What the threat is, I can describe from an intelligence standpoint. But the perspective is much better given, I think, from General Gill's standpoint: what it feels like to sit in the field as opposed to an intelligence analyst in Washington.

General GILL. I am familiar with what I know about mines, back about 20 or 30 years, and what I hear about the mines over there, we tried to explain as I was going on.

Congressman Sisisky's question is multifaceted. There are antipersonnel mines. There are antitank mines. There are antitank mines that have been turned into antipersonnel mines, et cetera. On and on and on and on in all the different evil ways that you think about that you might booby trap them and make them work. My sensing of what is going on, what I hear from the people in the field, is that the warring factions are now cooperating with us. As long as they continue to cooperate, and they think that we are carrying the big stick and it is in their interest to participate with us, I think we will be very successful. Again, we may have the problem of some splinter element that disagrees with that and goes off and gets involved in some kind of an incident, be it a mine incident or a sniping incident or something like that; but if the climate is right, they will quit mining.

My Vietnam experience tells me that where you understood that the population was friendly and interested in you, they didn't booby trap and they didn't put in minefields; and where you got into hostile areas, then you had not only to clear the route the first time but also the second time, the third time, and the fourth time, and that is a much more difficult problem which I hope we don't get into.

Mr. PETERSON. If I may, Mr. Chairman, is it safe to say though at this juncture given, one, cooperation; two, preparation; three, surveillance that our original concept of the threat is significantly reduced from that anticipated?

Mr. REEDER. I think I will throw back a phrase that you yourself used in your remarks, sir, and I think it is absolutely appropriate, and that is "minimize minimize by knowledge."

I would have to add, for General Gill and for the Engineers' School, that our doctrinal concepts and the approaches we deal with: if mines are developed such that a mine is booby trapped, it really doesn't matter to the soldier dealing with the mine; in other words, we try to establish procedures so that we always treat them that way. We destroy them, regardless of whether they were booby trapped, so that those booby traps can't affect us.

That leaves booby trapped buildings or booby trapped equipment. And I must be remiss, I didn't try to bring out the fact that booby trapping has happened, and it has in specific areas been rather intensive. But, again, the idea is that we try to control the situation, to develop procedures that let us safely do that.

I am quite certain that the R&D folks will tell you about dogs that sense explosives, that are available in-theater. So there are some very good actions that have been taken that in conjunction with our training procedures to minimize that threat. And that really is the key point.

Mr. PETERSON. Thank you for being clear, and I appreciate the extra time, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. WELDON. Mr. Skelton.

Mr. SKELTON. You know, I do not care about your doctrinal concepts. What kind of capacity do we have to deal with the threat today? That is the issue before us. After it is all said and done, how safe are our troops over there today? What can you do? What is on the shelf? What is available that you are not using? Anybody.

General GILL. Sir, we are using everything we have in the inventory that the command feels comfortable using, bringing forward. We do not traditionally run around with rollers, because it kind of gets in the road of mechanized warfare, and so forth. But they have taken all the rollers out, trained on using them. Everybody has got them and there is no shortage of them, although we are still deploying there.

We are not full up over there yet. There is a lot of equipment arriving today and tomorrow. There are six mine dog detection teams that are in Germany. They are due to deploy in theater within this next week. So there is a lot of stuff flowing in there that will add to what they already have.

But I hold to my position that following the accords ruthlessly, assiduously, making the warring factions do the things that they must do, keeping our soldiers away from the areas that are even suspect, will protect our forces, barring error.

Mr. SKELTON. Could the incident where the young man from Maryland was so severely injured, could that have been avoided, from your knowledge of it, General?

General GILL. Sir, I am told that he had a route, and he erred, made a mistake and turned down a road that was known to have been mined. And you know, just in common terms, he screwed up. I also understand—and this is, maybe I can be backed up by others-that he was in an armored or armor-protected Humvee, and for that he owes his life. So it is a little bit of we are very thankful that he is alive and that is all of the bad that happened. We are very sorry that he made that error.

