime and the rest--are of extraordinary importance and simply have to be addressed more effectively by both the federal government and state and local governments than they have been in the past, but I do believe that it's extremely important that we not step away from this international leadership role, which is the only thing that really holds these alliances and these groups together. We've seen the consequences of the United States, in 1991, having stepped back from former Yugoslavia and turning it over to the Europeans to run. The Europeans exported hostages to the Serbian portions of former Yugoslavia, which were called peacekeepers, but effectively prevented what could have been useful military action for the last two to three years. That has not been an example of strong European leadership and cohesiveness without American involvement.
So, although theoretically, it would be nice if we were just another country, if we could relax, if we did not have this international leadership role that is partially because of our strength, partially because of history, partially because of the very nature of the American state--the fact that we're not a tribe, we're not a race; we're an idea. And that notion that we are an idea has a tremendous galvanizing effect on our being able to pull together free and democratic societies in defense of freedom and against tyranny throughout the world. It's simply something we should not step back from.
Rep. FRANK: May I respond to you briefly?
Gen. HAIG: Yes.
Rep. FRANK: Because the tragedy is that we are doing that at the expense of maintaining that democratic ideal at home, I think people may not be focusing on the degree of social tension in the United States. But you have tens of millions of Americans who are very angry at what they see as this kind of diversion of resources. John Kennedy, when he launched the Alliance for Progress, quoted Franklin Roosevelt--or described Franklin Roosevelt's good-neighbor policy and he said, "Franklin Roosevelt could be a good neighbor abroad because he was a good neighbor at home."
In this current situation, lacking the resources to be good neighbors at home, you are undermining the consensus for that. You talk about the Yugoslavian situation, but I think the president's going to have an extraordinarily difficult time getting American troops into Bosnia, in part because of this. And there has to be a break. Let me just--to close, to take the Korean example. If the Japanese and the South Koreans cannot be persuaded by their own self-interest to take a more active role against North Korea, then they may have to live with the consequences. But the notion that this is somehow primarily an American responsibility, given the geography, is obviously a mistake. I believe that we encourage them in that mistaken thinking and the notion that it is primarily America's responsibility to deal with this rogue state which is in their midst, is an example, I think, of the fruits of our having encouraged them to just rely on us and do nothing themselves.
Gen. VESSEY: I just simply have to challenge that. That idea that the South Koreans, for example, aren't doing anything for themselves. They have 600,000 of their own people in uniform; we have some 25,000, I think, on the ground. They spend more than double the percentage of their GNP on defense than we do. So the assertion that those people don't recognize their threat...
Rep. FRANK: No, I agree. I should have...
Gen. VESSEY: ...is just so absurd.
Rep. FRANK: ...focused more on the Japanese. I was just responding to Mr. Woolsey's point that you couldn't get the Japanese and the South Koreans to work together on this. Obviously, the South Koreans are clearly doing a great deal; the Japanese, however, continue to do very, very little. And I would just say, on all of this--and Mr. Woolsey is right, we have had some reductions, but these reductions came over the objections of all the people who are still against any objections. They told us terrible things would happen.
Let me just give you an example--the Philippines. It seemed to me for a long time that we were spending far too much money in bases in the Philippines and paying the Filipinos for the right to do that. And I was told time and again that Subic and Clark were absolutely essential to the defense of the United States. And then God intervened and a volcano closed down the base. And when Clark was closed down, we got rid of Subic. And God was able to accomplish what some of us in the House weren't, and I acknowledge that there's a disparity in power there, but in consequence of that volcano and the closing of those bases, I do not believe America's interest has been one whit diminished. And I would invite people to go back and look at the arguments. We were told if we got out of Clark and Subic, it would have a terribly destabilizing effect; all it's done is save us money.
Gen. VESSEY: Mr. Chairman, could I simply add that God happened to act just about the same time we won the Cold War. So there was a coalition of interests there.
Gen. HAIG: Right. I would suggest that's right, but I had dinner with President Ramos the other night in New York.
Rep. FRANK: Oh, I wasn't sure who you were going to say you had dinner with, General!
Gen. HAIG: Listen carefully! And I said after that dinner that there is a future for generals as presidents of countries, because Ramos certainly personifies that.
Now, Pat, the floor is yours, because I've assured myself that Mr. Frank is not a member of the Pat Buchanan campaign team.
Hon. PATRICIA M. DERIAN (former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Adviser, Human Rights Watch/Middle East): Hm. I'm just leaving that all alone.
What we have had are two strong threat assessments, one in the area of international affairs and one in the area of domestic affairs. And I'm not sure that we have to choose whether the threats that Jim Woolsey outlined are more serious than the threats that Barney Frank outlined. I think the disparity comes in terms of money between those two. And it's hard to figure out what the B-1 bomber has to do with terrorism, for instance. General Trainor has acknowledged that both of these areas--what's going on here at home, where people are really afraid about what's going to happen to their kids at school and not quite so worried about what's going to happen with a cruise missile coming our way. The flop of the Scuds was kind of a relief to the people who were watching it so carefully.
But General Trainor really makes it necessary in his assessment to look at the way we've organized both our diplomacy and our military. The military apparently can't stop thinking about what they needed in the past, so they're looking at the future, it seems to me, but they also can't let go. They're running scared. We're running scared domestically. Things look terrible. Race relations are terrible. Poverty is increasing; the difference between the rich and the poor. These are times when we're all worried.
What worries me is that the people who are thinking in current terms, in the way that General Trainor outlined, don't have enough room on the podium to do it. And there are so many things mitigating against any reasonable solution to how we face up to all of these things. If you look, for instance, at Rwanda--a rogue government genocide--and take just the incident of the radios, where the radio was blaring for people to go out and kill the people of another tribe, where it went 24 hours a day. There was discussion about putting the radios out of commission. The military said, "We can't do that. We don't have the technical means to jam these radios. And besides, it would be against the law." At the same time, we're funding a huge amount of stuff for Radio Marti.
So I'd like to move, if we could, just from--beyond saying what's wrong to saying how you might put these problems together. Can anybody see not spending so much money on the military? Forget about what percentage it is. What does it cost to do what we need? Do we have to do everything, as General Haig said? Look at A, B, C and D and drop money on all of them. Where is it that you can find a place to relieve us of this huge military budget to meet the assessment of the threats that are against us and to also meet our domestic needs? And while I know that the Congress stayed up all night not doing that, it seems to me that somebody has to start talking about it outside of the small inner circle. So I want everybody to tell me.
Gen. TRAINOR: Well, one of the things I would like to point out is that the ideal world that Congressman Frank would like to have, where we can provide for our own and also for people in Africa and elsewhere, and the world in a sense that Jim Woolsey describes, where you're dealing with very clearly defined states who either have our interests at heart or are inimical to us--all of that could come apart with the strange centrifugal activities that are taking place in the world today, where the states breaking down, with bankrupt states emerging, destabilizing regions, destabilizing the global economy. It's, I think, the danger there, while ill-defined. And that's the worst part of it: We can't define it because it's so new.
But it's almost as though we could be moving into a new version of the Dark Ages, which makes all of our economic strength at home and the so-called international stability that we have with our various coalitions as alliances, meaningless. That, in a sense, we'll find things breaking down around us that we can't respond to unless we start to think about what it is that's happening and how we should be responding to it, not just militarily, but also politically, economically, socially and culturally. Otherwise, the argument about how much you're going to put into defense and how many divisions or how many aircraft carriers you need, becomes somewhat meaningless. I mean, the responsibility of the president and the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not to take chances. You can't afford to make a mistake with the national security of this country.
So, ergo, by definition, they are going to take a more robust look at the world and the threats around it and what's needed to deal with those. My argument is that they'd better be making sure that they're dealing with the correct order of problems.
Rep. FRANK: I agree with much of that. Let me say there is one difference I have. And that is: Of course, there's got to be a margin of safety when they're making defense decisions about national security. That's my central point. When you do not have the kind of threat to our very existence as a society that the Hitler-Tojo-Mussolini axis, or Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev--both of those were qualitatively different than the threats we have today. It doesn't mean there aren't threats, but it is a qualitatively different threat.
It's also the case, by the way, that when we say, "Well, we have this whole new set of threats: Iran, Iraq." I mean, none of those nations, it seems to me, came into the world in 1992. We used to have the Soviet Union and a lot of those nations; now we just have those nations. So I think our margin has improved our margin of error--because it is one thing to have terrible killing in Rwanda, which we very much regret, but that is not the threat to the security of the United States that you had from Hitler and Stalin, and that's qualitatively different.
Secondly, I agree with the General that we should be looking at these kinds of threats. I think the problem is that some of the defense spending is not only meaningless but counterproductive. The money that goes into the B-2 bomber, the Seawolf submarine, the money that we spend defending NATO so that NATO cannot spend very much money on its own--those take away resources that could be used to deal with the kinds of things you're talking about. I agree, we should be spending more money there, but we can't spend some money and do more about this, but working to prevent that kind of internal disintegration, etc. It just doesn't work. And we've seen this.
The problem in the former Yugoslavia was not a lack of American military power. The problems have not happened in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia because America couldn't defeat them in a war. The problem was the political and complex one of getting involved there. And building the B-2 bomber and the Seawolf submarine just doesn't do it. And maintaining the capacity to fight two conventional wars--two full-scale, conventional wars and do the nuclear deterrence at the same time is, in fact, not just irrelevant to what General Trainor was talking about, but damaging to it, because it takes away those resources.
So I would get rid of the B-2 bomber; I would get rid of the new Seawolf submarines; I would say, "No. We're not going to have to fight and win two full-scale wars simultaneously and do the nuclear deterrence."
Gen. HAIG: I think we're going to get into these questions in the next session in considerable detail. Let me just make an observation, Jim, before you enter into this, and that is, I hope we can, in this session, focus on the broad political, strategic, geopolitical aspects of dealing with a number of new and very sophisticated threats.
