Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Contingency Reserve Fund Request for FY05

Federal News Service

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE

SUBJECT: CONTINGENCY RESERVE FUND REQUEST FOR FY05

CHAIRED BY: SENATOR JOHN WARNER (R-VA)

WITNESSES: DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PAUL WOLFOWITZ; GENERAL PETER PACE, VICE CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF; JOEL KAPLAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET

LOCATION: 216 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:
SEN. COLLINS: Mr. Secretary, we need to strike the right balance here between the administration's understandable need for flexibility and the congressional need to closely oversee spending. I recognize that the administration will be submitting a traditional supplemental request next year, but I want to echo the concerns of many of my colleagues-Senator Lieberman, Senator Allard, Senator Nelson and others-in encouraging you to consider either re-submitting this $25 billion request in the form of a traditional supplemental appropriation, or along the lines suggested by my colleague from Colorado. We really do need to preserve the important role that Congress plays. It is our duty. This is not a case where we're not eager to give you the money you need. We are eager to ensure that our troops have all the resources that they need.

You don't need this dispute, and I would encourage you to work with the committee to come up with some controls on the spending. We're very eager to move quickly, to give you the funding that you need, but I hope you will consider working with the committee to come up with a more traditional request with checks and balances in it, so that we can move forward without having this needless dispute.

MR. WOLFOWITZ: I appreciate the spirit of that comment, Senator Collins, and we will work with you.

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you.

SEN. WARNER: Senator Collins, without interrupting you, I think it would be nice to get Director Kaplan on the record.

MR. : (Laughs.)

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you for that admonition.

SEN. WARNER: Direct your question to Director Kaplan, please.

SEN. COLLINS: Director Kaplan, since you're representing OMB, which tends to play a very important deciding role in these issues, I would like to get from you also a commitment to work with the committee to resolve the concerns that you've heard expressed on both sides of the aisle.

Again, I want to emphasize, this is not a dispute over giving you the resources that our troops need. All of us want to make sure that we do that quickly and fully.

But we do need to exercise our constitutional responsibility, so I would ask from the-for the same commitment from you.

MR. KAPLAN: OF course, Senator, and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for giving me the opportunity to get on the record as well. (Laughter.)

SEN. WARNER: (Right ?).

MR. KAPLAN: We share Secretary Wolfowitz's commitment to working with members of this committee and other committees and members with interest to try to strike that balance between making sure the Congress has-can exercise its constitutional oversight prerogatives while still providing the flexibility that the commanders and the services need.

SEN. WARNER: Fine. Bear in mind we're on the floor Monday. So you've got your weekend work cut out. Thank you.

SEN. COLLINS: Mr. Chairman, I'm supposed to have --

SEN. WARNER: You take another minute.

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you.

General Pace, I continue to receive the e-mails from soldiers in Iraq who tell me that they still lack the equipment they need. And that is just so troubling to me.

Just a few days ago, a member of my staff received an e-mail from a friend serving in Iraq. Doesn't happen to be from Maine. And let me tell you what he said. He said, despite numerous requests, that he still had no long-range communications, only light armored vehicles, and the only ammunition he had for one of his weapons came from the generosity of a local Danish military unit. That really troubles me.

Do you believe that this additional $25 billion will be sufficient to ensure that our troops have what they need? We're sending them into such a dangerous environment, and I feel we have a moral obligation to make sure that they have all of the supplies and equipment and, most of all, protection that they need. Are you confident that the 25 billion (dollars) that the administration has requested will solve those concerns once and for all?

GEN. PACE: Senator, thank you. That e-mail, in the way you just described it, troubles me as well.

And in whatever way you think appropriate, if you could share as much information from that as you can with me, I would like to get directly to answering that specific problem.

Second, I am confident that this Congress has already allocated sufficient resources for that problem to not exist today. So if it does exist, it's not because you have not given us the wherewithal; it exists for some other reason.

You have, for example, when we identified to you the need for up- armored vehicles, more armor on them, when we identified the need for the new state-of-the-art personal body protection, all those requests that we have brought forward to this Congress, you have funded very quickly. So I am confident that you have already given us the assets we need to answer that question. But I cannot answer that question without having more specifics.

SEN. COLLINS: I'll see what we can share with you. Obviously, I don't want to get the soldier in trouble in any way who brought this to our attention, because it's not just one soldier. I keep hearing similar reports. And we do need to remedy it.

In my remaining time, could you please explain more precisely, General Pace, to the committee how you arrived at the $25 billion figure?

GEN. PACE: Ma'am, I did not personally arrive at that number, but I can tell you that it is specifically based on the numbers that Mr. Lanzillotta indicated, which is a current today utilization of about $5 billion per month combined between Iraq and Afghanistan, and our understanding that if things did not change, if, come 1 October of this year, we are operating exactly the way we are today-and that's not a known-but if it is, then that would take us through the first five months of the coming fiscal year in a way that would allow us to not have to reach deep into '05 to come forward with training and fuel and things that we would buy in the he fourth quarter to pay for the current expenditures at that time.

SEN. COLLINS: Mr. Secretary or the comptroller, if either of you could add to that?

MR. WOLFOWITZ: Senator Collins, it was intended to give us a very comfortable margin of error, which doesn't mean that we wouldn't be paying for some first-quarter expenses with fourth-quarter money; that, we think we can do. But we don't want to end up in a situation where we're paying for second-quarter expenses with third-quarter money and people start to see their accounts running dry, especially Army O&M, which I mentioned earlier. You know, sometimes people say-businessmen come and say "you've got a $400 billion budget." I mean, certainly that gives you a lot of latitude to move money around. But the account that is most critical here is the Army's $26 billion O&M account, and it's the Army, as we all know, that is incurring the greatest share of that supplemental funding.

So we need to make sure that those accounts don't start to run dry and the managers of those accounts start to say, "I've got to cut back on something that's pretty important because I need to fund something that's absolutely essential." We want to make sure, and particularly when it comes to maintaining the momentum of key Army programs, like the brigade restructuring.

If I might just make a comment reinforcing what General Pace just said: If there are issues, and there are issues, then we want to find them and fix them as fast as we can in the area of force protection.

In fact, Ron Sega, who is the director of Defense Research and Engineering, has a task force that reports to me on force protection measures across the board. And the Joint Staff has an Army-directed-or Army-led force protection effort that focuses particularly on equipment issues.

We've already accomplished nearly $2 billion-in fact, one billion, 931 million dollars, to be precise, out of FY '04 funding particularly for up-armored humvees, interceptor body armor. And there's another $720 million in process; in other words, over $2.6 billion, which is another reason why we do need the kind of-some considerable degree of flexibility. Many of those expenditures were different from what we anticipated a year ago.

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you.