Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee - The Defense Department's Fiscal Year 2009 Budget

Interview

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REP. TOM COLE (R-OK): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Is my mike on? The light's not on so. Mike okay? Okay, thank you very much.

Well, first, Mr. Secretary, Admiral Mullen, Secretary Jonas, just thank you very much for your service and the job you do, and I must add on a personal note, as the sort of reluctantly proud Oklahoma father of a Texas A&M graduate student, thank you for the -- (laughter) -- wonderful job you've done at that institution. I had my first visit there to watch Texas A&M play at the University of Texas football game this year, and somebody asked me when I came back home to Oklahoma did I feel out of place. And I said, now, if I could be surrounded by 80,000 people hollering "Beat Texas," it just feels right at home to me, and you guys did, so a wonderful job.

Two quick questions, if I may, and I don't want to drag us too deeply back into the thickets of FCS, but I've got similar concerns to what my subcommittee chairman, Mr. Abercrombie, expressed about, number one, how you see things moving forward, particularly on one of the component parts, the NLOS-C cannon. I've got Fort Sill in my district. That's a very important weapon system regardless of whether it's integrated into the FCS. So I'm just wondering how any cutbacks might, in your view, affect the continued development and deployment of that particular system.

SEC. GATES: I don't -- we'll have to get back to you on that with an answer for the record, sir.

REP. COLE: I'd appreciate that very much, Mr. Secretary.

The second thing then -- not to take too much time -- I'm also got a concern about just any funding shortfalls with BRAC, and I'm very interested in how you see that process unfolding since we haven't really given you the amount of money that's been requested. Do you see any particular delays or problems moving forward?

SEC. GATES: Yes, sir. I would tell you we have some real problems with BRAC. Last year in FY '07 we had -- we operated on -- under three continuing resolutions eight months into the fiscal year, and the result was that billions of dollars could not be -- or could not be spent or contracted for with respect to BRAC until we received the entirety of the money in May. In fact, we only had -- as of May, we only had received 2.5 billion out of, I think, 5.6 billion. We operated under a continuing resolution this fiscal year for the first three months of the fiscal year, which further delayed the BRAC.

We have a -- the consolidated bill for the base budget for '08 -- correct me if I get this wrong, Tina -- is for about $8.2 billion, and that was cut by nearly a billion dollars. Now we have a statutory requirement to complete BRAC by 2011, and so I would say that this kind of goes back to the -- my answer to an earlier question about some of the difficulties imposed by the way that the budgets have been being approved and so on; is that this is one of the areas that probably has been most effective. And we are going to be -- we're going to have to work very, very hard to meet the statutory deadline for BRAC under these circumstances.

REP. COLE: Do you have any concerns, Mr. Secretary, along those lines that we might effectively undo the BRAC process by simply not funding it completely? I mean, obviously there's a lot of pain associated with that.

SEC. GATES: Well, sure, because so much of this is all inter- related. In terms of bringing troops back from Germany, the question is, have the facilities been built for them in Texas or some place else where they're going to be assigned. As you move these units around, as you try to consolidate, all of these things are impacted, and as much as anything in our budget, it's all a very -- it's all interleaved together in a way that if you pull the string over here you're going to create downstream impacts in a lot of different places.

REP. COLE: I just want to add for the record it also creates enormous problems for local communities that are trying to determine how to receive additional people that might be coming, everything from school systems to housing off base and those type of things. So it makes civilian planning extraordinarily difficult, too, and I know the communities that are receiving additional units, frankly, want those units to be well looked after and well cared for.

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