atively low input in terms of dollars and folks, we wind up getting not only a lot of good feedback. Our folks like to get that kind of feedback-knowing they have done well.

Mr. KENNEDY. It offers a training medium for our military in the field. But in addition to that, more importantly than ever, it gives us the bridge to those areas, where if we are ever called upon to be deployed, we already have an immediate communication going with those militaries that will prove to be the difference in whether we know where these fields are and where they aren't. Colonel BARLOW. I think that is absolutely right.

Mr. KENNEDY. I would like to go back to what I know has been the question that has been most asked already. And that is, How do we move the R&D into procurement so that we can get the best, you know, detection equipment out there? In that respect, the problem with the technology is that while it is good, it is not foolproof.

I would be anxious to hear from your perspective. It has got to be 100 percent, I imagine, and that is the problem with this. Or does it have to be 90 percent? Or when you are talking about demining and clearing areas, or declaring it an area that has been breached, from your sense of comfort, how do you address that? Do you address it from a 90-percent perspective, 100 percent, or where do you draw the line?

General GILL. The breaching requirement under fire in combat is significantly less than 100 percent, but we proof it. The clearing mission from a military viewpoint-we will clear the minimum essential area necessary to conduct our operations and protect our force. Those areas that are not cleared, we will properly mark. Marking mine fields is a very key force-protection and humanitarian-protection issue.

For humanitarian demining, we don't use our troops. We do use our explosives ordnance disposal [EOD], our explosives ordnance disposal people. They are the experts in actually removing mines. We use the bulk of our forces in detecting, marking, and often blowing in-place minefields, we just consider that too hazardous to put soldiers at risk.

Mr. KENNEDY. I want to follow on another question that Mr. Skelton raised: What is out there to protect our troops? As I understand it, those protected Humvees that saved the life of one of our service personnel that was injured already in Bosnia was something that was not deployed until very recently-retrofitting the Humvees so they had that armor.

General GILL. In the old days we would have filled sandbags and put them around and on the vehicle, and so forth, but that is a crude way to get the job done. So that was a solution to a Somalia problem: to go out and develop a system that was more highly armored and protective. In fact, that is what saved this soldier's life. Mr. KENNEDY. How has that gone forward in terms of procurement?

General GILL. I need to have the procurement people answer that. I do not buy any Humvees.

Mr. WELDON. We are going to have a second panel, and we will get into that procurement issue.

Mr. KENNEDY. Oh, I am sorry. OK. Thank you very much for your testimony.

Mr. WELDON. We are very pleased to welcome the distinguished chairman of the full committee, our good friend, who just had a very successful vote on the House floor, Mr. Spence.

Mr. SPENCE. I don't have any questions.

I want to thank you for having this hearing and thank you gentlemen for appearing on the panel to help us, and all the ones on the other panels, too. It is a very meaningful hearing we are having. It is very timely and concerns a great many people, obviously. We appreciate all you are doing. Thank you.

Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Our final questioner before we go to panel two is Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

General Gill, I apologize if this question has been asked already, but I would like to ask it. Is there any evidence in Bosnia that in areas that you knew to be previously cleared that mines had shown up after clearing operations. Any evidence of new mines being put out in the American or allied sector?

General GILL. Let's get the intel view on that and then I will pick up on the incident.

Captain MAZZAFRO. The short answer is no, but it is incomplete because we don't have enough data. We haven't been there long enough, checking the mines. As the forces are deployed, they will be primarily involved in getting themselves over the Saba River and setting up in the camps. As General Gill pointed out earlier, we have been trying to verify the minefields where we are actually living and operating on a daily basis.

We are just now beginning to go out to the lines of separation, because the forces have moved back from those confrontation lines in accordance with the Dayton agreement on the 19th of January. We are now just beginning to patrol those areas and beginning to check those areas where the parties have said no mines have been cleared. We are now beginning to check those areas again.

In accordance with the strategy that General Gill has articulated, we are going to go where we have to go, not going to go just to see if there is a mine out there. If there is a reason to go, we are going to go and check.