For example, I think the last two presidencies should have taught us something as Americans. One is that President Bush was condemned for enjoying foreign policy and neglecting our domestic need. President Clinton came in, stating he was going to let the world take care of itself and (pounds table) focus on these long-overdue domestic requirements. Well, again, his nose has been pushed in the doo-doo, as George Bush might say. And he's now up to his neck in foreign alligators. What you need is balance, and I hope we keep some balance in this discussion with respect to America's relevance. We sell American goods and services abroad. That is the locomotive of our economic development in this past decade. And if we are withdrawing our presence, let me tell you, as a businessman, I would hate to go to Europe and sell an American widget or to Asia and sell an American widget.
Gen. TRAINOR: Oh, General...
Gen. HAIG: So bear in mind these are interrelated...
Rep. FRANK: Can I respond briefly--directly to that? The fact is that most of our Asian allies sell us a lot more than they buy from us. You think they're going to say, "We are so upset that you don't have the seventh fleet here that we're not going to sell you anything anymore"? I mean, that's backwards.
Gen. HAIG: They're happy to sell.
Rep. FRANK: The fact is that the Asians do quite well...
Gen. HAIG: They're happy to sell.
Rep. FRANK: ...with the United States. They're not going to cut off trade because we don't...
Gen. HAIG: I'm in the business of trying to sell to them, and let me tell you...
Rep. FRANK: I understand that.
Gen. HAIG: ...it becomes increasingly difficult if they believe we are not a relevant player in the ritual.
Rep. FRANK: Excuse me, General, but how come--see, this is the problem with the one-sidedness we imposed on ourselves. None of those nations, to my knowledge, are contributing substantially to the defense of the United States; that doesn't stop us from buying from them. And I don't understand why we say, "Oh, but if we don't make a--if we don't subsidize your defense, you're not going to buy from us." They are doing quite well in the bilateral trade. I'm not trying to upset it, but I don't think we ought to pay for the right for them to have a big surplus.
Hon. WOOLSEY: No. Untrue. Untrue, incidentally, just as Jack Vessey pointed out on Korea.
Rep. FRANK: Right. But it's not the...
Hon. WOOLSEY: You can make the same issue with...
Rep. FRANK: Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, all of whom have great trade surpluses with us, and certainly, Japan and China are normally...
Gen. VESSEY: And Japan pays $40,000 a head to support our soldiers that are deployed over there, and the Americans over here...
Rep. FRANK: And their total military budget is a small fraction of the GDP compared to ours.
Amb. RIDGWAY: You know, General, I have the impression the discussion has suddenly started to sound as if it's taking place in the well of the Congress...
Gen. HAIG: Yeah. That's what we were looking for.
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...along party lines, and we may have been looking for that, but, in fact, I have been stunned this morning--not stunned, but at least mildly surprised--to hear a degree of commonality among all three of the participants. There has not been a questioning of whether or not there is, in the future of the United States, an international security picture that contains threats. There may be differences as to the immediacy of those threats, but that there are threats. I hear a degree of commonality about the need for alliance. There is differences about who pays what proportion of it, and I'm of the view that the allies have probably not been given credit over the years for the amount that they have paid, up to the point of turning us into Hessians rather than acting in behalf of our own national interest.
And I hear a degree of commonality about a sound defense budget taking place, and the differences seem, very quickly, to descend into what is probably the next panel, which is, how do you then, in terms of military hardware and numbers of people, express an appropriate American national response to that atmosphere? What is the bill that you add up? That it's not a choice between isolationism and internationalism; it's somewhere in between. And I've never thought that it was really a question of money as we have looked at, say, Yugoslavia; it's a question of a willingness to send your kids there. And that is a political will question, not an economic question. And I think we're not getting, really, to a couple of tough issues that maybe are appropriate to this session, which is the nature of the American mood at this time and the willingness to play the role, by sending our kids into this world of turmoil.
Hon. WOOLSEY: Could I...
Gen. HAIG: Jim.
Hon. WOOLSEY: Could I address something that Patti raised earlier, and also Barney has addressed clearly a couple of times, which is this issue of whether you ought to be prepared to deal with two major contingencies simultaneously or near simultaneously? It seems to me we can't get away from that. The problem is that the regional contingencies can notice one another. If one is engaged because Saddam Hussein is threatening Saudi Arabia, Kim Jong-Il, for all his emotional problems, is likely to notice.
One cannot, I think, maintain, in the modern world, an American military structure that can only deal with one issue at a time or one major regional contingency at a time. There are ways one can probably do it smarter and with more technology and fewer people than we're doing now. Bill Owens, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has taken the lead in the last couple of years in the Department of Defense in promoting, I think, some very innovative thinking about using technology in place of people.
And there, over the long run, I think, lies, perhaps, some possibility for savings. But it does seem to me that whether you're talking high technology and fewer people and being able to fight smart or whether you're talking about doing things a bit more the way we have done it historically, nonetheless, the matter of having the will to engage and prevent either massacres from having occurred in Bosnia or to have prevented Hitler from moving into the Rhineland in the mid-1930s--neither of which we did--that will depends very heavily upon having the wherewithal to implement what you have decided to do. It is certainly not that power is sufficient, or military force is sufficient, but it certainly is necessary. I mean, one cannot stop Hitler in the mid-30s, before Czechoslovakia and before Anschluss and before World War II, if you don't have the forces, and then derive from that the will to be able to move.
So it seems to me, on the domestic issues--Barney and I have been debating these issues now for over a third of a century, I think the first time, at the National Student Association conference in Ohio State in the summer of 1962. I know of no more able spokesman for the very important domestic issues facing the United States, and also I think some of the critiques that he has made today on some of the foreign policy and security questions are trenchant. But I do believe that, at the heart of the matter of whether or not you are going to be able to have adequate national security policy in diplomacy and in everything else, you have to look at whether or not you are able to maintain enough forces to deal with two near-simultaneous regional contingencies. And many of the decisions about numbers of troops and numbers of aircraft carriers and all the rest fall out of that decision. Barney has his finger right on the issue. That is the question, and I take a different view than he does on that one.
Hon. DERIAN: You and Ms. Ridgway have brought me to my real question, which is a question of will. And will is always the key point in any political decision, but I'm talking about something very specific. And over and over again, we hear representatives of the military saying that they do not wish to put their people in harm's way. And we talk about our boys, our kids, our youths. And what that translates to and what I think is one of the great impediments to having this discussion is the general idea in the voting populace that, "Wait a minute. If the soldiers don't want to fight, what are we paying them for?"
Now I see you make your face. I'm telling you, this is a real factor, because there is a question of the difference in will. Is it a lack of leadership on the political side that the military feels that it must uneasily step forward and say, "This is not what we want to get into"? You prove to me, you political people, that you're not going to send my people out to be massacred. Because it goes with the giant weapons that we're not going to use. There's a whole body of stuff here that puts the American people in the oddest position to address the debate.
Hon. WOOLSEY: Could I just say one quick word on this? It does seem to me to be a very important matter. I only got up to Army captain and I never wore a uniform; I sat in the Pentagon at a desk for my active service and got two four-star generals--Mick, the Director of the Marine Corps staff, and all the rest here. So I say this with some trepidation. But I think that the military leadership of the United States, over the years, has quite appropriately, and especially recently, taken the position that the country should be slow to anger, that if ordered into combat, they will do a damned fine job, but that if we're going to send a bear, we ought to send a grizzly. And therefore, they are normally, in the councils of government, not standing in there saying, "Yes, Coach. Send us in." They want to be told by the political leadership, "This is a vital American interest. We're going to war," as we did in the Gulf War.
I think it's entirely appropriate that military--uniformed military leaders point out the problems, point out the concerns, say, "You know, we might be able to do it with one corps, but I really think we ought to have two corps over there," or three corps or whatever they decide they need. I don't think you want uniformed, career military leaders standing there saying, "We're ready to go. Send me in, Coach. And here's a good opportunity." That's not the attitude you want them to take.
Hon. DERIAN: It's not directly responsive, but it's an interesting...
Rep. FRANK: Well, I think that...
Gen. HAIG: One thing bearing on that point is that the military people recognize that it is not their will; it's the will of the American people and the political leaders they've elected that counts. And having watched the will change overnight, it is important that the military forces be prepared for that change in will when it occurs. And I don't want to spend time on defense budgeting 101 here, but it's important to understand that the defense budget of today--about 30 percent of it goes for today's readiness and forces and the other two-thirds of it goes to tomorrow's readiness and forces. It's research and development for the weapons we'll have 30 years from now. It's buying the weapons that we'll have 15--10, 15, 20 years from now. And it's important to understand that that lead time cannot--you can't recover from it if you've lost it. You must do what you have to do to prepare for the next 20 years.
Now Mick has made a good point: We have to get the best possible view of what the world will look like 20 years from now, but none of us knows. And surely, the world that comes over the horizon tomorrow will be vastly different from the world we expect to come over the horizon, and the military forces have to be prepared for it. And it gets back down, again, to what you're going to do if you cut or add to the military forces. And it sort of sounds to me as though some of our panelists think that the 3 percent of GDP or the 15 percent or 14 percent of the federal budget or the 1.7 percent of the labor force is the total swing in whether or not we're going to fix the problems in the cities or whatever it is, and I find that absurd. I think we have to...
Rep. FRANK: So does everybody, General. That's a caricature...
Gen. HAIG: Yeah.
Rep. FRANK: ...that no one has advanced. No one has remotely suggested that.
Gen. HAIG: But we simply have to be prepared...
Rep. FRANK: No, but...
Gen. HAIG: ...for the world of the future outside this country as well as the world inside.
Rep. FRANK: Excuse me. But I'm not--let me...
Gen. VESSEY: The question is how do you...
Rep. FRANK: I never suggested that that's the total answer, and that's a caricature that I don't think helps us.
Gen. VESSEY: No, I'm not trying to...
Rep. FRANK: No, but you refuted an argument no one has made.
Gen. HAIG: I don't understand the argument you have made, then.
Rep. FRANK: Well, let me try it, because I would like to respond to both of these points. First, I would just...
Gen. HAIG: But in order to do that, you have to tell me which part of that third of the defense budget you're not going to spend that's being spent for next year.
