[House Hearing, 108 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
COMBATING TERRORISM: A PROLIFERATION OF STRATEGIES
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY,
EMERGING THREATS AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 3, 2003
__________
Serial No. 108-20
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
______
87-702 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 2003
____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DOUG OSE, California DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
RON LEWIS, Kentucky DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
CHRIS CANNON, Utah DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma C.A. ``DUTCH'' RUPPERSBERGER,
NATHAN DEAL, Georgia Maryland
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania Columbia
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio JIM COOPER, Tennessee
JOHN R. CARTER, Texas CHRIS BELL, Texas
WILLIAM J. JANKLOW, South Dakota ------
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
(Independent)
Peter Sirh, Staff Director
Melissa Wojciak, Deputy Staff Director
Rob Borden, Parliamentarian
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Philip M. Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International
Relations
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut, Chairman
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
DAN BURTON, Indiana DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio TOM LANTOS, California
RON LEWIS, Kentucky BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee C.A. ``DUTCH'' RUPPERSBERGER,
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania Maryland
WILLIAM J. JANKLOW, South Dakota CHRIS BELL, Texas
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Lawrence J. Halloran, Staff Director and Counsel
R. Nicholas Palarino, Senior Policy Advisor
Thomas Costa, Professional Staff Member
Robert A. Briggs, Clerk
David Rapallo, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on March 3, 2003.................................... 1
Statement of:
Decker, Raymond, Director, Defense Capabilities and
Management Team, U.S. General Accounting Office,
accompanied by Stephen L. Caldwell, Assistant Director,
U.S. General Accounting Office............................. 12
Gilmore, James S., III, chairman, Advisory Panel to Assess
the Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving
Weapons of Mass Destruction; Michael E. O'Hanlon, senior
fellow, foreign policy studies, the Sydney Stein, Jr.
Chair, the Brookings Institution; John Newhouse, senior
fellow, Center for Defense Information; and Andrew F.
Krepinevich, executive director, Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments...................................... 58
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Decker, Raymond, Director, Defense Capabilities and
Management Team, U.S. General Accounting Office, prepared
statement of............................................... 15
Gilmore, James S., III, chairman, Advisory Panel to Assess
the Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving
Weapons of Mass Destruction, prepared statement of......... 62
Krepinevich, Andrew F., executive director, Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, prepared statement of. 148
Kucinich, Hon. Dennis J., a Representative in Congress from
the State of Ohio, prepared statement of................... 7
Newhouse, John, senior fellow, Center for Defense
Information, prepared statement of......................... 119
O'Hanlon, Michael E., senior fellow, foreign policy studies,
the Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair, the Brookings Institution,
prepared statement of...................................... 102
Shays, Hon. Christopher, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Connecticut, prepared statement of............ 3
COMBATING TERRORISM: A PROLIFERATION OF STRATEGIES
----------
MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2003
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats
and International Relations,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher
Shays (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Shays, Turner, Murphy, Janklow,
Kucinich, and Bell.
Staff present: Lawrence Halloran, staff director and
counsel; R. Nicholas Palarino, Ph.D., senior policy advisor;
Thomas Costa, professional staff member; Robert A. Briggs,
clerk; Mackenzie Eaglen, fellow; David Rapallo, minority
counsel; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Shays. A quorum being present, the Subcommittee on
National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations
hearing entitled, ``Combating Terrorism: A Proliferation of
Strategies,'' is called to order.
Almost 2 years before the attacks of September 11, 2001,
the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for
Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, far more
widely and succinctly known as the Gilmore Commission,
concluded the United States lacked a coherent, functional
national strategy to guide disparate counterterrorism efforts.
In testimony before the subcommittee on March 26, 2001, the
Commission's vice chairman said, ``a truly comprehensive
national strategy will contain a high-level statement of
national objectives coupled logically to a statement of the
means used to achieve these objectives.''
The Bush administration inherited a loose collection of
Presidential directives and law enforcement planning documents
used as a strategic framework, but that fragile construct
collapsed with the World Trade Center on September 11th. The
brutal nature of the terrorist threat shattered naive
assumptions terrorists would be deterred by geographic,
political, or moral borders.
A new strategic paradigm was needed. Containment,
deterrence, reaction and mutually assured destruction no longer
served to protect the fundamental security interest of the
American people. The threat demands detection, prevention, and
a proactive, preemptive approach to self-defense.
To meet the demands of a new, more dangerous world, the
executive branch has promulgated strategy statements
articulating national goals for various aspects of the war on
terrorism. Subordinate to the overarching national security and
military strategies, other plans guide efforts to secure the
homeland, combat terrorism abroad, integrate military response
capabilities, combat weapons of mass destruction, stanch
terrorist funding, secure cyberspace and protect critical
national infrastructure.
A strategy famine has given way to a variable feast of
high-level statements of national objectives and tactics to
defeat the multifaceted foe that is global terrorism. Today we
ask how these strategies link to form the national
comprehensive policy recommended by the Gilmore Commission. Are
they dynamic to meet changing adaptable threats? Do they guide
the application of finite resources to achieve critical
objectives? And how do we know if they are working?
Just as reorganizing the Federal Government to
counterterrorism will take time, reorienting the U.S. long-term
strategic mindset will require sustained effort and hard
choices. Some fundamental elements of a fully integrated
preparedness and response strategy are not yet evident. State
officials and local first responders are still waiting to know
how much will be expected of them in the event of a major
incident. What capabilities in terms of training and equipment
should be resident at the local level? When and how should
Federal capabilities be brought to bear?
To help us begin our consideration of these important
questions today, we welcome two panels of distinguished
witnesses, including former Governor James Gilmore, chairman of
the advisory commission that has been and remains on the
forefront of the national debate on combating terrorism. In
future hearings, we will hear from administration
representatives and others to address specific elements of the
strategic bulwark against terrorism.