As I said at the beginning, my answer is no but it is a caveated no, but the caveat is we just don't have enough data to give you a strong, confident no. When they tell us there is not a mine, that there won't be one there, there hasn't been so far.

General GILL. We are very concerned about this issue. We had a wake-up mine incident recently. One of our armored vehicles hit a mine like this one here. The area had been proofed. The theory they have come up with is that weathering, the age of the mine and a number of other things caused this mine not to explode when they rolled across it. So we dodged the bullet there. There is an increased sense of awareness that there just are no perfect solutions. Mr. TAYLOR. The spring thaw, does that present any new problems or does that make your job easier?

General GILL. I will rely on my old-time experience. The problem you may get with spring thaw is that things move around, just as water moves around. That is the bad news. The good news is the snow cover and the frozen conditions that inhibit some of our detection will go away, so in a sense the detection mission ought to be

a little bit easier, and the visibility and all the other factors. You use all of your senses and equipment to detect these mines.

Mr. TAYLOR. But to date, you have no evidence of roads that have been previously cleared or areas that have been previously cleared where someone snuck in?

General GILL. Nothing to date.

Mr. TAYLOR. I have no further questions.

Mr. WELDON. Just in closing, one final question: Which country, if any, has the lead responsibility in Bosnia for the demining operation? Is it, in fact, the United States, or is it apportioned according to where the countries are assigned, for their troops, or is it all one responsibility?

Colonel BARLOW. It is apportioned to the area.

Mr. WELDON. Our responsibility is limited to those areas where our troops are, in fact?

Colonel BARLOW. But we have a responsibility, or at least we have pointed out, not the DOD, but the U.S. Government is working with the UNDHA to work out the civilian humanitarian demining portion. We have the Bosnia executive committee working on coordinating that through the United Nations, the civilian side.

Mr. WELDON. But we are not, in fact, responsible alone? There are other countries that are involved. What other countries, the Brits, the French?

Colonel BARLOW. And the Brits, yes, sir.

Mr. WELDON. Three of us really taking the lead.

Captain MAZZAFRO. I would add, as an aside, that on the intelligence side we have gotten a tremendous amount of information on the basis of Norway's experience. They used to operate in the American zone. They are still in the American zone, and this experience and intelligence on what is what and where things are has proved very useful.

Mr. WELDON. I want to thank you all for your excellent testimony. We appreciate you coming in.

You know the commitment of this Congress to this issue by the attendance at this hearing. We would just encourage you to speak out loudly and clearly for whatever it is that you feel we need in theater. You will get it. There will not be any second-guessing of the requests made.

The second panel will talk with us about the broader issue of R&D to get you the technology you need.

We thank you for coming, and we will now convene our second panel.

Mr. WELDON. Our second panel consists of John Bachkosky, Deputy Under Secretary for Advanced Technology; George Singley, Deputy Director, Defense Research and Engineering; A. Fenner Milton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Science and Technology; Brig. Gen. Roy Beauchamp, Deputy Chief of Staff, Research, Development and Engineering, U.S. Army Materiel Command; John Reingruber, Assistant for Science and Technology, Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense (Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict); Dr. Claude Manley, Deputy Director, Navy Joint Explosives Ordnance Technology Division, U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Center; and Dr. Michael McD. Dow, Acting Director, Board on

Science and Technology for International Development, National Research Council.

General Beauchamp, it is a privilege to have you here.

I would just like you to know, Mr. Skelton-I just want you to know General Beauchamp, who before his new assignment, was a very successful leader in Philadelphia.

Welcome to all of you. We are very pleased to have you here. Your statements will be accepted in the record. We would ask you to keep your presentations as brief as possible so we can have time for questions.

And to get to the nitty-gritty of what we are doing, research and development, we will start with Mr. Bachkosky.

STATEMENT OF JOHN M. BACHKOSKY, DEPUTY UNDER
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Mr. BACHKOSKY. My name is Jack Bachkosky. I am the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Advanced Technology.

