STATEMENT OF HON. OWEN B. PICKETT, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA, RANKING MEMBER, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. PICKETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to welcome the Secretary here today, along with the other witnesses. I thank the Secretary for his service to our country, and I would just raise the issue about the size of the Army research and development budget for 1998. It's down some 8.5 percent from 1997, which concerns me. When you have a cut of that size, obviously something is being given up, and I would like for the Secretary if he would to tell us the areas in the Army's program that are being cut back in order to accommodate this reduction in the top line of the Army's research and development budget.

I'm very concerned about it. They have done some really tremendous work in recent years in modernizing the Army, and I don't want to see this effort slowed down or stopped.

And with that, Mr. Chairman, I will yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Pickett. Mr. Skelton has not yet arrived. We will reserve the time for him to make any opening statements he'd like to make.

Gentlemen, it's a real pleasure to have you here. Mr. Secretary, we're going to start off with you, and I understand you'll bring in the other witness, and then finally, I understand, Dr. Chait, you're going to give us a little show and tell here, which we're looking forward to.

So we will enter your statements for the record, unanimously, and then ask you to make whatever verbal comments you would like to make. Thank you for appearing here today.

STATEMENT OF MR. GILBERT F. DECKER, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE ARMY FOR RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND ACQUISITION, ACCOMPANIED BY LT. GEN. RONALD V. HITE, MILITARY DEPUTY TO THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE ARMY FOR RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND ACQUISITION; MAJ. GEN. RONALD ADAMS, ASSISTANT DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR OPERATIONS, PLANS, AND FORCE DEVELOPMENT (ADCSOPS), LT. OTTO GUENTHER, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE ARMY FOR COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS, AND INTELLIGENCE C4I; AND DR. RICHARD CHAIT, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AND LABORATORY MANAGEMENT, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY

Secretary DECKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairmen-all three of you— oh, Mr. Bateman left. Well, anyway, I thank him, too.

Í sincerely appreciate your kind remarks and your thanks as do my colleagues. It's been a very exciting and personally rewarding 3 years for me, and I appreciate you having us here. I especially think it's a useful format to have the Research and Development [R&D] and Procurement together, because they do fit together. So I appreciate that format very much.

And I mean this very sincerely: I really want to express the Army's very sincere appreciation for your assistance in the last couple of years in hard budget times, and your generous support of Army modernization.

We're doing our best to be careful stewards of the resources, but I think our success would have been marginal at best without your strong support.

With me today I have Maj. Gen. Ronald Adams. He is Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans, and Force Development. And we work very closely with his shop, in the prioritization of things.

I also have with me today General Hite, who you have introduced already. He is the Military Deputy to me for all research, development and acquisition matters. I have Gen. Otto Guenther. He's dual hated. He's the Deputy Chief of Staff for Command, Control, Communications, and Computors (C4) he's also, under the new law, the Army's chief information officer.

And he deals in a broad spectrum of information and communications, including the acquisition of those elements of modernization. And then Dr. Dick Chait, who is the No. 2 fellow in our science and technology directorate. Dr. Milton, his boss, is off at a Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC] hearing today with Dr. Kaminski on technology, and is covering for me there.

And so that's the people that we hope to answer your questions. I'll keep my statement brief, I promise.

Our Army, in my honest opinion, is still the world's best land combat force, as of today, 11 March, 1997. As you have heard many times, we're the eighth largest army in the world, but I think today this same date we probably are clearly the best.

We all believe that we have and will continue to see an increasing role for land forces. In fact today's challenges are more complex and varied, in terms of the spectrum of missions, than any other time in history.

The diverse operations have one thing in common, and the statistics show this over the last 10 or 11 years. The majority of military men and women involved in our deployment operations are soldiers on the ground. And it is clear that in today's world, de facto, America's Army is the force of choice. And, as I say, the statistics bear this out.