We welcome all our witnesses and look forward to their
testimony. At this point, the Chair would recognize the
distinguished gentleman, our ranking member, Mr. Kucinich.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]
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Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would
like to extend a warm welcome to you and everyone connected
with the work of our committee and to let you know that I look
forward to working with you in this session.
Mr. Shays. Likewise.
Mr. Kucinich. As you know, Mr. Chairman, we worked together
in the last Congress to conduct oversight over the
administration's efforts to secure our country against
terrorist attacks. After the awful events of September 11th, it
became more evident than ever that we needed a rational
approach to protecting the American people.
Officials from the U.S. General Accounting Office, who are
appearing before us again today, testified that the No. 1 step
in crafting a national strategy was a comprehensive threat and
risk assessment. Before we reorganized ourselves or allocated
additional funding, we needed to understand and to prioritize
the true threats to our Nation.
Mr. Chairman, on October 15, 2001, you and I joined
together and we were accompanied by our counterparts on the
full committee, Chairman Burton and Ranking Member Waxman, and
the four of us signed a letter to President Bush. We urged the
President to conduct exactly this type of assessment. In the
spirit of bipartisanship, we moved forward and asked the
President to use the opportunity of Governor Ridge's
appointment to carefully examine all the threats we face.
Unfortunately, President Bush was not responsive in regard
to our request. He did not respond to the committee. The
administration moved ahead with the new Department of Homeland
Security and produced a new budget, all without taking the
initial step of completing a comprehensive threat, risk, and
vulnerability assessment.
What is the result of this? Today's hearing is aptly
entitled, ``A Proliferation of Strategies.'' The administration
has been proliferating national security strategies, nearly a
dozen by my count, without any logical or demonstrable sense of
priorities.
This lack of logic and the lack of priorities is
exemplified by the administration's push for a preemptive
attack on Iraq. The administration has not been able to make
any kind of a credible connection between Iraq and al Qaeda
with regard to September 11th, nor has the administration
produced credible evidence connecting Iraq and September 11th.
Yet the administration is moving ahead with the preemptive war
despite the fact that Iraq poses no imminent threat to the
United States.
This rush to war, in the face of international opposition,
threatens to alienate the United States from the international
community at the very moment we need international cooperation
to root out terror. By pushing our Nation and the world to the
verge of a historic preemptive attack, we are making America
far more dangerous as a place to live.
I would suggest that whatever strategies we are discussing
here must take into account the impact of any preemptive action
by the United States against Iraq, because it's quite likely
that such action, according to reports I've heard, Mr.
Chairman, from the FBI that were published in the New York
Times, it's quite likely such action could result in more
terrorist attacks being directed against this country. So
that's why it's important we have this hearing.
This weekend's capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the
suspected mastermind behind numerous al Qaeda attacks by
Pakistan, the capture that was effected with the help of
Pakistan, once again demonstrates the great importance of
international coalitions and cooperation in our ongoing efforts
to root out the terrorists. The administration's rush to a
historic preemptive war against Iraq, I believe, threatens to
isolate our country and alienate allies that we need in our
efforts to disrupt, capture, and dismantle the al Qaeda
network.
I thank the Chair.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Dennis J. Kucinich
follows:]
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Mr. Shays. At this time, the Chair would recognize Mr.
Janklow, former Governor of South Dakota, and then we will
recognize Mr. Murphy from Pennsylvania. This is our first
hearing and we're delighted to welcome both of them. Mr.
Janklow, you have the floor.
Mr. Janklow. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much. And I am
going to be very brief in my comments.
As I had an opportunity to review the strategies that were
put forth by staff, I believe there were eight in number, it
becomes really clear as it's been suggested, that we have had a
proliferation of strategies enunciated and, at the same time,
they are interrelated in certain respects, overlapping in
certain respects. What I think we do lack is one clear overall
strategy.
Now that's really not surprising. Notwithstanding political
comments any of us want to make, this President was President
for 9 months when the World Trade Center was attacked and we
were subjected to the greatest terrorist attack in the history
of this country. As a matter of fact, I believe it was the War
of 1812 the last time that America, in a substantive way, had
enemy soldiers within our borders operating.
Be that as it may, this administration inherited no
strategic plans at all; that occasionally cruise missiles would
be launched against some site in Afghanistan at an empty camp
to enunciate some kind of announcement. But other than that,
there really wasn't any clear cohesive strategy. But the
important thing is now we have thousands of dead people. We
have enormous damage to individuals' lives, survivors' lives.
We have trauma the likes of which this country has never known
before. We have untold damage to our economy totaling in the
hundreds of billions of dollars. And terrorists have figured
out they have the ability to bring America virtually to a
standstill.
Five or six anthrax letters stopped the U.S. Postal
Service, and, for all practical purposes, most of the
governments in America, from being able to function for a
period of time. The airlines were shut down. America's economy,
for all practical purposes, was shut down.
And so, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to your leadership and
working with you and the other Members of the Congress, the
administration, and the American people to do what we can to
come up with an overall program, laying out the road map in a
very clear--in very enunciated ways, specifically setting forth
what it is that we are trying to accomplish and the objectives
by which we mean to accomplish that.
I realize when I say that, it is not unlike a play book for
a football game; that you go into the football game with a play
book and by the time the second play is called, the other team
intercepts your ball and your play book is back to the drawing
board for modification.
But we in this country have about 18,000 law enforcement
units that have never before had to work together in an
absolutely coordinated way. In my State of South Dakota, which
is one of the least populated in the Union and one of the
largest--as I tell people in my congressional district, it is
just slightly smaller than Great Britain in terms of size; we
have 534 fire departments within the State of South Dakota,
over 250 of which are in communities of less than 1,000 people.
So we can begin to understand the magnitude on a national scale
of what it is that we have to deal with and how we have to
address it.
So, Mr. Chairman, I am pleased that you have been selected
to be our chairman, with respect to this subcommittee, and look
forward to working with you and others as we move forward to
try and get accomplishments done at the speed of light to
better protect and secure the American people in this country.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
At this time we will call on Mr. Murphy from Pennsylvania.
