Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on US Global Defense Posture - Transcript

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE

SUBJECT: U.S. GLOBAL DEFENSE POSTURE

CHAIRED BY: REP. DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA)

WITNESSES: DOUGLAS FEITH, UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR POLICY; RAYMOND DUBOIS, DEPUTY UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR INSTALLATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT; LIEUTENANT GENERAL JAMES CARTWRIGHT, DIRECTOR OF FORCE STRUCTURE, RESOURCES AND ASSESSMENT, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF; LINCOLN BLOOMFIELD, JR., ASSISTANT SECRETARY, BUREAU OF POLITICAL AND MILITARY AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF STATE

LOCATION: 2118 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:

REP. HUNTER: The hearing will come to order. Our guests this morning are Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Raymond DuBois, deputy undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment; Lieutenant General James E. Cartwright, United States Marine Corps, director of Force Structure, Resources and Assessment, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr., assistant secretary, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Department of State.

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REP. RICK LARSEN (D-WA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First a comment. I want to harken back to Congressman Snyder's question with regards to consideration of-I think you could call it countering --

MR. FEITH: Countering ideological support?

REP. LARSEN: Countering ideological support. It could be that Dr. Snyder-I could be rephrasing his thought here, but I thin the caution which he was perhaps putting out there was that we need to be very mindful of putting a new footprint in places that, to use a Cold War analogy, would be the equivalent of putting a base in the middle of GDR-that is, there's a Boston Globe article of June 12th that the staff reports sites about potential candidates in Africa can be Morocco or Algeria-of course Morocco has been a long-time ally, but it's also been a target. And so are we inviting something that we don't want to invite by placing our folks where they don't-where they maybe could be somewhere else and do the job just as effectively?

So just perhaps as a twist on what his question was about, just some food for thought, Secretary Bloomfield, Secretary Feith's comments talking about legal arrangements and so on, just from a State Department perspective do you see the end game with new countries for new bases, do you see those legal arrangements as (global-run ?) treaties or do you see them more as rental agreements, for lack of a better term? How does the State Department see these?

MR. BLOOMFIELD: Well, sir, I am not sure I can put a name on it. The elements will be the same in any case. We'll need to know whether our forces are welcome to come in easily to the territory; if they're bringing weapons with them, we'll need to make sure that's secure. We'll need to know that if there are crimes committed, which often happens with a large number of people-things happen-we need to know what the criminal jurisdiction issues are. We need to know what the taxation that might be applied to our forces might be. And we also, in the spirit of the idea of being able to train together with new allies and with security partners, and maybe prepare for an operation and go from there, we need to know whether coalition or allied partners will have the same facility to come into that territory and that facility and be just as welcome and on reasonable terms. Those are the elements that traditionally apply to some of our long-standing defense cooperation agreements or status-of-forces agreements. But just to make clear, what you've been hearing throughout the presentations, there is no plan to move huge new major bases further to the east or into new territories. What the picture that has been painted here is one that has transportation roots, mobility, the ability to join up with willing partners, and move to trouble spots, some of which we can anticipate, others which we can't. And so I believe that subject to the green light from the president we will find ourselves sitting down and going through a fairly specific set of issues in places where we haven't had those arrangements. And in places where we do have existing arrangements, we may have to sit down and take a look at whether the 21st century conditions for deploying forces are still compatible with whatever agreements have been in place for a long time. And so there's a little bit of that question as well. And so public opinion and parliamentary approval will be a factor there as well.

REP. LARSEN: Secretary Feith, I want to give you an opportunity to answer that as well and give us some thoughts on that. But I also want to ask a question of you, and if you'd combine or separate your answers, however it may be. Certainly I think it's accurate-when you said we're not going to build new bases, say, in some generic Eastern European country-I won't get into specific names-but is it accurate to say that we will be putting no capital investment into facilities? And the reason I ask that question-also relate that to the same Boston Globe on July 12th that mentioned a couple of African countries as possible strong candidates for new bases-maybe they were inaccurate in saying "new bases," but it still seems a capital investment-likely U.S. capital investment will be going into these countries. And I want to tie that to some of the concerns being expressed here about base closures, BRAC and so on. If we're putting U.S. taxpayer-presumably defense dollar investment into maybe upgrading facilities as opposed to full-blown new bases, those are dollars that are not going into perhaps bases here in the U.S. to accommodate people either moving back here or to accommodate additional missions being placed at bases. So, if you could comment on that, and then perhaps return to the treaty versus rental agreement question, I'd appreciate that. Did you get all that?