This year, as in the past few years, we were faced with some pretty tough budget choices as we worked to balance readiness of the current force, end strength of the current force, quality of life. and related programs of the current force, and modernization.

As you alluded to in your remarks, Mr. Chairman, the Army has the lowest percentage of the total DOD research, development and acquisition [RDA] budget, as it turns out.

In some respects, modernization in the Army has essentially become a design to price endeavor. Within this constraint, I honestly believe we're getting the biggest bang for the buck, but it will leave some unfilled holes for the future.

The fiscal year 1998 [FY98] budget request funds our highest priority programs and makes the most of the limited resources. We continue to fund development of only new high payoff systemsand I emphasize new: Comanche and Crusader.

We are introducing in 1998, the beginnings of a new, well thought-out requirement for a future Scout vehicle. We have systems in procurement, such Army tactical missile system [ARMY TACMS], brilliant anti-armor submunition [BAT], Javelin and

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other related systems. But our main strategy is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future to extend the lives and to improve the performance of existing systems by technology insertion and upgrades.

The examples for those programs are the Abrams M1A2 tank, the Bradley M2 Fighting Vehicle, the Apache LongBow Helicopter, and a series of power projection C4 infrastructure programs.

We have had to accept risk in modernization program in the near term to protect readiness and quality of life, which have been the avowed priorities during the period of drawdown and reductions. So modernization has been the bill payer within this sparse fiscal

environment.

We've remained focused on achieving information dominance. And our efforts include programs and supporting information architecture, like the Army Enterprise Architecture and the WarFighter Information Network, or WIN.

Our Army Technical Architecture has been adopted as the joint architecture for DOD. Investments in the WarFighter Information Network, and technical architecture, significantly enables the capacity and velocity of information throughout the battle space.

Where are we headed? We have set in motion a series of initiatives to arrive at the 21st century with the requisite capabilities and this is denoted as Army 21. It is the Army's process for modernizing and preparing for challenges of the early 21st century.

Army 21 uses digital technology to optimize the flow of information and create situational awareness at all levels of command. As we field Army 21, the focus in the future is on what we call Army After Next. And, in fact, a great deal of our S&T investments are now focused in that long-term dimension.

And by Army After Next, we're looking out at 2010, 2015 and beyond.

We are looking for ways to be more efficient. We have reduced our infrastructure, and we are continuing to reform acquisition process. Acquisition reform is a success story. We have many examples, and we've had them independently checked by our independent cost agencies to where we have, indeed, reduced the costs of given systems as we procure them, and have been able to either buy more for the same dollars, or beef up some other programs. And so we are getting a bigger bang for the buck.

As I said before, we are the eighth largest Army. Thank God, we're in first place. And that's because of quality people, quality training, quality leader development, and the very best modernization and equipment the Army can buy. And we need to stay in first place in all four of those dimensions.

Last year, Mr. Chairman, you may recall, we demonstrated the capabilities of tomorrow's soldiers themselves. The individual soldier, the Land Warrior, is again highly critical in our operations. We continue to place great emphasis on enhancing the battlefield capabilities of the individual soldier.

It is a top Army priority, and I am proud to say that our soldier modernization program is actually going well.

Now we have a few examples of some of our R&D capabilities to show and where we're going with it. And I would like to ask Dr. Chait, our director of research and laboratory management, for

about 4 or 5 minutes to point out what's represented here on display. Following which I'll conclude my statement and we'd be happy to take your questions.

Dr. CHAIT. Good afternoon, I want to run through a few examples of where the Army's investment in science and technology [S&T] programs has made a difference. The first example I will use is a cross section of a gun tube from the Crusader 155 millimeter tube.

And to increase the rate of fire, what our designers and our materials people have done is to insert these cooling holes between the bore you can see the rifling here and the jacket which surrounds the bore, and through these holes, just like in the automobile, we pump a coolant, a water ethylene glycol solution.

This increases the rate of fire-steady state rate of fire-from 1 round per minute to 12 rounds per minute.