Mr. Murphy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I first of all commend
you for calling this hearing. It is very important that if
there's anything that the Government Reform Committee should be
doing during this time, it is looking at ways to reform our
strategies on national security; to make them more efficient,
both in local emergency services, as Congressman Janklow just
alluded, but also at the State and national level. We have to
be united in our message, united in our strategy, and then
united in our means of implementing that strategy during a time
when people will--and certainly the terrorists will look for
ways to divide us. They are counting on our short memory of
events, although they are burned in our memories forever. They
are counting on Americans to be fickle about their memories and
counting on us to be divisive in our politics as they watch the
news, and they mistake freedom of speech for disunity.
There may be times when this committee and other committees
may have people who do not agree, but I want them to also know
a message that as we iron out ways of making these strategies
more efficient, as we'll hear from testimony today, these are
geared toward working in a united way to take care of these
problems quickly and efficiently. So I look forward to the
hearing, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman.
We will call our first panel. Our panel is Mr. Raymond
Decker, Director, Defense Capabilities and Management Team,
U.S. General Accounting Office, accompanied by Stephen
Caldwell, Assistant Director of Defense Capabilities and
Management. As is our practice, we will ask you gentlemen to
stand and we will swear you in.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentlemen. Note for the record that
our witnesses have responded in the affirmative. I think we
only have one statement. That's from you Mr. Decker, correct?
Mr. Decker. That's correct.
Mr. Shays. And just let the record note, Mr. Decker, we
have worked with you for many years and we appreciate very
sincerely the work of the GAO and specifically your work. Thank
you very much. And, Mr. Caldwell, nice to have you here as
well.
I am going to put the clock for 5 and rotate it another 5,
so you will have 10, and we will go from there.
STATEMENT OF RAYMOND DECKER, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE CAPABILITIES AND
MANAGEMENT TEAM, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE, ACCOMPANIED BY
STEPHEN L. CALDWELL, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, U.S. GENERAL
ACCOUNTING OFFICE
Mr. Decker. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I
appreciate the opportunity to be here today to participate in
this important hearing on national strategies relating to
combating terrorism.
More than 2 years ago, in July 2000, GAO testified before
this subcommittee on ``Combating Terrorism: The Need for a
Strategy.'' We had just completed our initial review of the
Attorney General's Five Year Interagency Counterterrorism and
Technology Crime Plan, the closest document to a national
strategy at that time, and commented on its weaknesses. We
stated at that time, there should be only one national strategy
to combat terrorism. We indicated that additional planning
guidance providing more detailed information for specific
functions should be integrated under this one overarching
national strategy in a clear hierarchy.
At that time, Mr. Chairman, you were sponsoring a bill to
establish an office that would, among other duties, coordinate
a single integrated strategy.
A lot has happened since then. My testimony today is based
upon GAO's comprehensive body of work in the area of combating
terrorism over the past 6 years at the request of this
subcommittee and others. In our past work, we have stressed the
importance of a national strategy to combat terrorism which
should serve as a foundation for defining what needs to be
accomplished, identifying approaches to achieve desired
outcomes, and determining how well the goals are being met. It
should not only define the roles and missions of the Federal
Government and agencies, but also those of State and local
government, the private sector and international community.
Finally, a national strategy must incorporate sound management
principles promoting information sharing and coordination in
order to guide effective implementation.
Sir, I'll focus my comments on two areas, the current
national strategies and their implementation.
During the last year or so, the administration has
developed several new national strategies relating to combating
terrorism. This constellation of strategies generally replaces
the 1998 Attorney General's Five Year Plan I mentioned earlier.
We have identified at least 10 national strategies relating to
terrorism; 9 of the 10 are approximately 14 months or younger;
3 are less than a month old. As you can see from the chart on
my right, which is also on page 11 of the written statement, we
have attempted to portray the complex relationships among these
various strategies based on our review of the strategies and
discussions with executive branch officials. Please note that
the National Drug Control Strategy isn't shown on the chart
since its relationship with combating terrorism is mentioned in
only one or two areas within that strategy. Also, we are
unaware of any national intelligence strategy to combat
terrorism tailored to support all of the strategies, although
we recognize intelligence and related activities as crucial for
their success.
Overall, the strategies do generally form a national
framework for combating terrorism. Collectively they provide
goals and objectives on broad issues of national security and
how combating terrorism and homeland security fit into that
larger realm. In addition, they offer more detailed goals and
objectives in specific functional areas to include military
operations, weapons of mass destruction, money laundering,
cyber security, and the protection of physical infrastructure.
Although we have not fully evaluated whether the framework
these strategies form is cohesive and comprehensive, there are
some positive indications. The strategies are organized in a
general hierarchy; some share themes, and some explicitly refer
to the other strategies. They are more comprehensive in
breadth, coverage, and actions needed to combat terrorism than
the Attorney General's Five Year Plan. And consistent with our
earlier recommendations, the strategies include not just the
Federal, but State, local, private, and international partners.
Since the administration has not adopted a single
overarching national strategy to combat terrorism and has
stated that the National Security and the National Homeland
Security Strategy are mutually supporting documents, it's
difficult to ascertain the real hierarchy within its framework
that may complicate implementation plans. For example, since
different Federal agencies have a role in many of these
strategies, some confusion in setting priorities and developing
coordination mechanisms may exist without a clear understanding
of how the strategies are integrated within a tiered framework.
Therefore, we believe that a better defined hierarchy among
the various strategies is needed. One approach that better
explains the precedence and the interrelationships of the
strategies might be with a basic pyramid configuration.
Although some blocks might be of different shape and size, a
pyramid depiction is somewhat easier to understand for all
participants.
For example, might the National Security Strategy of the
United States occupy the top-most position on the pyramid and
perhaps the National Homeland Security Strategy and National
Strategy to Combat Terrorism sharing a tier below.