I really appreciate the opportunity to appear before your committee. I hope that my associates and I will be able to address your concerns regarding the landmine threat in Bosnia. We will focus principally on our efforts to evaluate new technologies that could be developed and deployed to improve the countermine capabilities of U.S. forces in support of Operation Joint Endeavor.

With respect to that operation, we have established a procedure to ensure our forces have access to those systems and mature technologies that have the potential to reduce or eliminate that landmine threat while enhancing the effectiveness of our forces.

Our overall objective is, where possible, to enhance our military capability with equipment that is acceptable, is available in the timeframe that is consistent with the United States commitment in Bosnia, and does not place an unacceptable burden on the commanders in theater.

We have taken steps to ensure that the services, OSD agencies and staff elements coordinate all efforts to introduce new systems and technologies to the forces involved in Joint Endeavor. It is clear that while we want to enhance the capability of our joint forces, we also want to ensure we minimize disruption by not introducing technologies with systems that may not be sufficiently mature or are of minimal value.

We have established this procedure in coordination with the Joint Staff, the services and the defense agencies to achieve these objectives. Military operational needs that are the result of unique joint endeavor environment, operations, or hazards will be forwarded through the normal operational chain of command to the Joint Staff, who will prioritize these needs, forwarding them to Dr. Kaminsky and his group for action. Within the office of the Secretary of Defense, Mr. John Phillips, the Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics, will be responsible for evaluating proposals to our logistic support capabilities. I have a similar responsibility to meet the prioritized needs of our Bosnian support forces in the area of technological support.

We look to the DOD science and technology community, other Government activities, and, as Mr. Hunter pointed out earlier, industry and our allies to provide these solutions. Recommendations

for deployment of any new capability will be presented to the Under Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff before deployment. Another of my responsibilities is the management of the advanced concept technology demonstration [ACTD] programs. This is an effort that has been established to provide a means of rapidly transitioning promising technologies from the developers to the operational users.

Again, in response to Mr. Hunter and Mr. Kennedy, to your questions, we have, in fact, been able to move technology from the laboratory to operational use in a matter of months. The one example that I think you may be familiar with, is the Predator system. The Predator system was conceived in late 1994. The request for proposal (RFP] went out on the street in March 1994. We had the first system flying in June and July 1994 and, frankly, we deployed that system to Bosnia a year later and it has performed exceptionally well in Bosnia. We are about to redeploy in March of this year. So we can do that. In fact, the ACTD concept has been set up specifically to address the kind of issue you are alluding to. So that we don't take years but rather we take months or possibly days. And we think we have been successful in doing that.

One of the things we are looking at in this context is some of the efforts we have going on in technology now to address the countermine problem. The ACTD's allow the war fighter and the user to evaluate military technology, the military utility of the technology that is emerging from our scientific programs. It also permits them to develop concepts of operation for employment of that new technology in a theater of war.

Key among the ACTD's that my office now has under way is a joint countermine ACTD which was initiated in fiscal 1995. This ACTD is a coordinated effort between the Army, Navy, and the Marine Corps. It is focused on conducting seamless mine countermeasure operations from the sea, through the surf zone, and on land. This will be accomplished by integrating Army, Navy, and Marine Corps mine-detection technology along with currently fielded military equipment.

The ACTD leverages these technologies to both detect and neutralize mines that may be found, and those programs that are being conducted within the individual services. Key mission areas are mine surveillance, reconnaissance, detection, and neutralization. The current plan is to conduct a countermine ACTD demonstration in fiscal year 1997 and another that is more focused on ocean and surf zone in fiscal 1998. We have looked at this. It does not appear possible or practical to accelerate the ACTD in support of Bosnia.

Even though I make that statement as far as it relates to the joint countermine ACTD, there are individual technologies that may, in fact, be candidates for Bosnian support. The Army under Brigadier General Beauchamp, whom you will hear from shortly, has been conducting an investigation to determine if any of the novel technologies in the ACTD, or elsewhere, might be deployed in support of Operation Joint Endeavor. This effort is concentrated on the needs of the Army forces which will be operating in Bosnia. Similarly, I have had ARPA conduct an assessment of those technologies that are being pursued in Office of the Secretary of De