Captain MAZZAFRO. The other interesting fact is, the Bosnian Serb Army [BSA] forces in the area were trying to flag him down off the road, which speaks to the issue of cooperation.

Mr. SKELTON. What, General, could we in this committee do to help keep our troops safe in this mission that they have undertaken?

General GILL. Sir, I will not advocate a throw money at the problem kind of thing. I will tell you that expressing the interest of the American people that they are concerned about their sons and daughters over there, your personal involvement in this issue through this committee and through the other work that you do, clearly puts a great deal of pressure on us to do our job, to do it to standards and to get all the equipment over there.

There is, to my knowledge, nobody in the force that has said, “I need something," that it has been an issue that it costs too much money. It is only an issue of "where can we find it, who has it, how can we get it here." If we keep that attitude up through this entire operation, God willing, we will come back with an intact force and an absolute minimum of

Mr. SKELTON. Some of the saddest occasions that we have had in this committee have been hearings on incidents that have gone

awry, some very sad ones, and I commend the chairman, both the chairmen of these two subcommittees, for holding this hearing and bringing this to your attention and letting you know of our interest. The last thing we would like to have is a hearing for you and others to explain why some bad things happened.

Now, on a more positive note, General Gill, thank you. Especially, I would like for this committee to know that you are the commandant of the finest Army engineering school in the world. It is in Fort Leonard Wood in the Fourth Congressional District, and I am very pleased to welcome you here. Thank you. This is a political commercial. Thank you.

Mr. WELDON. Thank you for that commercial, Congressman Skelton.

And, Congressman Bateman, I understand you are yielding back. Congressman Hunter, chairman of our Procurement Subcommit

tee.

Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to add my commendations, Curt, for your holding this very important hearing.

Gentlemen, let me, since I haven't been here for most of the hearing, apologize. We have had the remake of the defense authorization bill on the floor, in which the leadership was once again excoriated by some Members for increasing defense spending. But some of that increased defense spending this year and over the last several years has gone to mine detection. I know you may be a little grateful for that at this point.

I go back to Desert Storm, and my question has to do with the defense acquisition system that mine detection equipment must necessarily go through to be procured. As you know, and we are all familiar with, it is a fairly difficult and tedious defense acquisition system to procure anything in DOD, whether it is a simple system, or an aircraft, or an artillery piece.

In Desert Storm we needed a certain weapons system fairly quickly to bust bunkers, and my understanding is that we put the requirement out, invented the solution, built the solution, and utilized it in combat in only 14 days.

Now, that is because we didn't go through all the hoops and hurdles of the defense acquisition system. We would still be in the third stage of development of that system if we had taken it through the normal course. We did that because this was an emergency. We had to do certain things in Desert Storm and do them quickly, and because of that, we went to the skunk works out in Ĉalifornia and got some of the old graybeards out there, came up with an invention quickly, built it quickly, deployed it, and used it in combat.

You have a similar emergency, as I understand it, with respect to these nonmetallic mines, because we do not have a great system for clearing nonmetallic mines.

So my first question to you would be, have you elevated this requirement to the same level that they elevated several weapons requirements during Desert Storm, where they said: "I do not want to have a giant labyrinthical defense acquisition system in front of because I have got people out there who are going to be wound

me,

ed or killed if we wait for years and years to develop this; I want something quickly"?

Have you really pressed aggressively through an accelerated system to acquire what you need? First question. Are you trying to get this stuff as fast as you can?

General GILL. Sir, you need to ask the research and development [R&D] panel. That is out of my line. I have a requirement out there to build detection equipment for minefields. We have been pressing that, I mean forever, to get better systems to do that sort of thing. Again, it is a technology issue.

Your question kind of is, are we doing it hard enough and do we have the right kind of pressure, technology, people and money and all that sort of stuff, focused on the problem. I think they can answer that better.

Mr. BACHKOSKY. Mr. Hunter, if I can, we will answer that question later, if I can do it. We will answer that.

Mr. WELDON. We will ask that question of the next panel.