Mr. Chairman, allow me to briefly comment on
implementation. These national strategies, individually or
collectively, no matter how well crafted, will not prevent
terrorism. However, these documents when implemented through
intergovernmental, interagency, and international programs that
are seamlessly integrated, effectively coordinated,
appropriately resourced, and smartly led will make the
difference in the war on terrorism. While these strategies must
direct and guide programs, it should be noted that the
strategies reflect a host of preexisting initiatives that must
be reviewed to ensure proper focus and alignment with newly
established goals, objectives, and actions. A critical element
for successful implementation is the need for clearly defined
roles and responsibilities for all players. If the Federal,
State, local, private, and international participants have a
thorough understanding of the roles, responsibilities, and
capabilities of all involved, then coordination through
established mechanisms is greatly facilitated. Finally, leaders
at all levels must ensure that the implementation process is
effectively and efficiently carried out to achieve goals and
objectives within the time line set. Using essential tools like
risk management to guide decisionmaking and performance
indicators to gauge progress, leaders will be better able to
focus attention and adjust resources to move closer to goals
and end states.
Due to the serious consequences of failure, GAO has
designated the implementation of homeland security as a high-
risk Federal area. This is a product that clearly delineates
that challenge. Sir, the leadership challenge is daunting but
not impossible.
In closing, we believe the framework formed by these
strategies, if effectively implemented with the full
involvement and commitment of all partners, will result in
significant progress toward our stated goals on the war on
terrorism. Congress will play an increasingly important role in
addressing the challenges facing this process. In addition to
recently passed legislation, reorganizing the Federal
Government to combat terrorism, and the appropriation of
significant funds to support the war on terrorism, Congress
will need to provide keen oversight through hearings like today
to ensure all programs are well designed, developed, and
executed to accomplish the national goals. Our success on
terrorism depends on the leadership and actions of the Federal
Government and its domestic and international partners.
Sir, this concludes my prepared statement and I will be
pleased to respond to any questions.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much, Mr. Decker.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Decker follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Just for the benefit of new Members here--and
first let me welcome Congressman Chris Bell from Texas, a new
member to the committee. We are delighted that you are a member
of this committee. I think you will find the work of this
committee quite meaningful and helpful to your district and our
country. At this time, Mr. Bell, I would be happy to recognize
if you would like to make an opening statement.
Mr. Bell. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I very much
appreciate the opportunity to serve with you on this committee.
And I thank you for calling this hearing on what has obviously
become one of our Nation's top priorities, finding a way to
combat terrorism and securing the homeland. And I would like to
thank Mr. Decker and the others who will be testifying here
today and offer themselves to answer our questions.
I have some questions about the plan, but I will hold off
on those until it becomes my time, but I thank you for the
opportunity. And thanks for your welcoming remarks as well.
Mr. Shays. What we usually do in this committee is 10
minutes if we have two or three members. But what we'll do is
first do a 5-minute round and then we'll come back and if
someone needs to go over the 5 minutes or wants to do a second
round, we'll do another round. And I have a rusty staff that
didn't turn on the clock for you, Mr. Decker, but don't blame
the clock. So here we go. Mr. Decker, I want to ask you to
describe in very short terms why a strategy is important.
Mr. Decker. Sir, very simply, this strategy is the
foundation piece in which you can go and implement particular
plans and actions and make sure that they achieve some type of
end state. I have used strategies, and I think most
professionals will look at them as road maps or concept papers,
that give you an idea of what has to be accomplished, what is
in the Nation's best interest, and, in a general way, how to go
about doing that.
So if you have a good strategy, you're off to a good start,
because from that you can derive many other vehicles and tools
that will help you do what you need to do.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. You have come before this committee
before September 11th, as have all three commissions dealing
with terrorism. And all three, the Gilmore, the Bremmer, the
Hart-Rudman Commission, made these three points. They said
there's a new threat out there. They said you need to develop a
new strategy. And then they said that you need to reorganize
your government accordingly. And I think the only area they
disagreed was on the reorganization of government.
When we encountered an ally in the Soviet Union--former
ally of the Soviet Union becoming our enemy, they wanted to
destroy us politically, socially, economically, as well as
militarily, we brought people in and President Truman and then
President Eisenhower--but with President Eisenhower, he brought
them into the White House; and it was basically called the
Solarium Project, and they developed the fact that we needed a
new strategy which was basically one of containment and
reactive and mutually assured destruction.
You accept the fact that strategy is no longer viable with
today's threat?
Mr. Decker. Sir, it's difficult to answer. I don't think
we've done----
Mr. Shays. I am not asking you what it should be. It's not
difficult to answer. Is that old strategy going to be effective
against this war on terrorism? This isn't a trick question.
Mr. Decker. No, sir. I understand----
Mr. Shays. Let me put it this way. Do you agree with all
three Commissions that said we needed a new strategy?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir.
Mr. Shays. So the answer is, so the old strategy doesn't
work; correct?
Mr. Decker. The old strategy may not be as applicable
today.
Mr. Shays. Would you walk me through--you have eight
strategies, it seems to me, not--you have nine strategies not
eight, unless I'm misreading it. And I would like to know--you
have the National Security Strategy of the United States. Would
you be able to articulate that in a fairly coherent way, as to
what that is?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir. The National Security Strategy of the
United States would be the top-most policy-driven piece that
explains what's most important about this Nation's security
from the international standpoint, from an economic standpoint,
and from a democratic standpoint. It covers all those aspects
of what has to be addressed to ensure our security for our way
of life.
Mr. Shays. Now you blocked it out in the same size as the
National Strategy for Homeland Security. Is it equal to or
supersede the National Strategy for Homeland Security?
Mr. Decker. Sir, that issue came--it's confusing to us
based on our reading of the document, the Homeland Security
Strategy, which states that the National Security Strategy and
the National Homeland Security Strategy are mutually supporting
documents and represent the top-most tier of the strategies. In
contrast, our sense would be that there's only one National
Security Strategy for the United States and that encompasses
many issues, to include the threats we have from terrorism, and
that the Homeland Security Strategy and the National Strategy
for Combating Terrorism would be the two component pieces that
deal with the problems of terrorism. And so our position is
that it is confusing.
