STATEMENT OF HON. WILLIAM L. DICKINSON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ALABAMA, RANKING MINORITY MEMBER, HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE

Mr. DICKINSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I, too, want to join with the chairman in saying how much we appreciate your various appearances here to brief the House and keep us posted in several meetings with the White House prior to this meeting, when the chairman and I have been there.

I told the President and he has been told by other Members of the House and Senate that he has kept the Congress better posted and has discussed with us perhaps better than any other President we have had, particularly as it relates to this crisis. I think that in a very large degree that has brought us to the point of having the broad-based support in the Congress.

I would add to that your continuing authoritative and informative briefings to the Members of Congress here, I think that continues to add to the broad-based support you are getting here in the Congress and will continue to do so.

Your briefings to us have given us reassurance and confidence that what we are doing is the right thing. It is imperative we have the continued support of the Congress which in turn leads to the continuing support of the American people as we go down the road in this conflict and as it draws out.

Just a year ago, we were looking at a too rapid drawdown of our military capabilities. Similarly, when many of my colleagues insisted that the Cold War had ended overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and few believed that the instability and political retrenchment that currently characterizes the Soviet Union was again possible, I also urged caution.

I can't help but be a little confused, Mr. Secretary. Early on in your tenure as Secretary, you made the rash statement that maybe Mr. Gorbachev wouldn't be there forever. As I recall, some people wanted to take you to task for that remark, but it looks like you might have been more prophetic than any of us wanted you to be. When we look at the budget, you are presenting a budget based on an agreement of last year, a 3-year budget, last year, this year, next year.

Outside of this, as a supplemental, we will be financing Desert Shield, Desert Storm.

We look forward to your presentation today and, as usual, we want to be as supportive as possible. I think you have done an outstanding job. You are leaving this evening going to the _Persian Gulf for a firsthand, face-to-face briefing with General Schwarzkopf, General Horner, and others there.

I hope that what you find there will confirm the good news and that as a result of that, we can move forward to a more expedited end and conclusion to the war.

Again, thank you for your appearance here. We look forward to your statement.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. WILLIAM L. DICKINSON

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, General Powell, it is indeed a pleasure to welcome you back to the Committee for the formal initiation of this year's defense budget debate.

But first let me say that there can be no debate about the magnificent job that the both of you and everyone in the Department are doing in connection with Desert Storm. You have, I believe, the undying gratitude of this Nation for so effectively managing the on-going campaign in the Persian Gulf. The success that coalition forces have had to date flows in no small part from your strong leadership.

Just a year ago, when a war of major proportions in the Persian Gulf was an issue only in the files of Central Command, I urged caution against a precipitous build down of our national defenses.

Similarly, when many of my colleagues insisted that the Cold War had ended overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and few believed that the instability and political retrenchment that currently characterizes the Soviet Union was again possible, I also urged caution.

Today, what was improbable just a year ago has become real. We find ourselves engaged in the largest military conflict since Vietnam. We also find that Soviet troops have killed unarmed civilians in the Baltics and the star of Soviet hardliners, including the Red Army, is on the rise.

Today, the only certainty is uncertainty. So once again, I want to urge caution on my colleagues.

The proposed fiscal year 1992-1993 Defense Budget is consistent with the overall 25 percent reduction in our defense forces that was discussed at length last year. The objective is not in question. Where caution is needed is in weighing the tough choices and trade-offs as we try to allocate a shrinking pot of money.

Mr. Secretary, the press statement that accompanied the release of the Department's budget leads me to believe that the budget is the result of a, quote, "new U.S. defense strategy-I've heard it referred to as the Base Force Concept-which has been formulated to counter the threats likely to concern the Nation throughout the 1990s."

Although the release further states that the budget reflects priorities that flow directly from the new strategy, we have been left, so far, to our own devices to guess why you have, for example, terminated production of all ground combat systems, or why only one warm fighter production line is left open after fiscal year 1993.

We hope that details will soon follow on this new strategy so that we can understand decisions like these, as well as understand what you mean when you say that "fiscal year 1995 forces will be substantially restructured so as to support the new strategy effectively and efficiently."