Mr. HUNTER. During Desert Storm when we needed this bunker buster, Congress wasn't involved in that. The war-fighting theater commanders said, "We have got to have this; we have got to have it now." They went out and procured it for them in a few weeks' time, it was flown over, and it was used in combat. That is the kind of pressure we may need, and the kind of circumvention of this very tedious system we have all constructed for defense acquisition, in order to protect your troops. So you may consider that. The other question I would ask you simply is, Are you aggressively soliciting the innovation and the systems that the private companies have out there? Because I know there are a lot of private companies that say, "Hey, we have got something we think will solve the problem." Is the door open for anybody in this country who thinks they have got the answer to come in and make this pitch?

General GILL. Sir, I would tell you, only from my personal experience, that the door is very open and we are extremely receptive. Not a week, possibly not a day goes by that I do not have some offer of some system that we then go and investigate, or go back to our category of, is this something we really need, will this solve a problem? And if it will, then the next step of that process is, well, let's go find out. Again, the procurement and R&D guys who follow me on the second panel will be able to get very specific with that.

Mr. HUNTER. Just one last caveat. If we follow the standard procurement system in developing a nonmetallic detector, it will be years before we even have a prototype available for testing under our standard time schedules. Do you understand that?

General GILL. Yes, you are correct.

Mr. HUNTER. Unless you do something extraordinary, maybe we do something extraordinary, Bosnia will be long gone, the amputees will be recovering at home before the system is fielded. General GILL. Correct.

Mr. WELDON. With that, we will move to Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. KENNEDY. I would like to thank the panel for their testimony. Although I have not been able to hear it personally, I have gone through it. It has been of interest to me, given the fact that it seems, in the threats that we are facing globally, there seems to

be the issue that no matter what Commander in Chief [CINC] may be out there, each CINC has this as an issue that they are concerned about.

I would like to ask the panel what the different CINC's have said about this and what they have done to pressure or press the development of technology to deal with this problem. I mean, this is not a new problem. Every CINC sees it, and they have to have had a plan to incorporate it, a way to either get around it or to deal with it in their operational manuals, and I would be interested to find out today what they have been doing. Maybe there is something other than what you have said.

General GILL. Let me take it this way. Most of the CINC's are concerned about a threat, and the threat is an attack of an offensive nature that they have to defeat-stop and then defeat. In the tactical sense, when you get to the mine problem, if we are not mining we are talking about clearing or breaching, and we have a completely different set of problems, a different set of probabilities and so forth about breaching a minefield, the minimum effort that we can make to get quickly through an area where he has probably got us under fire.

That is a big CINC issue, and we have systems under development, promising systems, prototypes. They are still several years away to assist us getting or solving that particular problem. There may be some spinoffs from that technology that help this problem of clearance of minefields, but that is not the direct CINC pressure that we get, other than we now have Commander in Chief, European Command [CINCUSEUCOM] who is very interested in this Bosnia issue.

Mr. KENNEDY. It seems to me there has been-I cannot speak from the long perspective of this, but breaching these minefields is going to be a challenge of every CINC. I mean, you think about what we may be called on to do in our various humanitarian efforts, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, this is going to be an ongoing issue for us.

Maybe, Colonel, could you tell us about what may be the humanitarian programs that have been done so far that have helped, and what we have learned from those in moving us forward in dealing with this problem?

Colonel BARLOW. Yes, sir, I would be glad to do that.

About 2 years ago our humanitarian demining program got started, and to this point each of the regional CINC's has verbalized, through cables and whatever, back to the Joint Staff their interest in this program.

We do not do the operations. We train the trainers to be able to do demining, and right now we have operations going in nine countries. These operations are, I will call them economy-of-force operations, because it only takes a few people, generally special operations folks. In the case of Cambodia, for instance, about 27 special operators for 2 years have been there training the local Royal Cambodian Army to do demining operations.

We find that the CINC's are saying that this is an integral part of their peacetime campaign plans. It gives them a kind of influence and access, and the special operators and others who go in there are able to learn about this area of operations. So for a rel