If it's confusing to us, and we happen to have done quite a
bit of work on this, it might be confusing to other agencies,
international partners, and so on as they start to look at
specific goals and objectives.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Mr. Kucinich, we are going to do the 5-minute rule the
first pass and 10 the second, and you have the floor.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Decker as you stated, there are perhaps 10 national
strategies, more or less, each with overlapping and
interrelated functions and each with a set of priorities. I'm
concerned about the administration's conception of
prioritization, however. The strategy has described many broad
goals as priorities, but the strategies really don't involve
any comparison. This is a priority, that's a priority,
everything's a priority. But the process of prioritization
means picking which comes first. It means choosing where the
money will go. Is that not correct?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir. Strategy should help guide where you
put resources against specific issues.
Mr. Kucinich. Let me expand on this, if I may, and how they
relate. Can you tell me, from the text of these national
strategies, which is more important; for example, securing our
ports or building missile defenses?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I would like to answer that by saying that
perhaps the priorities that are articulated in the National
Security Strategy would be the big priorities for the Nation.
But when you get below into the specific strategies with
critical infrastructure protection, cyber issues, it gets a
little bit more difficult to determine at that particular level
which priorities are more important between the strategies.
Mr. Kucinich. Let me help you, then. We know the
administration is spending $10 billion this year to defend the
United States or to try to create a defense against a missile
carrying a nuclear warhead, while spending less than a tenth of
that amount to prevent nuclear material from entering our
ports. Isn't that right?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I'm not sure of the exact numbers.
Mr. Kucinich. But you know they're trying to build a
national missile defense on one hand and--there's a lot of
money going to that--and on the other hand, there's concern
about protecting the ports, and only a fraction of the money
that is going to the national missile defense would be going
toward the ports; is that correct?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir.
Mr. Kucinich. Now at the same time, the Central
Intelligence Agency reported in its recent national
intelligence estimate that the threat of a national missile
attack is actually less than that of an attack on our ports.
Are you familiar with that public estimate?
Mr. Decker. National intelligence estimate?
Mr. Kucinich. Right.
Mr. Decker. I'm familiar with some. I am not sure which one
you're referring to.
Mr. Kucinich. It's in the national intelligence estimate.
The Central Intelligence Agency states that the threat of a
missile attack is actually less than that of an attack at our
ports. They're saying the ports may require more attention than
building a missile defense that may or may not work 10 years
from now. Do you have any comment on that in terms of
priorities or how would you explain these anomalies?
Mr. Decker. Sir, as we stated in previous testimony as well
as the statement today, threat assessments should drive your
policies and your strategies. At the national security strategy
level, you look at all threats and you have to consider what
they represent when you're trying to defend against them. My
sense is that there are--not just the threat of terrorism, but
there are other threats that the government has to address in
different ways to ensure that we're prepared, that we can
prevent if possible some of these threats, and, if we're not
able to prevent them, to deal with the consequences.
Mr. Kucinich. For example, the administration has not yet
been able to make a case that Iraq represents an imminent
threat to the United States, but there's a lot of money going
into that, to a preemptive strike against Iraq; and on the
other hand, there's not money going for chemical and biological
decontamination equipment to our hospitals.
In terms of priorities, what's your role in trying to be
able to calibrate the priorities and compare one against the
other to see if we're actually putting the money where it needs
to be put in order to provide a measure of security for people
in this country?
Mr. Decker. Sir, we look at the strategies. We really do
not critique the priorities per se. We have to assume that the
government when they draft the strategy are using threat
assessments and other tools to help them shape that strategy.
And if they say that the strategy will have four goals or four
priorities and here is the list of those priorities, we look at
those in general way to ensure that do they make sense and is
the rest of the implementation driven by those priorities.
Mr. Kucinich. I want to thank the Chair and just point out
that in connection with this discussion that the administration
appears to be ready to spend about $500 billion in Iraq, but so
far there's only about $36 billion that is being offered for
securing our own country.
Mr. Shays. We'll have disagreements on numbers, but we'll
proceed.
Here we go, Mr. Janklow.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Janklow. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Decker, let me ask you, if I can, the National Strategy
to Secure Cyberspace, the Money Laundering Strategy, the
Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Strategy
for Homeland Security, the Strategy Plan for the War on
Terrorism, the Strategy for Combating Terrorism, the Strategy
for Cyberspace, the Strategy for Physical Protection of
Critical Infrastructure, and the National Security Strategy of
the United States--that list that was prepared--do you know any
of those that, standing alone, aren't important? You agree
they're all important.
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir. I think they have elements that are
in a collective sense important.
Mr. Janklow. Am I correct, sir, that a part of your
testimony was we're really not sure at this point in time that
we have been able to effectively tie them all together into one
comprehensive super-strategy, if I can call it that--I hate to
keep using the word strategy--or policy or plan or whatever
characterization you want to give; but we really haven't been
able to effectively tie that into one set of documents yet,
have we?
Mr. Decker. Sir, if I can paraphrase. If we looked at these
10 strategies, albeit the National Drug Control Strategy is a
very small piece--and this may not be the total list by the
way, this is what we have come across--they represent a
collage, if you will, on the government's attempt to deal with
combating terrorism from a very broad look on the national
level down to a more focused, when you are talking about money
laundering or weapons of mass destruction.
Our sense is that because we haven't had time--some of
these literally came out within the last couple of weeks, our
sense is they may not all be wired and cross-walked or
integrated in a way that, if you are that executive, in a
Federal agency or a Governor or company or a CEO, that the
pieces that really touch you, that you may have an important
role, you may not be able to tease that out.
Mr. Janklow. Two other things. One, we can't minimize, I
think, the whole question of drugs given the number of
revelations that have been made over the past couple of years
of the number of terrorist organizations that utilize drugs to
raise money for their purposes. So clearly that has a role in
this, No. 1. And, two, what are the institutional forces, what
are the philosophical forces that prevent our country from
sitting down and coming up with a master strategic plan that's
debated and then becomes the plan, albeit it may be modified at
times; but what's preventing us from coming up with a plan? Why
do we have to keep issuing new documents. There isn't any human
being that can follow all these.