Rep. FRANK: Well, I started to.
Gen. HAIG: Where will it be reduced?
Rep. FRANK: I started to...
Gen. HAIG: What do you want to do? Is it today's problem, where the Chief of Staff of the Army tells me he's issued Purple Hearts in the last four years for wounds or deaths in combat in four different places of the world, or is it tomorrow's war that you don't know about that you don't want to be prepared for? What is it that you want to...
Rep. FRANK: Well, I've tried to, but, General Haig, you don't want to get too much detail. I agree. The B-2 bomber, for instance, for tomorrow and today, I think, is excessive. The Seawolf submarine--but it also goes to the two-war theory, and here's the problem I have with the two-war theory. No, I'm not suggesting that we not be able to deal with two contingencies; what I'm differing with is the notion that America, primarily, has to be able to win two conventional wars in two different places at the same time with primarily American forces...
Gen. HAIG: Do you think we could?
Rep. FRANK: ...which particularly--what?
Gen. HAIG: Do you think we could today?
Rep. FRANK: I don't know, but I don't think we should try, and that's my point.
Gen. HAIG: I...
Rep. FRANK: General, you asked for an answer, and I want to give it to you. I think the problem with that is that it assumes that there is no Europe. It says, yes, the South Koreans will participate. South Korea is, of course, larger than North Korea; has a much better industrial base. The notion that America should have to take the brunt there doesn't make sense; obviously, we would cooperate with the South Koreans. But as far as the Middle East is concerned, I don't want to continue this notion that France and England and all of our wealthy western European allies--somehow it should be irrelevant to them.
So I don't think that we need to be able to fight and win the two full-scale wars by ourselves at the same time. Beyond that, the problem now is, with the will--and I agree with, I think, what Patt Derian was saying. We didn't lack the physical force in Bosnia and Serbia. The American people don't want to do it. And I think what some of you are forgetting is what John Kennedy said about Franklin Roosevelt: You can't be a good neighbor abroad if you're not a good neighbor at home.
When the American people feel as they now feel, many of them, that they are facing economic insecurity, in part because of international economic trends, your ability to get them further to sacrifice is substantially diminished. The final point I would say is this, General: Yeah, we need lead time, but so do our enemies, and I think that cuts both ways. The notion--you can look now and say, "Well, there's nobody out there that's all that strong," but what's going to happen in the future?
Well, I'm for a good intelligence budget. I want to do good espionage on them. They need the same lead time as we do, and I do not think that we face the danger--now the problem we had in the '30s was, we ignored Hitler. I don't see anybody comparable out there now militarizing and growing the way he did. If that happens, then we would have to step up, but that lead time works both ways.
Gen. TRAINOR: If I could go back to...
Gen. HAIG: Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry, but we have run out of time, which is a great credit to the contributions of our witnesses, to the diversity and complexity and comprehensiveness of the discussion. I want to thank each and every one of you for your contributions here this morning, and I think these are all very, very--use that term--relevant issues that we've discussed, because these are the issues that are in the hearts and minds of the electorate in America. And the resolution of these issues in the months ahead will decide the future direction of this country, and thank God that is the way we run our business.
So again, I thank you very much. We're going to take a five-minute break and then we'll reassemble to put the lights on the Christmas tree. PGRM: Council on Foreign Relations NTWK: SYND DATE: October 27, 1995 TIME: 9:30 AM-12:30 PM Gen. HAIG: Ladies and Gentlemen, this will be session number two of our hearing this morning. I remind you that this is a session which is designed to look at our defense budget. This is a more detailed discussion of how to accomplish the mission of dealing with what we discussed in the first session.
Oddly enough despite a number of differences on priorities, the common thread was the agreement of the diversity of the threats, with the possible exception of not exploring Mr. Woolsey's concerns about what's going on in the former Soviet Union. They'll be more trouble rather than less trouble. That was his own observation.
Having said all that we have a very distinguished panel for this session. My old friend Jan Lodal, Richard Perle, and Admiral Carroll, all of whom I've worked with in the past with the most pleasurable of memories though not always agreement. I'd like the first statement to be made by Jan Lodal since he is the representative of the government.
Hon. JAN M. LODAL (Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Department of Defense): Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss with the panel the Clinton administration's defense strategy. I'd like to start with a brief review of how we'd come to some of our strategy choices and why some of the more frequently suggested alternative strategies and programs were not chosen. Our job in the defense department is to support and implement the President's strategy of engaging and enlarging through the development, deployment and, if necessary, actual use of military forces. As you know our basic program was developed through what we call the bottom-up review. And I can assure you that the appellation "bottom-up" refers only to the fact that we started from basic principles in assessing our military strategy and needs rather than taking a top-down approach of incrementally cutting forces from the Cold War defense program.
We have shaped the administration's defense program primarily around the need to offset military power of regional states that pursue policies opposed to the vital interests of the United States. We believe that the appropriate planning approach is to focus on what we call a major regional contingency, an MRC, something like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait or North Korea's attack on South Korea. We have programmed enough force to handle two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies, two MRCs. And let me emphasize here that we assume we will have help from our allies. For example, should war in Korea occur, only about a third of the forces in the country would be American.
This two-war criterion has been criticized as being overly cautious, but I would argue that the prudence it represents has been validated by real-world experience. Just last year we confronted two threats in both Iraq and North Korea. Saddam Hussein was moving armored forces toward the Kuwaiti border once again and North Korea was taking potentially irreversible steps toward the acquisition of a significant nuclear arsenal. In the Persian Gulf we undertook the deployment known as Vigilant Warrior, and in Korea we increased our forces and our capacity to reinforce South Korea. In both cases deterrence worked and our adversaries backed off. Had it not been clear that we could have successfully handled conflicts in both theaters essentially simultaneously, the result might well have been different.
The United States must also be prepared to use force in smaller-scale operations, including peacekeeping and peace enforcement. We simply cannot walk away from the challenge the world faces with failed states and communal conflicts. And our forces are also called on to combat terrorism, to carry out emergency evacuations, to provide humanitarian and disaster relief, and to help the fight against narcotics.
We also shape our forces for counterproliferation. We face a continuing threat from weapons of mass destruction and many already deployed and others being developed as fast as possible by rogue states. Some have challenged this threat-based approach to force sizing, arguing that as a great power we should simply allocate a set proportion of our economic wealth to defense and by a diverse set of capabilities. But this approach simply won't work. The national debate about what the United States should do abroad and what forces, in turn, are required is a debate we simply must have in a democracy. Furthermore, without an underlying strategy, it becomes impossible for our military leaders to plan, equip and train a balanced force that can move with the speed necessary to meet the challenges we face.
The defense budget has come down from about 6 percent of US gross domestic product in the mid-1980s to about 3 1/2 percent today and will decrease further to about 3 percent by the year 2000, the lowest level since the 1930s and a reduction of about 40 percent, in real terms, from the mid-1980s. These dramatic cuts reflect our recognition that the end of the Cold War gives us the opportunity to redirect resources toward helping reduce our dangerous budget deficit.
Nevertheless, some have argued that we are still spending far too much on defense and that we could reduce to perhaps 2 percent of gross domestic product, about what our European allies spend. We do not believe that we can field a force that can meet our two-MRC strategy at that level of funding. Furthermore, it's important to remember that 1 percent of GDP is the amount our economy grows in about four months. So spending 1 percent more on defense is equivalent to setting back the level of our national income by only about four months. The nation can withstand a one-time four-month delay in the ongoing increase in its national income.
A far more serious debate concerns our focus on readiness. Some have argued that we should reduce our insistence on maintaining highly ready forces in order to invest more in modernization. But warning time in this new strategic era is often short. We needed highly ready forces to respond effectively in Iraq and in Haiti, and we will need them in Bosnia. More fundamentally, I would argue at the premise that we can somehow turn off high readiness to save money now and then turn it back on when we need it later. The excellence that is so characteristic of our forces today--the tough training, the ability to react effectively under pressure, to innovate on the battlefield--all these characteristics would simply disintegrate if readiness funding were significantly reduced. It would take years to rebuild.
We do have to continually modernize our forces, but the dilemma is that spending too much now on weapon systems that we don't need can commit us to operating costs that hurt us badly in the future when we will need additional procurement funds to buy the next generation of equipment. For the moment, our equipment is staying about the same average age as we draw down our older forces. We have enough for the last generation of systems, and the next generation isn't ready yet. But between now and 2001, as new systems become available, we will increase the procurement budget by 47 percent to ensure adequate modernization.
We have built a lean but agile force that is stronger than any plausible combination of adversaries. It gives us the capability to exercise the leadership that our place in history calls for. We should use our military force only with the most exacting care, but when we do decide to send our men and women in harm's way, they are the best-equipped and best-trained force in the nation's history.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gen. HAIG: Thank you.
Mr. Perle, it's your floor.
Hon. RICHARD N. PERLE (former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy and Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As one looks at the American military forces today, I think it's fair to say that, by and large, they reflect the requirement to protect this nation and its allies during the Cold War. And the transition to a post-Cold War force is only now beginning and it is slow to take effect.
The Cold War was characterized, of course, by an overwhelming requirement to defend against the Soviet Union and the center of Europe and to defend against a central strategic war. And it is not surprising that the size and configuration, the equipment, the training and orientation of America's military forces reflected those contingencies.
But the likelihood of having to fight in the center of Europe in anything like the manner that would have been necessitated during the Cold War is now very small. The future contingencies are almost certain to be quite different from those of the past and on the basis of which our forces were structured. For one thing, we don't know where we may be called upon to fight. It is likely to be at a great distance from the United States where we are not as well prepositioned and as well-organized in conjunction with allies as we were to fight the central contingencies of the Cold War. And we will have to, in all likelihood, move quickly in order to fight effectively in future contingencies.