Next we are going from high strength steel to composite materials. One of the things about composite materials, they're very difficult to process in thick sections. In the early 1990's, our materials people began a science and technology [S&T] program that looked at processing composites in thick sections. This is of a fiberglass composite material.

Using analysis and simulation we were able to produce thick-section composite materials, and from that effort evolved a composite material with increased armor capability. Utilizing advanced adhesive technology we bonded to the thick-section composite material a ceramic material for increased ballistic resistence, a flame-retardant material and a rubber material that would improve the multihit capability of ceramic.

This basically saved approximately 30 percent in the overall structural weight of the vehicle, because compared to the all metal solution, for, say, a composite armored vehicle, of which I have a model up here, the aluminum all metal solution weighs about 56 pounds per square foot, whereas the composite solution just described weighs about 25 pounds per square foot.

This program, the Composite Armored Vehicle Program, is presently in advanced development, example 6.3.

I want to go next to night vision goggles. Detector technology has enabled us to go from looking at images using quarter moon illumination to see a man-size target at 160 meters, to seeing the same target in overcast starlight.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, just to clarify a point in this last thing, that armor, the armor composite there that you have made

Dr. CHAIT. Yes.

Mr. HUNTER. You mentioned you've got a substantial weight savings, but what is your armor factor with that?

Dr. CHAIT. This is equivalent armor factor.

Mr. WELDON. This replaces the two pieces of the same at 50 percent less weight.

Dr. CHAIT. That's correct. I want to go next to from starlight illumination, and night time illumination, to thermal illumination. This is a thermal weapons site. This, by the way, is in procure

ment.

We're starting now to buy these thermal weapons sites, which go on the M-16 rifles, for example, this will enable us to see a mansized object at 1,100 meters because of the thermal energy that is given off by the person.

This is a medium weight thermal sight, weighing about 4.5 pounds. If we increase the weight to about 5.5 pounds, we can see that person at about 2,400 meters. So, illumination by starlight on one hand and illumination by thermal energy-body heat-on the other.

Let me go next to situation awareness-Mr. Decker mentioned that. This is a microcosm of how we are approaching the digital battlefield. These are displays that if we had on all the units on the battlefield, we would be able to identify the friendlie's, identify enemy units, and because we will be able to draw accurate positions from the GPS technology that we have we will be able to display those positions throughout the tactical internet, from brigade level on down. And today, at the National Training Center, we have an Army advanced war-fighting experiment going on, where we have these types of units and I present here a laptop, but there are more ruggedized versions on some 65 types of platforms. Some 800 units in total.

And so, as Mr. Decker explained, we are very capable of passing position locations from one unit to the other, at all levels from brigade on down. And you probably can't see this, but I am able to identify just by placing the cursor where I can identify a particular position on the battlefield, and the system indicates that this is a light tank, an enemy light tank.

And so this is basically the heart of the digitized battlefield.

Now, I have more detail on every one of these displays. And I will leave them here for your perusal at the break, or whenever you get a chance to look at it. Thank you.

Secretary DECKER. Thanks very much, Dick. I appreciate that. That concludes our opening statement. I want to thank you again for your great interest in the Army, and your sound critiques for the last 3 years. It has certainly been a great help to me.

And with that, sir, I will close and we stand ready for your questions.

[The prepared statements of Secretary Decker and Mr. Hite can be found in the appendix on page 422.]

Mr. WELDON. That's got to be the quickest opening statement on record.

Secretary DECKER. Somebody told me you would like that, and I'm a good listener.

Mr. WELDON. We appreciate that. That leaves a lot of time for members, and we have a number of members here to ask questions.

Let me start the discussion off, first of all, with the issue of the theater high altitude area defense [THAAD], perhaps describing that if you can, and give us some highlights of what occurred, and whether or not the latest schedule for deployment in fact is tenuous, or whether or not we're on track.

Also I would like you to touch upon a very specific question I have. I got word that there were calls made from the Comptroller's