Mr. Decker. Sir, I would agree with you. The National
Security Council, on behalf of the President, has
responsibility to craft these strategies.
Mr. Janklow. What is your sense that is preventing this
from happening? It can't be Republican-Democrat politics. Is it
the bureaucracy or just our inability to understand it? What is
it that's preventing this from happening?
Mr. Decker. First, I think it's a pretty complex issue. And
when you look at the partners that are involved, it makes it
extremely hard to craft, when you talk about the role of the
Federal Government, State, local, the private sector and the
international, and some of that domain you control and some of
it you do not control. And it becomes extremely hard when
you're, say, with a task force that's charged to build a
document that has the ability to accomplish--you know, to set
clear goals and objectives that are achievable.
Mr. Janklow. It wasn't that hard during World War II after
Pearl Harbor. Why is it so difficult now?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I don't have a good answer for you. I
think part of it may be if you look at the new Department of
Homeland Security, the challenge that Governor Ridge is going
to have blending 22 agencies, 170,000 people. I heard a comment
that one of the major issues with some of the agencies was
trying to determine perhaps what color uniform would be used by
all.
Mr. Janklow. God bless America.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman.
At this time, the Chair would recognize Congressman Bell
from Texas.
Mr. Bell. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I understand
that the documents that you provided us today are intended, or
I assume they're intended to offer a road map, if you will,
from where we are trying to go in this area in the war against
terrorism and overall national security. And in looking at the
road map, a couple of questions come to mind, some of them were
already touched on by my colleague, Mr. Kucinich, in terms of
port security. And I think, and I want to be clear that you
agree with the premise that--well, the suggestion has been made
that a terrorist organization would be much more likely to
smuggle a nuclear device into the United States via one of our
ports rather than launching some kind of missile attack. Would
you agree with that premise?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I think the Intelligence Community and law
enforcement community would probably agree with that, and I
think that is more realistic.
Mr. Bell. And if you take that into consideration--and you
didn't touch on specifics, but my understanding is that the
budget proposal seeks over $9 billion for missile defenses,
while seeking less than $1 billion for port security. And
coming from Houston, TX, where we have the second largest port
in the Nation, that's of obvious concern, and I am curious
about the reason for that disconnect.
Mr. Decker. Sir, I think the government tries to ensure
that the priorities are set right and that the resources to
work on those priorities is also linked. And this has to be
driven by threat assessment. I don't have a reason, an answer
to give you, why there's a difference between missile defense
and port security. Why would there be a difference, you know,
between first responder training issues, you know, and a
vaccine? It's kind of like apples and oranges, if you will, and
we are not privileged to understand some of the reasoning
behind----
Mr. Bell. Let me interrupt, because it's not completely
apples and oranges, because you all are setting the priorities.
And if you already said that port security is a priority--and I
realize there's not going to be a direct match-up in terms of
dollars, but that's a pretty significant disparity when you're
looking at $9 billion compared to less than $1 million, and
really looking at the same kind of threat. I'm sure it is more
expensive to develop missile defense systems, but that seems
like a paltry sum to be spending on port security. And when you
view a port like the Port of Houston, and travel the waterway
and see what a daunting task it is to try and protect that
amount of shoreline, it is obvious there's a tremendous amount
of expense involved. And if the administration is not willing
to make a more serious commitment to it, then it's just going
to go unprotected.
Do you see any possibility for change or for it to be
addressed further in the future?
Mr. Decker. You addressed one of the key issues we stated
before, in that there's going to be an awful lot of
vulnerabilities. Governor Ridge, in his new responsibilities,
is going to have to do a balancing act with the resources and
the people to address the various concerns that he will be
handling as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Above him, the President is concerned about many threats and
issues; and again, there's not enough funding, resources, or
energy to cover all the vulnerabilities to this great Nation,
so it comes down to making leadership decisions. Those have to
be driven by information. Some of it perhaps we are privileged
to know and see.
Mr. Bell. Can you touch on the coordination issue for just
a moment as to who is going to be overseeing all of this,
because that's a rather significant question as well.
Mr. Decker. You're talking about the coordination----
Mr. Bell. Well, all of these various efforts that we have
been presented with today.
Mr. Decker. Sir, I suspect the newly formed committees of
Congress will have direct oversight, particularly when you're
talking about homeland security. But when you deal with some of
the more specific strategies, they touch a lot of different
activities particularly here on the Hill.
The money laundering, I think the Banking Committee will be
involved with aspects of that. When you talk about the National
Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism, the House and
Senate Armed Services. Within the administration, this is--
again, the oversight on whether these organizations are
performing is probably going to be driven to a certain degree
by the heads of the different agencies tasked to perform the
duties under these different strategies. And the President and
his team will have to determine are all the agencies and
departments that are being tasked, are they coming together in
a way that makes sense. And they will report this out, by the
way, through their annual report to Congress on the results.
Mr. Bell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. It's not my attempt at all--I'm sorry, Mr.
Murphy. Thank you very much, sir. We appreciate your service on
this committee, and sorry I got so eager. I didn't want to
leave you out.
Mr. Murphy. I appreciate you noticing me.
Mr. Shays. You have an extra minute because I simply blew
it.
Mr. Murphy. You know, as I look upon this chart and as I
read the many parts here, I'm reminded of the book and also now
the movie, ``Gods and Generals,'' which featured a lot of
Stonewall Jackson, and he described his strategy with the enemy
as ``mystify, mislead and surprise.''
I have to think in looking at this, any domestic and
foreign enemies would look at this and they don't know how to
make sense of this system, although I am sure it makes sense to
someone, and I appreciate it has come out of a comprehensive
look of setting many, many goals to combat terrorism.