MR. FEITH: I'm trying to keep up. On the facilities question, there are three types of facilities that we talk about in our posture review. One of them is bases. One of them is what we are calling forward-operating sites. And the third is what we call cooperative security locations. And those are in descending order of the amount of infrastructure involved and the number of U.S. personnel that might be there. As I said, when we talk about bases we're talking about the kinds of facilities we have in Ramstein-the hospitals and schools and the like. We're not building new bases, and that's not what our posture review is dealing with. We are, as I said, we are stressing a lighter footprint generally, and we are maintaining certain bases that we have abroad. In Eastern Europe, we are not talking about new bases at all.

There are some facilities that we are thinking about in order to promote better training and combined training, so that we can get our new allies doing defense transformation in partnership with us. And we also have the thought that in Southeastern Europe, for example, we are going to be having more of our air patterns going in that direction in Europe-to the southeast. So having a greater ability to operate there, train there, train there in combined work with our new allies in southeastern Europe, makes sense. And so there will be some investment in new facilities in those areas to promote this kind of interest, but we're not going to be building facilities for our forces to go there in large numbers, and we are not going to be creating the kinds of bases that people are familiar with from our experiences in Japan and Korea and Germany with the full set of facilities-hospitals and schools and the like. What we are talking about are just the kinds of infrastructure improvements that will allow us to do exercises and operations, and do the kind of work that will really help, as I said before, integrate these new allies into the alliance.

On your point about treaties versus other agreements-we will probably have a range of agreements that we're going to need to achieve with our various allies and partners around the world. There are status-of-forces agreements that are relevant. In some cases we have them. In some cases we are creating new ones. In some cases we have to update or modify the agreements that we have.

I mentioned acquisition and cross-service agreements. We had the experience at the beginning of the war on terrorism, in the fighting in Afghanistan, we had the experience where countries were helping us valuably, and we were running up bills in those countries. And we did not have acquisition and cross-servicing agreements in place, so we didn't have the legal mechanism to reimburse them. And this was creating terrible embarrassment and strain in the relations. And with some of these countries, when you're running up bills of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is enormously significant for them, and we were eager to reimburse them, and we didn't have the agreements in place in some cases. And Secretary Rumsfeld said emphatically we cannot be in that position in the future. We should be looking in advance of crises and problems and military operations-looking around the world where we might want to be doing things, and let's make sure that we have the agreements in place in advance, so that when situations arise like this we will be able to treat our allies and partners properly, and reimburse them when they help us. That's another type of agreement that we need to have. It's not a treaty, but it's an agreement.

Something else that's very important to us are the kinds of protections that we get from Article 98 agreements relating to the International Criminal Court. That means basically a commitment that no American is going to be sent to that tribunal that is created by a treaty that the United States is not a party to. This is a very important question of the sovereignty of the United States and the right of the Congress to make laws for the United States and not in effect delegating to a number of other countries the ability to legislate for us. And we want to make sure that our people are properly protected and we have Article 98 agreements in place where we might have to operate. That's just an example of the kinds of agreements that we're going to be pursuing. It's not an exhaustive list.

REP. LARSEN: Okay, thank you, and just one final comment, if I may, and-I'll be quick, Madeleine, here-you mentioned earlier about some of these countries wanting us to be there-Eastern Europe and you're maybe thinking they may offer help on construction, help on this and help on that. I just-just-you know-don't get excited. Be conservative about what they might provide. They may want us there, but they have what we want-space-and so I just don't want you to be coming back to us in a year saying, "Well, we underestimated exactly what they wanted out of us, and now we're going to need to put, you know, more dollars forward to get what we need there." It's just kind of a pull back on the reins in terms of that a little bit. Thank you.

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