And so the question--the most important question facing us today is: Are we managing the transition to forces competent for future contingencies? Are we doing it fast enough? Are we doing it effectively enough? Is there a clear plan for a transition? And my strong sense, Mr. Chairman, is that there is not, that the bottom-up review essentially confirmed the force structure that this administration inherited from its predecessor, and that if we continue as we are now we will find that we are unable to fight the future contingencies because we will have a diminished version of the Cold War force, which is no longer relevant to future contingencies, and we will not have the kinds of forces that we need for the future.
One reason for this is that we are, in my view, investing too much in readiness for--spending too much to maintain a high level of effectiveness to deal with near-term threats when, happily, the near-term future ought to be relatively benign. At least if one had to bet the likelihood that America will be fighting a major conflict 10 years from now seems to me a great deal higher than that we will be fighting it a year from now, in two or three. And so we may have an opportunity--an almost unique opportunity to make the transition from the Cold War to a force oriented toward future contingencies. And happily, the time for that transition comes when our technological base, our technological prowess should enable us to do some extraordinary things in the future.
We now have the potential to do two things that it has never been possible to do consistently in military affairs before. One is hit the targets at which we aim, and I know that it sounds facetious, but in most of human history, most of the ordnance fired at most of the targets is missed. For every bomb that affected the target at which it was aimed in World War II, 400 bombs missed the target entirely--had no impact whatever. Now with precision-guided munitions, with the ability to sense targets at a distance, with computing capability being what it is, we can imagine hitting the target most of the time. And it is obvious that if you have to drop two bombs rather than 400, the size of the Air Force and the support and maintenance of that air capability can be significantly reduced in size.
And second, we have the capacity today--again, based on technology--in many cases--not all, but in most cases--to fight beyond the lethal range of our enemy. And this should enable us to fight effectively with minimum risk to American forces in the future if we exploit these technologies with an adequate level of investment. And when Jan Lodal says we're investing enough, I have to question that. We will spend in 1996 almost $1 billion less--almost $100 billion less on procurement than we spent in 1985. The procurement budget has been decimated in recent years, and the research and development budget is now under 30--$30 billion a year. And that is our future. We are not investing, in my view, in the forces for the future in the exploitation of technology, which I think is the only hope for our capacity to deal with those future contingencies.
There's only one way I can see to find the funds to do this because I think we will be compelled by the political situation to live within something like the current budget, and that is to reduce the overall size of the armed forces even more deeply than we have done already. But that can only be done safely if the funds that are saved by reducing the overall size of the armed forces are vigorously and aggressively and with certitude invested in recapitalization and modernization.
So I hope very much that we will begin to see a significant transition in the way we conceive of our military forces. We need to have agile forces, we need to have smaller forces with greater firepower and greater effectiveness. We need, in short, vastly to increase the productivity of our military personnel by arming and equipping them with the best that modern technology has to offer, and we won't do that on the strength of budgets that reflect the bottom-up review.
Gen. HAIG: Thank you very much. We'll now turn to Admiral Carroll for his exposition.
Rear Admiral EUGENE J. CARROLL, Jr. (US Navy (Ret.); Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information): Thank you, Mr. Commissioner.
You'll hear an opening statement which stresses three points. The United States today is spending money it does not have to pay for weapons and forces it doesn't need in order to defeat nonexistent enemies. With the exception of those three niggling reservations, the military programs seem to be in great shape.
The first point is undeniable. Neither the administration nor the Congress can even hope to balance our budget in the next seven years. Therefore, when Congress generously tacks on $7 billion for military purposes in the 1996 budget, that's another $7 billion that's got to be borrowed someplace for this hardware.
The second point is more contentious. Why will the United States pay out about $265 billion for weapons and forces in 1996? The pro forma answer, of course, comes from the bottom-up review: the ability to fight and win two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously, and to do it without help from friends or allies. These two requirements drive the need for armed services of about 1.4 million people on active duty who must be equipped, trained and deployed at high levels of readiness to deter or defeat regional violence. The overall posture that we're aiming at is very similar to that maintained throughout the Cold War in order to contain the Soviet Union.
Is this a reasonable defense posture in 1996? Secretary of Defense William Perry told Congress that a two-war scenario is highly implausible. General Merrill McPeak, who participated in the bottom-up review as Air Force Chief of Staff, recently wrote, `We should walk away from the two-war strategy.' He explained that neither history nor common sense supports it.
And must we go it alone? The bottom-up review requires us to do it on our own. Except in three-day exercises or a week in Grenada and Panama, we haven't gone alone in recent years and we give no evidence now of willingness to go alone. We were supported by more than 30 nations in Desert Storm and we take action in Bosnia only in concert with our NATO allies. In Korea, which has been mentioned, we would certainly go with strong South Korean forces.
Worst of all, we are not configuring our forces and buying weapons to fight two major regional conflicts. We are still preparing to defeat the Soviet Union in a major war scenario, not to address the needs of conflicts in the Third World. Look at the potential adversaries identified in the two-war strategy and then at the weapons we're buying. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Cuba were singled out in the bottom-up review. B-2s, Seawolf subs, F-22 fighters, C-17 transports and a national missile defense program were all initiated in the 1980s to defeat the Soviet Union in the 21st century. This was to cast ourself in a war with a very high-tech, powerful enemy. These weapons are now all outrageously costly programs which contribute very little to defeating third-, fifth- or 10th-rate nations which collectively spend about 16 percent of the US military spending.
In truth, far more is being spent to defeat a resurgent Soviet Union or Russia than is being spent to support a two-war strategy, and this includes, most specifically, about $26 billion in the 1996 budget to sustain--maintain our nuclear war-fighting capabilities.
US policy today virtually equates national security with military power and it has a very detrimental effect on many other elements of our national security. This equating national defense and--or national security and military power leads to overinvestment in military forces and weapons to use against these nonexistent external threats.
This places additional limits on efforts to address clear and present security threats right here at home. I'll offer three examples. Growing US dependence on imported energy, the biggest long-term security threat to the United States--it already saps our economy, and 30 years from now it may well restrict our leadership role in the world. Drugs, street crime and chronic unemployment among the uneducated are creating a violent underclass who threaten the social unity of this nation. We need a strong boost to nonmilitary R and D to increase America's competitive role in world markets and reduce the trade deficits in order to strengthen our economy.
In short, there is a need to recognize that true national security rests on far more than military power. Our national priorities must reflect rational decisions about all elements of a sound security program for America. We can no longer afford to allow unreasonable fears to drive continued overinvestment in unneeded military programs.
Gen. HAIG: Thank you very much, Admiral, and each of you. It's now time for the panel to interrogate you. And I just remind you, as I did the previous panel--or witnesses, that you can feel free to challenge the comments made by any of your colleagues and we'll certainly feel free to do the same. So if we'll now change our system a little bit and let you go, Patt, first and then finish with John Vessey.
Hon. DERIAN: Well, I think the Cold War is really over--or nearly. When Richard Perle started talking and I found myself nodding my head right up to the budget--and so I guess it's not--just as we have not made our transformation from a Cold War Army to a modern one. But that question of having to change everything--war having changed--and yet we still have to have an even bigger budget puzzles me, so I want to ask you a question.
If we have a major war and we've got two armies ready to go, as you describe and as other people describe modern warfare, what you have are troops far behind the lines and wonderful weapons that zip over far away, keeping your people out of harm's way, at essentially civilian targets. I mean, there's no question that when the weapons changed, a lot else changed. And mostly, when wars are fought, it's the water supply that goes, the electric supply. We're always looking for the bunker where the leader is and it takes out huge percentages of civilian population.
So what I want to know is: When we have this expense to arm and equip our personnel, who are those people? Who--what do you mean "personnel"? Are we going to have this great big Army behind the scenes to service our technical weapons? What are we doing back--tell me who those people are.
Hon. PERLE: Well, my view is it can be a smaller Army than we've had in the past, as we improve the productivity, in effect, of military manpower, which I believe we can do with adequate capital investment. But I must take issue with the idea that we are more likely to inflict civilian casualties today than in the past. It is, in fact, one of the benefits of emerging technologies that the sort of precision of which we're capable--precision in locating targets, precision in firing munitions at those targets--means that there will be many fewer civilian casualties, at least when we fight. And if you look at the war in Iraq, it is extraordinary--Desert Storm--how few civilians were killed by American firepower.
Hon. DERIAN: I understand we'll have a disagreement about that because I think that taking out water supplies and the electricity, the means of transportation, interdicting food and medicine also are--maybe not as many people die, they don't die as fast, but...
Hon. PERLE: If we make the sort of transition that I'm arguing for, I think it should be possible in future to be even more discriminating than we were capable of being during Desert Storm, and I thought we did a pretty good job there. For example, with advanced sensor technology and with some of the intelligence systems now available to us, it should be possible--will be possible in future to pinpoint communications systems that are military communications.
Hon. DERIAN: So is that what the money's needed for, for refining these weapons?
Hon. PERLE: I think...
Hon. DERIAN: I mean, is it all going to wind up weapons essentially?
Hon. PERLE: Well, I think we now spend roughly two-thirds of the budget on personnel and current operations, with a third going to procurement and research and development. I would like to see us spend more on procurement and research and development, and rather less on current operations and personnel. But you talked about a larger budget. The budget, in fact, is declining and declining sharply.
Hon. DERIAN: No, no, I know that, but you are asking for--you think it should be increased.
Hon. PERLE: No, I think the current budget, if it's properly allocated, is adequate, but I would not cut it further. I wouldn't do what Gene Carroll's suggesting, which is exactly what he was suggesting at the height of the Cold War, by the way. I mean, I haven't heard that speech since...
Hon. DERIAN: He was right then, too.
Hon. PERLE: Well, except...
Hon. DERIAN: As it turned out, everything we thought about the Soviets might...
Hon. PERLE: The happy result, Patt, is that we won the Cold War.
Hon. DERIAN: Oh, yeah.
Hon. PERLE: And if we'd listened to--if we'd listened to him, we might have lost it.
Adm. CARROLL: We can't afford too many victories at the level of a $5 trillion national debt, but...
Hon. PERLE: Well, we can't afford defeats either.