But just a couple of questions and we can get into more
specifics another time as to how this is done, but the key
feature I see in this is communication. Can you describe to us
how communication is set up between these strategies; for
example, same agencies, different agencies, same people,
different people? And I put that in the context of what we
found in post-September 11th and as described by the folks up
here, the difficulty in communicating between how many police
forces did you say in this Nation--18,000 police forces, it's
pretty massive--and how those strategies work at that
communication to improve upon that?
Mr. Decker. Sir, let me make a comment or two and then I
would like to ask my colleague Steve Caldwell to address that.
First off, most of the strategies are under the aegis of the
National Security Council and many of the task forces, the
working groups that were put together, and most--this is post-
September 11th although several of these strategies are pre-
existing before September 11th and have been readjusted to
consider the impact of terrorism. Different working groups
representing different agencies, departments, and sometimes
it's the same person that may flow between some working
groups--normally it's not--but there are some key members,
participants that are the same. And they are given a charge, if
you will, to work and build a particular document. Sometimes an
agency will be given the lead for the document, pulling in
expertise from different agencies and departments as needed. So
the partnerships that are developed on these working groups
vary quite a bit depending upon the issue.
I'll ask Mr. Caldwell if he can provide a little bit more
elaboration on that because some of these obviously are very
tailored and some of them are very broad.
Mr. Caldwell. Thank you. In terms of the coordination in
general--and this will address one of the earlier questions as
well--there's really two major mechanisms for coordinating
here.
On the domestic side, you've got the Office of Homeland
Security at the level above the individual agencies, you've got
the Department of Homeland Security now, interagency working
groups, and some of these interagency working groups actually
work putting these plans together. And then you've got at the
individual agency level lead agencies which then have other
cases where agencies would support them, and in a few cases,
for example, money laundering, there may be a little bit of
confusion about who is the lead agency when you've got, say,
Treasury and Justice both cited as leads in the National Money
Laundering Strategy. And that's pretty much the domestic side.
On the overseas side you have the National Security
Council, and within that you have interagency groups as well.
For example, they had a specific interagency working group to
come up with strategies here, the National Strategy for
Combatting Terrorism. Then, again, you've got the lead agency
concept.
Then you have the other partners, I'll call them. Those are
within just the Federal family. The big challenges, as several
of you have alluded to, on the domestic side is dealing with
the State and local governments and the hundreds of fire
departments just within a single State, as well as the 50
States and all of their subdivisions in the State and local
level.
And then, of course, on the international side, you have
the international community where you're dealing with other
countries, you're dealing with international organizations and
things like that.
Now, the key is to keep the international side of our
coordination mechanism and our domestic side of the
coordination mechanism talking to each other, and I think if
you look at the two top-level strategies for both of those--
actually, I think within the two plans there is a good deal of
commonality.
For example, in what we'll call the overseas strategy, the
National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism, there is an
explicit objective to implement the other strategy, the
National Strategy for Homeland Security. So I think those two
strategies we look at as the top-level strategies, one being
offensive and overseas, one being domestic and defensive under
the top of the pyramid, as Mr. Decker said, which would be the
National Security Strategy.
I'm sorry if our chart is a little bit mystifying.
Hopefully the enemy finds it that way. But this is how the
administration had portrayed those two strategies as being side
by side, the National Security Strategy and the National
Strategy for Homeland Security. But as Mr. Decker said, we see
the National Strategy for Homeland Security as being maybe a
coequal with the National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism,
one being offensive, one defensive; one domestic, one overseas.
And then the other strategies, a lot of them are really
kind of functional strategies within that. So we do see some
kind of hierarchy among these plans. Thank you.
Mr. Murphy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I yield back my time.
Mr. Shays. I want to just go through--and we're going to
have a 10-minute cycle here. I'm not saying that Members don't
have to use the 10 minutes, but I do want to make sure we cover
some things, and if we cover them--and I know my colleagues may
want to do that as well.
I want to ask you four basic questions that I want on the
record that are part of your statement. I want to know what are
the essential components of a successful national strategy.
That is one of the questions I want. I want to know are these
found within the eight Bush administration strategies to combat
terrorism. So that is my first question.
Mr. Decker. Sir, we would look for several key elements
within a national level strategy. Obviously one of the most
important things would be a vision, a mission statement, clear
goals and objectives, roles and responsibilities delineated, a
general scheme of how to accomplish some of this, and then some
performance measurement issues so that you can measure your
progress.
There also should be, when you talk about the mission and
up in the vision statement, a sense of end state.
Mr. Shays. What--I'm not clear whether you have attempted
to grade all of these eight strategies, and this is National
Security Strategy, National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism,
the homeland security, combatting weapons of mass destruction
national strategy, the National Money Laundering Strategy,
securing cyberspace, the physical protection of critical
infrastructure. All of these, have you attempted to evaluate
and give a grade of whether it meets the test of a good
strategy?
Mr. Decker. Sir, let me answer the question without grades.
I would say some of the strategy documents are well written.
They have most of the prerequisite pieces that we would expect,
and this is for implementation purposes.
The National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism is very well
written, has an excellent threat assessment linkage with why
you're doing what you're trying to do.
Mr. Shays. I'm not going to ask you with my time to go
through each one. I just want to know----
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir. I was just going to give you the
field goals, if you would.
Mr. Shays. OK. That is fair.
Mr. Decker. The one that I think I would send back to redo
or review would be the Strategy for Combatting Weapons of Mass
Destruction. I believe it is only eight pages in length. It
really doesn't do the issues that need to be done about the
principles. It does talk about some focus areas and the roles
and responsibilities. It is quite academic.
Mr. Shays. Have you seen--even those that are basically
classified, you've gone through these strategies as well,
correct?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir.
Mr. Shays. OK. I would like you to look at each one based
on how you describe what a good strategy is, and I would like
you to provide a document to this committee that we'll
distribute to both sides, obviously, outlining on each of those
tests how they measure up. OK?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir.