Notwithstanding my comments on your new strategy, I realize that the large manpower and infrastructure reductions will drive many decisions about conventional force modernization. Without getting into specifics, I must say that as we terminate more and more weapons systems, we will place increased pressure on an already dramatically weakened industrial base. The recent A-12 decision is a vivid indicator of how fragile the industrial base really is.

Our challenge is to sustain that fragile defense industrial base while also finding suitable trade-offs between maintaining the short-term viability of current systems through continued production and upgrades, and moving into the 21st Century with the development and production of next generation systems-all within an environment of severely constrained resources.

If the long-term vision of strategic modernization reflected by your budget comes to pass-that is the B-2, Midgetman and strategic defenses—then the U.S. will have a robust strategic force decades into the next century. Unfortunately, I don't believe anyone in this room would bet their savings on the political survivability of these costly, controversial systems.

Therfore, I am concerned that the Department has opted to terminate a number of short-term, politically viable, strategic modernization programs in order to freeup funding necessary to squeeze SDI, B-2 and Midgetman into the 6-year plan.

For example, you've decided not to retrofit the first eight Tridents with the D-5 missile; Rail Garrison will be shelved, and the kinetic energy ASAT program would not be in this budget at all had it not been for White House intervention at the "11th hour." I am particularly concerned, however, with your decision to end production of the MX test missiles.

I hope the Department has not been "too clever by half" in holding our strategic force posture hostage to the political success or failure of a handful of contentious programs.

Let me close by saying that Congress and the Department must resolve the Total Force Policy issue that will indelibly shape both our future force structure and our political debate.

I support the general policy adopted by the Department in this budget which envisions proportional reductions between active and reserve component units. However,

I would urge caution on both opponents and proponents of the Department's force policy proposals so that none of us becomes a victim of gross over-generalizations, or hung up in rigid formulas. Cheaper may not always be better when it comes to force structure, and, as Desert Storm has taught us, this Nation cannot go to war for any extended period without an effective mix of both the active and reserve components. Without a meeting of the minds on the Total Force Policy, there is little or no hope that Congress of the Department will be able to rationally manage the massive changes that lie ahead.

I look forward to your testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Secretary, the floor is yours.

STATEMENT OF HON. DICK CHENEY, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Secretary CHENEY. It is a pleasure to be back before you again this morning.

As you indicated, Mr. Chairman, yesterday we had the opportunity in this room to brief the Members of the House in a closed door session on the current situation with respect to Operation Desert Storm and the war in the Gulf.

This morning we are here to present the President's Request for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993 and the broad outlines of a 6-year defense program; and, therefore, our presentation will focus on that. Obviously, we will be happy to respond to any questions the members may have on any subject.

I think the best way to proceed, Mr. Chairman, would be for me to run through a broad overview, if you will, of some of the strategic assumptions that underlie our planning for the next 5 or 6 years, and then talk about some of the specifics that are in the budget. Then I will turn it over to my colleague, General Powell. He will make a presentation based on what we think those future forces ought to look like and some of the strategic rationale underlying the force structure we think is basically the absolute irreducible minimum the United States needs in order to guarantee its security in the future. Then we will be happy to respond to your questions, sir.

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, last year at this time we submitted the fiscal year 1991 budget. It was the first budget submission that began to reflect some of the changes we have seen in the world over the last 2 years. I think it would be best described as a transition budget. That is to say in November-December of 1989 when it was put together, it really represented only the very first breakthrough in terms of changes in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall had just come down.

Since that time, since those dramatic changes of a little over a year ago, we have had time to absorb some of the developments inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the package we are submitting to you today-which in effect is a new 6-year defense program-does in fact embody what we think are significant changes that can be made in our overall strategy and force structure, in keeping with the changing world situation.

The changes that are most significant, that clearly played an important role in our thinking as we prepared this plan over the last year, focused especially upon the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe. The Soviets are well on their way to keeping their commitment to pull their troops out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by

July of this year. They have agreed to a timetable for the withdrawal from Germany and are negotiating with Poland.

The second key item, of course, has been the virtual collapse of the Warsaw Pact as an effective military organization.