Adm. CARROLL: No, I agree with you, Richard, that we had to have a very powerful military force confronting the Soviet Union. They were expansionists, they were aggressive. But we overexpended. We bought things we didn't need for defense, just as we're doing right now. I should nuance my remarks a bit. I spent 37 years in uniform. I'm very proud of that service, very proud and appreciative of the people who are in the armed services now. They create a safe America. My point is, we're spending too much money for weapons we don't need, and I express that as, I hope, a responsible critic.
Hon. DERIAN: Would you tell us what they are...
Adm. CARROLL: The weapons?
Hon. DERIAN: ...we don't need?
Adm. CARROLL: Oh, I just listed a few of them on the spur of the moment. The B-2 is clearly not relevant to wars in Africa and on the periphery of Cuba. I don't think we need B-2s. The F-22 fighter was sold to Congress as necessary to counter two new Soviet fighters in the 21st century. They'll never be built, yet the program for 442 of them is going to cost something like $69 billion. That's one airplane--one model. The C-17 transport was to support General Haig's NATO commands. It was to get the reinforcements into NATO in a big hurry.
Hon. DERIAN: Looks like they won't need them either.
Adm. CARROLL: I don't think we need to reinforce Europe overnight. There are all sort of things in the periphery of the national missile defense system, certainly there are rogue nations and there are rogue nations who will pursue weapons capabilities, but they won't be intercontinental ballistic missiles. Only the United States and Russia are wealthy enough--China, a few--to develop these things. So my point is let's focus in on what the real threats are, just as Richard is suggesting, and build the weapons and the forces that are necessary to deal with those threats. But they aren't the threats that require these fantastic technological marvels.
One cruise missile--how many did we fire in--in Iraq? We fired 200 and some. Replacement cost is $2 million, and it delivers a 1,000-pound bomb, 50 percent of which are expected to hit a target. So you can see this is a very expensive mode of warfare, to move to the high-tech end of the curve.
Hon. LODAL: Mr. Chairman, could I jump in here and just correct a couple of misimpressions? Because I think there are several things here that are--that are just fundamentally wrong that are being said--or at least leave the wrong impression. First, with regard to a lot of the things that Richard has suggested--I think he's exactly right on target and so does this administration, and we do need to move to this next generation of systems and weapons which will, in fact, over time radically change the way warfare occurs.
The trouble is we can't do that by doing what Richard suggests, which is to spend a lot more money today, because those things aren't developed yet. So if we buy more things that are on the production lines today, we buy more of the things he says we shouldn't be having, so his argument is really upside down. In fact, we spend essentially as much money on research and development today as we spend on procurement, and that procurement includes a lot of ongoing things that we have to buy just to replace things that we use up, and the research and development budget has come down a lot less. Furthermore, as I said in my opening statement, we certainly plan to increase the procurement budget significantly over time in order to do exactly what he is suggesting should be done.
I would certainly hope it doesn't come to the point where we have to significantly cut our force structure until we see a safer world emerge. But I would agree that if constraints were such that you had to choose between a force structure that stayed as high as it is and a force that included the kinds of capabilities that he's talking about, you would choose the latter, not the former. That's really why we've cut 40 percent already, in order to move in that direction.
As far as some of the things Gene Carroll has said, you have to make some distinction between what the administration has proposed and what the congressional bills include. On the B-2--we've bought 20 B-2s. There's no reason to throw them away. They're fine systems and they can, in fact, play a role in some of these conventional force--conventional contingencies that might arise. We believe that 20 is enough. We don't believe we need to spend an extra $25 billion on 20 more of them. So to that extent I would agree with him.
On national missile defense, we don't need to build a national missile defense today, but we do need to have one available because he's wrong about the capacity of some of these rogue states to potentially build intercontinental ballistic missiles. They can build them--not today, probably not this century, but they can build them over time, and we have to be prepared. The C-17 happens to be a terrific aircraft for landing in Third World, unimproved situations and so forth. In fact, if you knew the war was going to be in NATO, you probably wouldn't have to buy so many C-17s because you don't--you have a lot of improved fields in Europe. So it's exactly the opposite of what he said here.
So I think that we just need to look carefully at what these facts are and, in particular, understand that--while all of these changes are occurring and they will occur that, as of today, they have not yet occurred. We still face a large army in Iraq that's half as big as what it used to be. We face a massive army in North Korea. We face a North Korea that has not only threatened but moved toward building nuclear weapons, that has all sorts of threatening characteristics to it. And we do face other threats around the world. For us to ignore these today and assume that they've already gone away would be--would be folly, in my view.
Gen. HAIG: Well, thank you very much.
Hon. PERLE: I--just--if I could, would like to take just a second on the B-2 because it seems to be opposed by both Gene Carroll...
Hon. LODAL: No, no. I'm in favor of the 20 B-2s.
Hon. PERLE: The 20.
Hon. LODAL: Yeah.
Hon. PERLE: Far from a relic of the Cold War, it seems to me the B-2 exhibits some of the characteristics that we would wish to see in forces for the future. It isn't dependent on a base near the theater of conflict; it can operate from the continental United States and return to the US after having delivered a sizeable payload with great precision. That seems to me a terribly important capability to have in the aftermath of the Cold War, and I'm glad we have some, and I think we probably ought to have some more.
The entire opening air offensive of Desert Storm could have been conducted with 35 B-2s, which is an impressive shift from the 1,200-aircraft fleet that we assembled for that purpose. So there are tremendous efficiencies to be achieved in moving from the kinds of forces that we, of necessity, had when the Soviet Union was the enemy and when the threat was a massive and overwhelming conventional capability in the center of Europe to what it's likely to be in the future. So I would not dismiss some of the programs that we began years ago as irrelevant to the future. What I'm afraid we won't be able to do if we maintain a force as large as the one we now have--1,400,000 men and women in uniform--is find the funds within the budget we're likely to have for the kind of recapitalization that I had in mind.
It is still the case that most of the bombs owned by the United States Air Force are dumb iron bombs of the kind that we dropped in World War II. And unless we find the funds to make the transition to utilize technology, we will a decade from now have a force of 1,400,000 men who will be badly equipped, but more importantly, they will lack the ability to fight from a relatively safe and advantaged position. And I think we owe it to our men and women in uniform to give them the best technology that we can find.
Gen. HAIG: Well, these are all very pertinent and relevant observations, and I think that's what we want to focus on in this session, is the threat--a description of the previous session and the weapons which we are now procuring or maintaining to deal with these threats. In that regard, I think there's a homily been bouncing around in both sessions that the allies are not doing enough.
Let me just give you my impression on that issue based on five years' experience at trying to get the allies to do more in Europe. Let me tell you, they will take our lead. We've been in the process of reducing defense spending since 1986. Every budget has declined since that year. And I tell you, my experience with our allies is they'll not only match you but they'll beat you every time, and that involves defense spending. And that's been the problem, and we haven't justified our needs, which we must do if we're going to sacrifice and expect people to do it for these needs.
Secondly, let me say I think Jan and Richard Perle are much closer together than their rhetoric sounds because Bill Perry, who's already recently stated that we have, as a country, very, very seriously deprived our modernization budget of what it should be receiving and that he is going to look to the out years to spend more for modernization. In the meantime, he's trying to keep readiness up. Now that's a very happy thing, but the facts are we've cut 84 percent out of our modernization budget this past year. I mean, that's the total depreciation of it.
I would mention also to you, Admiral Carroll, you know, 84 percent of our nuclear forces have already gone out of business and the expenses allocated for that are primarily in the area of pumping up our environmental concerns about weapons--Soviet weapons or Russian weapons--and getting them down and maintaining our inventories to where they are safe and stable. So I would be careful on that.
Now my real concern is this, is we've looked at the Congress bump up the budget not by $7 billion but about $6.7 billion in the recent deliberation. They've put some systems in there, including the B-2s, some air defense spending--a host of other things which are not controversial because Secretary Perry has said he would buy these things, too, that these add-ons have just sort of pushed the time frame a little forward. But it's the B-2, perhaps the Seawolf submarine and its role in this new world--Perle's commented on that. I'd like to hear about the submarine. I'd like to hear a little more about our air defense needs because, as a veteran of the Reagan administration, where some of us taught ourselves to believe the Soviet Union collapsed because of Star Wars, which I think is historic nonsense--but I think these are the things I'd like to hear in the period ahead.
So let me ask, if I can, Jan, how you see this force structure now imposed on you by the Congress and what will have to be some middle ground. What systems would you keep and what wouldn't you keep if you could afford it?
Hon. LODAL: Well, let me say at the outset that I think Richard made a wonderful case for exactly 20 B-2s. He pointed out that with merely 35 you could have done the whole Desert Storm campaign. I don't think anybody would propose having to used only B-2s because that opens up another set of vulnerabilities if you don't have any diversity in your force, though it says, with our present B-2 force, we could have done half of all of Desert Storm, which was a massive campaign. So 20, I believe, is enough. It's interesting--some of the ads that the manufacturer puts out say, "Well, with one B-2 you could have done Libya and with six B-2s you could have done"--whatever. And, you know, for God's sakes, we're having 20 B-2s already, so we're not saying we shouldn't have B-2s. We should have B-2s; we should have a significant number of them. It represents a massive military capability. It's just a question of: Should we spend more money on it?
If you look at what Congress has done, they've added money in the short run, but they've reduced the funds in the out years--exactly the years in which these new systems that we're now developing will be available for us to procure. So in the short run, the difficulty is that, for the major systems, if we procure them, we will procure the old generation of systems, essentially newer models of some of the very same things that we're drawing down. We're drawing down older F-16s and buying newer F-16s. The newer ones are much more capable than the older ones. That's for sure.
But that's the dilemma here, is that, in the short run, we really need to focus on development of these new generations of systems as opposed to procuring the old generation of systems. And so, yes, we could potentially use some more money in research and development, but you can't use that immediately and plus it up immediately. You have to do that over time. And, in fact, that's exactly what's built into the defense plan, is to increase research and development over time in that fashion.
