Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee

Secretary McHale, let me begin by commending you for the work that you've already undertaken to ensure a strong relationship between your office and the new department. I was very pleased to hear the update that you provided in your opening statement.

I want to follow up on concerns that have been raised by my colleagues about the National Guard.

As of April 2nd, I believe that there are nearly 220,000 members of the National Guard and Reservists now on active duty. In Maine, many of the members of the National Guard's regular jobs are in our police departments and our firefighters. They tend to be the backbone of the first responders in many Maine communities. Similarly, we've had a situation in Maine where a Coast Guard cutter which was working hard on port security in southern Maine has now been deployed to the Gulf.

Is there a concern that, as we rely more on the Guard in a conflict such as the one in Iraq and as we deploy—redeploy Coast Guard assets, is there a danger that we could end up actually weakening our homeland security? When you look at the members of the Guards who are first responders in communities all across this nation, and the first responders are the backbone of homeland security in many ways, and if you look at the Coast Guard, which has been so involved in port security, if we're starting to redeploy those assets, are we risking our homeland security in times of war?

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you for that response. And I look forward to seeing the results of the surveys that you are undertaking.

I'm also pleased to know about the exemption process because in some small towns in Maine, when the Guard member is called up and it is the only support for the police chief, it has been an issue.

I want to turn to the issue of port security and learn more about the department's role in that regard, and I'd like all three of you to comment.

I held a hearing recently in Governmental Affairs to evaluate the security of our ports, looking particularly at containers. We have literally millions of individual containers coming into the United States each and every year. And we used to look at container ships as marvels of international trade; now we look at them and we worry that they may harbor terrorists or the makings of a dirty bomb or a biological or chemical weapon. And indeed the testimony at the hearing was chilling in that regard. The experts who testified before us felt that our ports were our single greatest vulnerability.

They also told us that for years, containers have been used to smuggle in illegal aliens, drugs, other contraband. So there already is an infrastructure, if you will, that could be used by a terrorist group. There's also an al Qaeda manual that advises the recruitment of smuggling rings as possible members of terrorist units. So the combination of an infrastructure that's been used illegally for many years and the relative ease with which it could be penetrated by a terrorist group was cause for great concern among the committee members.

The Coast Guard and the Customs agencies are obviously the lead on this. They're doing a lot of screening and working with ports in other nations to station customs officials. They've developed new technology that is going to be of use. But it seems to me that the Department of Defense has an intelligence role to play in perhaps identifying cargo ships at particular risk, because the whole idea is we've got to stop them before they get to our shores. So, starting with Admiral Ellis, I'd like each of you to comment on the department's role in port security.