The third general category of items that I think has been crucial, has been the general improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations; and fourth, as part of these other developments, has been the ongoing effort to conclude an agreement on conventional forces in Europe and a new agreement on strategic armaments, the START Treaty. As a result of all of these changes, the President directed us to proceed to revise our military strategy and defense posture to fit these new, fairly significant altered world circumstances. That process was to culminate in a speech by the President in Aspen, Colorado, last August 2nd and was to be followed up with a series of briefings and speeches throughout the course of the fall when the Chairman and I, and others in the administration, would be involved in expounding upon what we perceived to be the new strategic requirements of the United States.

We did have one briefing. You remember, the Chairman and I met with you and Mr. Dickinson and your counterparts on the other key defense committees in the Congress and laid out a broad overview for where we thought we ought to go with respect to strategy. But that was on August 2nd. The same day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

In light of subsequent developments, we haven't had the opportunity to spend as much time talking about what we had planned to expound upon because we have been consumed, obviously, with the war in the Middle East.

Let me emphasize at the outset, adopting a new strategy does not mean rejecting everything that has gone before. There are a great many continuing requirements, enduring realities, if you will, that are just as valid today as they were before the changes we have seen in the last 2 years in the Soviet Union.

In general terms, the most significant shift from the old strategy to the new strategy is away from the matter that has dominated our planning for 40-some years; that is a primary focus on the Soviet military threat, a focus that meant we had to have sufficient forces deployed to deal with global conflict with the Soviet Union; focus on the Warsaw Pact conventional threat to Western Europe; a possibility of a no warning or short warning attack into Europe. That led us to adopt such strategies as the requirement to have 10 divisions in Europe within 10 days of a decision to mobilize.

Our military strategy for the last 40 years clearly has been driven very much by that need to prepare for all-out global war with the Soviet Union.

In light of the changes that have occurred, we think we can now place less emphasis on that requirement. Not that we can ignore the possibility of global conflict with the Soviets, but in the future, given the changes that have occurred in the Soviet Union and Europe, we can assume we can have a much longer period of time to get ready for such a conflict; that in fact we could reconstitute forces to deal with that kind of situation.

So the force structure that you will see us present today, that the Chairman will talk about in a few minutes, is driven much more

now than it used to be by the need to focus upon our ability to deal with what we describe as regional contingencies, precisely the kind of conflict we are now faced with in Southwest Asia where we are having to deal with Iraqi aggression against Kuwait and the threat to the Persian Gulf.

We still have to be concerned about Soviet capabilities. We are not arguing you can ignore the Soviet situation by any means. They remain the one nation in the world that has the capability to destroy the United States. That has not changed. We do not expect it to change. There are enormous uncertainties about developments inside the Soviet Union. That is a point I will come back to in a moment.

The key elements we will focus on in terms of developing a structure which we will lay out for you today, continue to be the notion that we want to maintain a system of alliances worldwide. There is no need to do away with those alliances.

Second, to give substance and meaning to those commitments, we want to maintain U.S. forces forward-deployed overseas at lower levels than in the past, but the concept of forward deployment still remains essential.

Third, we want to preserve in the United States the capability of dealing with contingencies and of reinforcing forward-deployed units with sufficient forces here at home.

Fourth, we clearly still want to control the world's oceans. That requires a robust Navy.

Fifth, we want to be able to reconstitute forces at some point in the future should that be necessary, should positive trends we have seen in recent months be reversed.

Finally, we have to maintain our strategic offensive and defensive capability in order to guarantee that we can defend the United States of America.

Given those broad outlines, it is clear that the world is significantly different than it was over the last 40 years. That is perhaps best captured in the old notion of containment. For 40-some years after World War II, throughout the Cold War, we pursued a policy to contain Soviet expansion. Today, when we think about the Soviet Union our focus is one of having to deal with the problem of a collapsing Soviet empire. That presents us with a radically different set of circumstances than we faced in the past.

We clearly have been encouraged very significantly by Soviet reforms until recently. Those moves toward democracy and demilitarization of the Soviet Union that we all welcomed I think so thoroughly in recent years, now appear to be in doubt. The circumstances, since last fall when efforts at economic reform appeared to come to an end in the Soviet Union, have grown increasingly bleak. We now see a situation in the Soviet Union where Mr. Gorbachev has resorted to and sanctioned a crackdown in the Baltics and appears to be prepared to use force to fall back upon the security services in the military to try to maintain order inside the Soviet Union.

We are now beginning to see a reversal of some of the trends in terms of human rights and freedom of the press and, of course, a