I would also say that the--we have a massive effort under way--I'm certainly an enthusiastic supporter of it--to improve our ability to use new information technologies across the board--precision-guided munitions. Richard points out we still own a lot of old bombs. We didn't use any of them at all in the recent campaign in Bosnia. We used 100 percent precision-guided munitions. This was a significant change from Desert Storm just a few years ago. Within just a few years, every American aircraft will be capable of delivering precision-guided munitions, and all of our future efforts and future procurement has gone in that direction.
So that's correct, and we will have these old ones--we won't throw them out; we'll keep them there for reserve--but there will be very few cases where we'll use them, and when their maintenance cost becomes too high, we won't even keep them.
Gen. HAIG: That's good. I just for the next round, does any--do any of you think we could, under any set of contingencies today, with the force structure we're supporting, conduct two contingency operations--or almost two?
Adm. CARROLL: No way. We couldn't even do Desert Storm again with the force structure that's now being supported. And I hope somebody will comment on that.
Hon. LODAL: I disagree with that because the Iraqi force is half the size it was when we did Desert Storm, among other things.
Adm. CARROLL: Well, there's a serious question as to whether the force we assembled for Desert Storm turned out to be the right force. Now...
Gen. HAIG: Yeah. That's right.
Adm. CARROLL: ...we have the advantage of hindsight, but I think it's clear by the time the ground operation got under way such damage had been done in the air campaign that you didn't need half a million Americans on the ground.
Hon. PERLE: And we won't in any case, we are not going to be given in future, by anyone who's capable of seizing territory of interest to us--they are not going to give us six months to organize the counterattack. And Saddam, if he did it again, would do it quite differently, although I find a great deal of our planning tends to turn on refighting that war--that's one of the two contingencies and the other is the Korean peninsula--and I think there are ways we could fight in future that would be quite different from the way we've fought in the past. But it requires a much bigger transition than we now have on the books.
And I--my sympathies are with the current management of the Defense Department. It is not easy to make the kind of shift in attitude and doctrine and organization and equipment and planning that I think is required after the Cold War. The institutions move very slowly and they may be pushing them as fast as they can, but it's not fast enough, in my view.
Hon. DERIAN: Where would two major wars be?
Hon. PERLE: What would two major wars...
Hon. DERIAN: Where?
Hon. PERLE: Well, I think the authors of the bottom-up review probably had the Korean peninsula and the Gulf in mind because those are areas we know something about. But I think that the "two major regional contingency" planning is what you get when you inherit a force that was designed to fight the Cold War, and you now have to make decisions about how much of it you're going to retain. And so you find a theoretical...
Hon. DERIAN: Right.
Hon. PERLE: ...construct that preserves most of what you now have. I don't take it all that seriously. I--and I think there is a huge mismatch between the intellectual construct of the two major regional contingencies and the forces in being, and I think what is driving the process is the forces in being and not thinking about the future contingencies.
Hon. LODAL: Well, you know, the only counter to that, Richard, is, I think, number one--well, there are several counters, but number one--the forces in being are really quite radically different from the Cold War forces and they're changing at a fairly rapid rate. As I think General Vessey pointed out in the earlier session, these programs do take a long time. It takes quite a while to develop and field and deploy a new set of systems and a new set of forces. But if you look at even the way our Air Force is organized with its composite wings and the way the Army is organized and trains, and you look at their doctrine, there really has been quite dramatic change for such a large organization, number one.
Number two, the two major regional contingencies come about for a variety of reasons. I mean, in one case, as I mentioned, simply because they do exist, and we saw them last October. We saw them very clearly where not only was Saddam Hussein moving toward the South but we have substantial evidence from a variety of sources that he did intend to attempt a reinvasion and a replay of the war and--or at least considered--considered it seriously and was--had ordered his forces to move in that direction--at exactly the same time that the North Koreans were, in fact, threatening military action by their actions, not just by their words.
And so we found ourselves in a situation where we could face this. The difficulty is if you plan for only one contingency in the world and you announce that and, in fact, that's your capability, and such a contingency occurs, you don't have any deterrents left against other bad guys who might want then to take advantage of your being preoccupied and tied down by one contingency when they know they have a cheap shot at you somewhere else. So that's one of the major reasons why we think it's important to make sure that you have a strategic reserve, if you will, that if you do get tied down one place in the world that you can't be taken advantage of elsewhere in the world.
Adm. CARROLL: We were terribly tied down in Vietnam for a good many years, facing a very vital and capable enemy, but no one undertook to challenge us with a second front at a time when we had committed the bulk of our combat forces to Vietnam. You lost--well, you didn't. You weren't there, but the NATO commander lost a good deal of his American support, and nobody attacked in Europe.
Gen. HAIG: He inherited it.
Adm. CARROLL: I think the idea of two attacks is, as Secretary Perry says, implausible. But if you want an insurance policy, then you have to have the two-war capability, which is a very, very expensive premium.
I'd like to offer one more comment also on the transition that Richard is proposing to the high-tech, high-kill military. I've been around long enough to watch all the new weapons come in and be promised and perform and fall short. At the present time, we are trying to introduce a number of new weapons systems which are having great difficulties. Until you complete all of the testing--all the research and development--and development testing--and actually get them into the field, you don't know what you have. That's when you find your real problems and the limitations. So this is a long, expensive process. One F-22 is going to cost in excess of $160 million. That's one fighter plane. The C-17, which is probably a good transport, costs over a half a billion dollars for the first 40 of them.
Gen. HAIG: I want to be sure...
Adm. CARROLL: How many of these can we afford to invest in to have high-tech capability capable of winning two wars simultaneously?
Gen. HAIG: Yeah. I want to be sure our panelists have an opportunity here to question you, though. Roz, would you move on?
Amb. RIDGWAY: Thank you very much. I mentioned in the earlier session I had the sense of a disconnect and I must say conceptually, General Haig, the same emotion is overcoming me at the moment. We spent the first session talking about threats to our national security and then we moved to the defense budget, and I really think that we could more appropriately have moved to the question of: What is a national security budget? Because as we applaud that deterrence worked in Iraq a few months or ago or in North Korea, I would argue that diplomacy worked, backed by a deterrent force. And I have been asking over the last several years, "Where is the budget for diplomacy?" and that you can have all of the high-tech systems you want, but if you don't have the people in the field to persuade the allies to cultivate the allies, to make the case internationally that American leadership is legitimate, you won't be able to afford the defense system that you need. And I just don't think I can let the moment pass without saying that we are--by focusing on a defense set of priorities, having done a national security threat assessment, we are missing a vital half of the challenge to America in that we will have to spend more for defense as we spend less for diplomacy.
And I know that you're here with several titles, that one of them is secretary of State, and I'm sure you can appreciate the State Department and an AID, what--you're for reorganization, consolidation and whatever is irrelevant. The dollar resources for assistance for diplomacy, for arms control have diminished to the point of almost being ineffective on behalf of American interests, and I think somebody has got to find a way to understand what that challenge is.
I don't disagree in major elements with Jan or Richard. I think there are arguments that can be made on managing the transition, on major regional contingencies, but I have a hard time listening to Admiral Carroll tell me what he's against without asking him: Would you tell me what you're for?
Adm. CARROLL: Thank you. We've published...
Amb. RIDGWAY: Give me a dollar. Give me a dollar. Your advertising's...
Adm. CARROLL: Oh, dollars.
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...going to save me $500 billion over the next several years. What are you for and what is it going to cost me?
Adm. CARROLL: Yeah. We have published a Cold War--post-Cold War military force, and we've analyzed the defense missions that...
Amb. RIDGWAY: Can't read it from here. What's that?
Adm. CARROLL: ...the United States armed forces must perform. We've then costed them and we've come up with an alternative budget. We would be talking about reduction, strangely enough, of just about the same thing Barney Frank advocated: one-third by the end of the century, down to about $175 billion in cash in 1999. And over the next seven years...
Amb. RIDGWAY: And what would those forces be doing? You've said there is no threat...
Adm. CARROLL: Oh.
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...so why isn't the number zero?
Adm. CARROLL: There is a threat. We have to be able to come to the aid of our allies. We've made commitments to them over the years and they count on us. That's the foundation...
Amb. RIDGWAY: Why should I come to the aid of my allies? Why wouldn't I act on behalf of American national interests? Aren't they out there engaged?
Adm. CARROLL: I miss your point.
Amb. RIDGWAY: Well, I'm having trouble understanding a defense concept built around just coming to the aid of allies.
Adm. CARROLL: There is no current physical threat to the United States of America and there's no nation out there capable, other than the Russian missiles, of delivering any military power against the United States. So we're talking about addressing that in our current plan, and noting that we're going to be gathering intelligence every year and every year and every year. And if you see a resurgent Russia--which I think impossible--or China becoming an aggressive threat, then you go back to the budget and you start putting in capabilities that will deal with that new threat.
Amb. RIDGWAY: But I don't...
Adm. CARROLL: If you don't spend money, just saying, "Well, we don't have any threat," we'll just have an insurance policy. That's what we're saying. It's got the insurance policy.
Amb. RIDGWAY: I'm still having trouble with it. There is no current threat, but if you see one coming, we're going to build up to it.
Adm. CARROLL: Right.
Amb. RIDGWAY: Does that have ships and planes or does it have bases...
Adm. CARROLL: Oh, we don't...
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...overseas? Does it have technology? What is in it?
Adm. CARROLL: In our time frame...
Amb. RIDGWAY: Or are you going to call the National Guard?
Adm. CARROLL: In our time frame, we don't go out to the emergence of a new threat. We're dealing with the current situation and as we see it evolving.
Amb. RIDGWAY: How can you do that? How can you do that in a fast-moving world? You're only on a--on--What?--a two-year--on a two-year view then?
Adm. CARROLL: No. We're taking a five-year look.
Amb. RIDGWAY: And you see no threats to the United States by...
Adm. CARROLL: No physical threat to the United States emerging in that time frame. I was in Russia...
Amb. RIDGWAY: And your definition of a physical threat?
Adm. CARROLL: ...last month. What that means, I don't know. But I did meet with defense officials, retired military officers, academics and so on. That country is a basket case. It is totally out of sync. No political system, no economic system, no leadership; there's no hope foreseeable, in these people's minds, of a functional Russian government that will begin to address their real problems at home. How in the world are they suddenly going to re-emerge as a military force? They can't really take care of Chechnya, much less NATO.
Amb. RIDGWAY: So if I can understand this then--and I'm really trying to understand it...
Adm. CARROLL: Yeah.
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...despite the way my questioning may sound--the idea is that physical threats--Pearl Harbor...
Adm. CARROLL: Yeah.
Amb. RIDGWAY: ...Russian missiles--are really what we're talking about with threats. We're not talking about, say, a world in which a declining industrial base destroys the dollar, destroys the trade. That's not a part of it. We're not talking about bombing the World Trade Center out of a world in turmoil. We're not talking about the corrosive effect on American leadership of unresolved regional issues. We--you're really talking--you don't see anybody ready to do a Pearl Harbor.
Adm. CARROLL: We are talking about that, but we are addressing the question on this basis: The military can't do anything about those sort of threats. As a matter of fact, overspending on the military increases the risk to our economy, to our fiscal stability. So we're urging reductions in military spending in part to strengthen our economy.
Amb. RIDGWAY: I just don't know why you don't get to zero and do your scenario.
Adm. CARROLL: The world isn't set that way. There's a lot of people out there...
Amb. RIDGWAY: But you just said it was.
Adm. CARROLL: ...with a lot of guns. It's just that they aren't...
Amb. RIDGWAY: I thought there were--there are no threats.
Adm. CARROLL: ...Hitler and they aren't Stalin and they aren't massive military forces that we have to mount out a Cold War defense.
Amb. RIDGWAY: That's all I have for...
Hon. LODAL: Mr. Chairman, could I very briefly just second the point that Ambassador Ridgway made at the beginning about the importance of diplomacy and--if I could go back to that for a moment, and how shortsighted it is if we destroy our capability to carry out effective diplomacy. I think people don't understand, among other things, for example, what the challenges to build up the immense set of skills that you need to effectively act as a diplomat in a complicated situation and bring together an understanding not only of the country you're in but of all the various aspects of military, political, economic and so forth--and we're really tearing that apart at a rapid rate here, and it's very shortsighted and we should not do that. The cost is very low. It's tiny compared to what we spend on other matters.
Same thing is true with some of our military assistance and some of the assistance we give our friends and allies and emerging friends and allies around the world. We don't spend much on this anymore. Outside of Egypt and Israel we spend tiny amounts of money here, and to try to cut it down to zero, which seems to be the objective of some, is--is a serious mistake.
Adm. CARROLL: I'd like to second that very briefly and say, in addition, support and American leadership in the UN is an area greatly in need of priority attention.
Gen. HAIG: Jack.
Gen. VESSEY: I want to second Jan and Roz on the reinforcement for our diplomatic capabilities. But I also want to address a couple of other points. Wrestling with these points that have been raised here--Richard makes some very good points about using modern technology and moving the force from a force that was designed for the Cold War to one that will meet the world of the future and using technology to do that. Jan has made some good points on the force structure and the difficulty in transitioning the force. Certainly one can't go down to the hardware store and turn in his M-1 tanks and buy something lighter to move in airplanes to Bosnia or wherever it happens to be. That takes some time to do it.
But there are two issues here, it seems to me--or, actually, three. One, Admiral Carroll suggests that, well, there's no nation out there, but there are certainly combinations of nations and the combinations can change very quickly. So we ought to be prepared for combinations of nations.
Secondly, Richard describes a force that I'm enamored with and have helped to try and move us to, but at the same time, it's a force designed to fight wars among nation states. I look out at the world today and I see a lot of shooting going on. None of it's going on between nation states; it's all going on by people trying to disrupt nation states or disrupt the order of nation states. I see a world that's--whose population's going to double in the next 50 years. I think the cover and concealment for military operations in the future may not be stealth. It may be civil populations in major urban areas. I don't see even the most precise standoff weapons necessarily solving the security problems in those areas. I think that people will have to be involved--very capable people who can discriminate between the bad guys and the good guys and the neutrals. I don't see nearly enough effort going into creating forces that would be able to deal with that sort of thing.
Secondly, getting back to Jan's point, it seems to me--I agree with the secretary's emphasis on readiness for today's forces. On the other hand, you have camouflaged--we, as a nation, have camouflaged in our defense budget an overhead that's far too great for the defense structure today. The forces have come down by about 40 percent, but the shooting forces have come down far greater than the overall forces and it is because we have a base structure that's far too big for the force today. We have headquarters that are far too numerous for the force today. We're doing things in depots and so forth that could better be done in civil industry.
What's happening? How are we going to address these two points? One is the--dealing with this world where it may not be between nation states. It may be dealing with rogues in large metropolitan areas. And secondly, how are you going to get at this huge overhead that's left over from the Cold War in the defense budget?
Hon. LODAL: I think the overhead part, if I could take that one first, is a key point. And as we know, we've had the so-called BRAC process--Base Realignment and Closure Commission process, which has made some progress. Whether it's possible to continue that--we have to get the consent of Congress, of course, in order to do that, to close some additional bases and save money. We have a lot of work to do to carry out that which has already been agreed to do, and in the first sense, that's not what we have to do.
I would also say that commercialization is a key here, and privatization. Secretary Perry just started a new privatization initiative. We have a major initiative under way to try to move our defense procurement process to commercial practices. It no longer is the case that you have to have a military standard to do most things. Now the burden of proof has to be on someone who insists upon a special military standard for some item of equipment rather than using a commercial item. So these things will help us reduce the overhead, but you're exactly right. We have to get this overhead down.
Turning briefly to this other question of: How do you deal with these diverse kinds of threats? In the first instance, I think it's important for us to be realistic about this. The fact of the matter is that we won't be able to deal with a lot of these situations. When we have these communal conflicts, American military power is not going to play a major role in some of these circumstances and we have to be realistic about that. We will continue to have many regional conflicts that will rise above the level of violence, I think, that you're talking about. You have situations in South Asia and around the world where you still have regional powers where they're organized state powers with organized armies and so forth still lined up against each other, and in those it's possible that our military forces can play a role.
Bosnia, perhaps, is, tragic as that situation is, an example of how limited our effect can be in what's really a communal conflict. Until there is a peace there, as we've said, we don't see a role for American ground forces in that kind of a conflict. It's been difficult. Even though there are organized forces, certainly on the Serbian side, with heavy weapons that are susceptible to some of our military forces, and when the Serbs shelled Sarajevo we used them and we used them to some effect recently. But it's a limited effect and I think we have to be realistic about that.
Gen. VESSEY: But I'd just like to go back to that because--I know--I think Julia Taft's in the audience--or was earlier--and works with me on the Center for Preventive Action. And looking at places like Rwanda and Burundi, we say, "Well, there's no role for American military forces." The question is: Is there a role for America or do we just stand by and let people slaughter each other? And if there isn't a role for America, how does the world deal with it?
Hon. LODAL: Well, I think absolutely there's a role for America and, of course, we have played a role and we try to continue to play a constructive role. It goes back to Roz's point. In some cases, our ability to bring together coalitions of countries who are closer, more on the ground, more able to deal directly with the situation is going to be key.
Hon. PERLE: And it does seem to me that in Bosnia we missed an opportunity early in that conflict to try to affect it at a time when our capacity to affect it was a good deal greater than it subsequently became. And I think it's much to be regretted that we allowed the aggression to get under way and gather momentum before taking any action. It was a mistake to believe--and this goes back to the Bush administration--that the Europeans would organize themselves without American leadership to respond, and they didn't. We then had an election campaign in which a candidate pledged to change that, and he got elected and he didn't change it. He stood by while the aggression continued and the slaughter continued.
And now we're promising to send troops without knowing whether we will have a stable peace of the kind that would give our troops a reasonable prospect of accomplishing something important. So I think it's been a fiasco from the beginning covering two administrations. And it's a very bad signal to send because the message is that we and our principal allies--our European allies--the guardians of liberal democracy--will not necessarily respond even where there's overt aggression and the most monstrous sort of genocidal activity.
Hon. DERIAN: Is there something between standing by and waiting till there's a peace to send an army? So many people have died in that interval.
Hon. PERLE: Well, I think we suffer greatly from the notion that the use of force must always be the last resort. And as I mentioned, I think we can thank the liberals for that. It's become a cliche. Sometimes a prompt use of force is by far the more humane, effective move. But we seem to have developed this idea...
Hon. DERIAN: Of course, Bosnia's the place where the liberals want to fight.
Hon. PERLE: ...that you only use force when you're driven to the extreme.
Hon. DERIAN: Yeah.
Adm. CARROLL: I think General Vessey's observations highlight the fact that in this world of snakes there are just many, many problems that don't have a military outcome or a military solution. The diplomatic, the economic and political, the cultural, technological--we have many, many strengths in this country in addition to military power, but if we continue to use military as sort of our prime foreign policy tool, we're depriving these other areas of the resources that they need to enter in and be effective. I agree early on in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, there was probably a very big opportunity for a economic/political initiative to try to prevent the tragedy that developed. I don't think a military intervention...
Hon. PERLE: Well, I mean, in...
Adm. CARROLL: ...at any point would have done it.
Hon. PERLE: ...in Slovenia, where there was military action, the Serbs were stopped, and they were stopped because there was a reasonable military balance. We have participated--and I think it will be recorded, if not now, eventually, as among the most shameful policies of this administration.
Gen. HAIG: I think there are some broader observations.
Hon. PERLE: We have participated in an embargo that has prevented one side in this conflict from defending itself and how we have justified that is beyond me. I mean, every nation has the right to defend itself, and we've deprived the Bosnians of that right.
Hon. LODAL: Richard has made a lot of false statements here that we should deal with briefly, at least. And he's also, of course, asserted that unwillingness to use force is a liberal characteristic. I suspect there's more conservative isolationists around who...
Hon. DERIAN: Right.
Hon. LODAL: ...wait till the last minute than there are liberals.
Hon. PERLE: No, no. It's liberal.
Hon. LODAL: But in any case...
Gen. HAIG: Forget the Weinberger theory.
Hon. LODAL: Exactly.
Gen. HAIG: You have to have everybody standing at the dock, waving the flag--"Go get them!"--before you can do it.
Hon. LODAL: Exactly. So--but I think there's no argument but that the early days of Bosnia were a mistake. I think it's important in the Bosnia case to understand what went wrong rather than just trade potshots on this matter because we might face situations again like this in the future.
What went wrong in Bosnia after we failed in the first instance to stop the Serbs when, for example, they were shelling Dubrovnik and it would have been easy to stop that from a military standpoint--what went wrong was we misunderstood the effects of putting a UN peacekeeping force on the ground and trying to back that up with an air force--an actual military air force in the air because when we put that UN peacekeeping force on the ground, we put them in a position that, were we ever to carry out the threat that we made with the air forces, they would become hostages on the ground. And our allies said, "We won't have anything to do with it." So Richard's correct in that after an attempt to try to reverse that, when the allies refused to go along with it, the United States, in effect, acceded to that desire.
So this is something we have to not do again. The situation changed on the ground--tragically, as it turns out--because of the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa and some of the events that flowed out of that, including the retaking of Krajina and so forth. And so the UN hostages are no longer in the position where they were--potential UN hostages. In fact, they were taken hostage at many points, as we know. So that then allowed us to carry out with the air the threats that we had made to retaliate against attacks on the safe areas, and we've seen some results in diplomacy.
This will not be a perfect solution and--because we did wait too long to solve it, and I think that goes back to the points that many of us, including Richard, have made earlier on about the need to keep our forces strong in this kind of a dangerous world. But we're going to have to figure out how to use them and how not to wait too long to use them.
Amb. RIDGWAY: You know, General Haig, I don't certainly want to prolong a long discussion on Bosnia. That's not why we were invited here today. I simply want to say that I think it will be a while before there's an agreed assessment on what went wrong. That may be a tactical assessment, but I'm closer to the point where Richard is on this, and in a political dimension our unwillingness to take the war in Bosnia to its real origins, which are in Belgrade--were in Belgrade and in Zagreb, and early on, to understand the nature of the conflict and its origins in the nationalisms of the region. There may have been problems later on how we prosecuted the war, how we prosecuted our participation in it, but I think there's--there are broader lessons to be learned that are another topic.
Hon. PERLE: Can I just say one broader lesson, it seems to me, is the fundamental importance of American leadership in this post-Cold War world. I don't believe--and I don't want to overly personalize this, but I don't believe that Secretary of State Haig would have come back from Europe the way Secretary of State Christopher did, having abandoned the president's preferred policy on--and I don't think President Reagan would have responded the way President Clinton did. And I think both the president and the Secretary of State had a lesson in the importance of American leadership. When we don't lead, no one else in the world does and the world is leaderless, and...
Gen. HAIG: Let me--that's...
Hon. PERLE: ...and--and it's important to remember this...
Gen. HAIG: Yeah.
Hon. PERLE: ...with all that--I mean, I think the Republicans are not acquitting themselves well now in essentially having lost interest in the world outside.
Gen. HAIG: Against the background music of Chicken Kiev, let's go on.
Gen. VESSEY: Yeah. I think God doesn't give mulligans, you know. If you play--you can't go back to the first tee and start over again. You have to go from where you are today.
Gen. HAIG: I think you're right.
Gen. VESSEY: And it seems to me very important that, in developing defense priorities, as we agreed we would address today, it is important that we address what those defense priorities should be and how we will deal with this changing world.
Gen. HAIG: Yeah. And in saying that, let me just pick up, again, from a very timely intervention that Roz made on diplomacy. The most important weapon that effective diplomacy has, in my historic memory, is a credible, relevant, capable armed force. That's what gives you your credibility in the various capitals of the world. And if it is less than credible, you've rendered another serious blow to American diplomacy. And it is, after all, the role of the armed forces to supplement whatever their aspirations or views are to the political considerations of--which is the diplomatic role.
Now having said that, I'm concerned that we haven't finished here today. Should we be using this new force in this new threat area to be social engineers? Is that an appropriate application of military force? Jan, I'd like to ask you.
Hon. LODAL: I would say absolutely not, that it's not an appropriate application of military force. Military forces have to carry out what they're designed to do, which is to fight, win wars, use force if necessary, predominantly, of course, to deter violence and deter wars in the first place. Of course, deterrence is a broader concept. It has to involve diplomacy, it has to involve other factors. But at its core, as you've said, Ms. Secretary, is the military force itself. But I don't see how it can be effective in nation-building or social engineering in the broad sense. I'm not saying these are things that America should turn its back on, that we shouldn't try to do. Military force can, of course, play a role in assuring a secure environment in certain places. This is what's happened in Haiti in recent months, as we've tried to put in place at least the opportunity to have elections and bring some stability to that country, but it can't actually carry out the rest of the program.
Gen. VESSEY: Well, I--you know, it may not be a mission for military forces, but American military forces ought to reflect American values wherever they are, and certainly, they contribute to a better world by correctly reflecting those values. But back to Al's earlier point, I often wonder here in the year of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II if the Japanese imperial general's staff knew they faced a Desert Storm-like force if they would have, in fact, attacked Pearl Harbor. I doubt it.
Adm. CARROLL: The strangest thing about the military as social engineers is we've done a pretty good job in the United States of upgrading the quality of our society and our economy. People who've come into the services from underprivileged backgrounds and have succeeded in the service go back out into the society, I think, as very strong contributors. But the ability of American service personnel, other than exemplars, to engineer in a different culture, a different setting, I think, is very, very limited.
Gen. VESSEY: Is that why you want to reduce the size of the forces, so fewer young Americans will have the chance of improving themselves?
Adm. CARROLL: It's a very expensive way of upgrading the society. I'll say that.
Hon. DERIAN: Could somebody tell me what social engineering includes? Are we talking about genocide? What are we talking about here?
Hon. PERLE: I think the General's talking about Somalia.
Hon. DERIAN: Mm. That could take a whole day. Now in this little lull, could you tell me what NATO has to do with the future of our strategic needs?
Hon. PERLE: I didn't hear that. You...
Hon. DERIAN: I just wondered what NATO--why we're still in NATO.
Hon. PERLE: Excuse me. Thanks. Well, I'm--my concern is not why we're still in it; it's whether we're doing enough to promote it and keep it healthy and sound. I...
Hon. DERIAN: Well, start at the beginning, though. How come we're there?
Hon. PERLE: Let's start at the beginning. I think we have learned twice in this century that it is foolish and shortsighted to ignore security in Europe, which has a history of instability, some of which...
Hon. DERIAN: Ah-ha! Really? They've been a big help in the latest...
Hon. PERLE: I'm sorry?
Hon. DERIAN: ...instability. NATO's been an enormous...
Hon. PERLE: In Bosnia, you mean.
Hon. DERIAN: ...help here in Bosnia.
Hon. PERLE: Well, I think NATO has not acquitted itself well in Bosnia...
Hon. DERIAN: No.
Hon. PERLE: ...but I attribute that largely to the failure of the United States to lead, as I was suggesting earlier. I think had we had a determined view of Bosnia and had we set out to lead, NATO would have responded, as it always has to American leadership. So I think it's important that NATO be well-led. And in my view, NATO will not survive without a renewed sense of mission because the world has changed pretty fundamentally. And I would look for that renewed sense of mission to the obvious way in which the world has changed, which is to say there are now threats to the well-being, to the security of NATO member countries that originate outside the territory of those countries.
The NATO charter, as you know, has brought about a very narrow view of the NATO mission, confining it to the protection of the territory of the members. And I think it's time for NATO to make the transition to regarding itself as an instrument for the protection of the common interests of the members, including beyond the immediate territory of NATO. And the Gulf is one very good example of where it would make a great deal of sense for NATO to consult, collaborate and plan with respect to the common security interests of the members in that region.
I also think that NATO ought to be enlarged to include those countries firmly on the path to democracy who wish to associate themselves with NATO and who abhor the notion of being caught in a vacuum between NATO and the democratic West and whatever's going to lie to the east in the future. And they don't know, but they're nervous and uneasy, and I think we would do them and ourselves and NATO a great service by bringing them in.
Hon. LODAL: I think this is very well-stated and, of course, these are brief--the administration's agreement with these points is reflected in a lot of the policies that are under way, certainly the effort to deliberately walk through the possible expansion of NATO. This is a complicated problem--and it shouldn't happen fast--and complicated for a lot of reasons and, again, it would take all day to go through it. But Richard's correct. We need to deal with this.
One point I would make: Again, we need to understand, as a nation, that when we do participate in multinational organizations like NATO--which we must and which we should--that we will not be able to call all the shots all the time and there will involve compromises. Should we compromise as much as we do in some cases? It's now fashionable to argue that we compromised way too much on the Bosnia policy and certainly the policy that resulted did not achieve the results that any of us wanted when we did compromise. But nonetheless, it is an alliance and we have to understand that. And we have to work on that, too. It comes back again to Roz's point about diplomacy. If we don't work that part of it so that we can reach consensus quickly when we need to and make sure that that aspect of our national capability's in place, we'll have trouble using these instruments in the future and we need to use them more, not less.
Gen. HAIG: Now with that very important observation, I look at the clock. My tummy says it's time to get busy and so I would like to take this opportunity, first, to thank the witnesses in this panel for your very thoughtful contributions--and they were that. And I think while we didn't decide on what the next defense budget will look like, we did dispose of certain aspects with emphasis on the need for modernization at the right time.
Secondly, I want to thank this very, very distinguished panel. I've re--promoted Jack Vessey because I love him so dearly and I was hoping that somebody in the Defense Department would decide to put you in charge, as I've used that word before.
Having said that, I want to thank you, Patt, for a very, very fine contribution and very important questioning; you, Roz; and all of our very erudite and intelligent audience for both your patience and your good sense in being here. Thank you.
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