Mr. Shays. How will we know if the strategies are
effective? I want to know what performance measures are planned
to gauge the effectiveness of the strategies, and to what
extent is the absence of a terrorist attack validation that our
strategies have been successful?
Mr. Decker. Sir, a strategy by itself, as I indicated, is
just a document. It should have some pieces that would help
guide the implementation. The performance measures to gauge the
progress of whether you're succeeding against the war on
terrorism by and large, are still under development.
We approach the performance and progress against the war on
terrorism a little bit differently, and we would--we know how
hard this is for people to wrestle with, but if you consider
the war against terrorism or on terrorism much like the war on
poverty, or the war on crime, you may never succeed in
eliminating it totally. What you do have in the interim, you
have positive operational events that lead to larger positive
outcomes.
For instance, when you eliminate the leadership of a
terrorist group, or you freeze their financial assets or you
reduce the safe havens that they enjoy, you have accomplished
quite a bit that will lead to an even greater outcome, which
means perhaps less--fewer attacks of significant measure.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
In regards to--I'm basically asking a question that relates
to the first but are there aspects of combating terrorism that
are overlooked or any holes in these strategies. I'm looking
for the gaping ones, not the final ones, and you started to do
it with one response, but when you look at these eight
strategies, where do you see the holes?
Mr. Decker. Sir, that links back into the review that we
will do, looking at the integration to see where are those true
fabrics. When I asked the team to take a look at that, we did
not come up with any particular gap, except for the one on
intelligence.
Mr. Shays. OK. How can the NSC, the National Security
Council, more effectively coordinate the implementation and
oversight of the eight national strategies? Is the Office of
Homeland Security coordinating and implementing the national
strategies? Those are my two questions. Do you want me to
repeat them?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir, if you could paraphrase it just----
Mr. Shays. I want to know how can the NSC more effectively
coordinate the implementation and oversight of the eight
national strategies?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I think the first step would be to better
articulate how they all relate to each other and put it in a
way that everyone--from the Secretary of the department down to
a GS-7--can understand how they are in some type of precedence.
Mr. Shays. That's Congressman Janklow's basic concern.
Mr. Decker. Sir, that would be No. 1. Then once that is
done, then you have better success of trying to tease out
whether some of the implementation is really being effective
and efficient and how it's being done.
My sense is that--and my team, I give them a lot of
credit--they looked at all the strategies. They talked to a lot
of smart people, and they asked during one meeting at the
senior level, has the executive branch come up with a
schematic, a graphic depiction of this? And they said, it's too
hard. They had not.
As far as we know, this is the only depiction of how these
kind of hook together, and obviously it's not perfect, and it's
very confusing.
Mr. Shays. Now, the one strategy that you added, your ninth
strategy, is the National Military Strategy. So that's what you
added there.
The one area--I think that Mr. Kucinich and I disagree on
some statistics and numbers, and I happen to believe that
preemptive is absolutely essential. I believe that Iraq
represents an imminent threat, not something that's way off in
the future. But the area where we do agree is that before
September 11th we talked about what various commissions said,
and particularly the Hart-Rudman said there needs to be a
Department of Security. In that Department of Homeland
Security, when I mentioned it to constituents before September
11th, they said, what are we, Great Britain? It seemed like a
foreign thing.
Then September 11th happens. The President believes that he
can deal with this issue with a coordinator. A lot of my
Democratic colleagues and a few Republicans, and I was one of
them, said we need something more significant, we need a
Department of Homeland Security, and he ended up, I think,
coming around to where most Democrats were.
But the one area that Mr. Kucinich and I think had some
real problems was that while we knew we needed to reorganize,
we never felt that the strategy--the threat was properly
described. We think it was more on an intuitive response, and
that the strategy was never fully described, and I want to be
fair to Mr. Kucinich, but I think on these two issues, we
thought that should happen. The difference is I felt we needed
to get this Department moving, and I think this is still a work
in progress.
So I'm happy we have a Department, but I am concerned that
the administration didn't really state in a sufficient way what
the threat was and what our strategy was to then begin this
Department of Homeland Security.
I'm delighted you're here. I'll be recognizing other
Members, and, Mr. Kucinich, I'll start with you.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
homeland security, physical protection of critical
infrastructure and key assets.
Sir, do you see the quandary which arises when preemption
could actually be counterproductive to assuring the security of
the United States of America, our home?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I can only answer that the executive
branch, the President has a lot of challenges he has to
address, and these strategies do address significant issues
that the administration is trying to deal with.
Mr. Kucinich. I'm going to read from the National Security
Strategy: The United States has long maintained the action of
preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our
national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the
risk of inaction, and the more compelling the case for taking
anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty
remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To
forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the
United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
I think to have this hearing without discussing Iraq would
be inappropriate, because we are talking about a preemptive
action against Iraq, and if the administration--and I'm happy
to have any Member--I'll gladly yield to any Member who can
articulate a case which says that Saddam Hussein has nuclear
weapons, has biological and chemical weapons of mass
destruction that are usable, has missiles with the potential to
strike at this country, has the intention to do so, because I
haven't seen anything on the public record which indicates a
case for preemptive action, and yet the day before our vote on
the Iraq resolution, the Central Intelligence Agency in a
letter to Senator Graham indicated that there did not appear to
be an intention on the part of Iraq to attack the United
States. The New York Times last Sunday had a story that
indicated that a preemptive attack on the part of the United
States against Iraq could result in terrorism being visited
upon our shores.
Mr. Shays. Would the gentleman like to yield? I'd be happy
to jump----
Mr. Kucinich. Sure, Mr. Chairman. I have a great respect
for you, and I think that this would be an excellent
opportunity for a colloquy on this, because I'm having trouble
for understanding what the basis for preemptive action is.
Mr. Shays. Well, I think, frankly, it stems from a lot of
the work in this committee. We know that Saddam Hussein had a
viable chemical and biological program before the war in the
Gulf. We didn't know that he had a viable nuclear program, but
he did. We knew that he had a viable chemical and biological
program after the war in the Gulf. We didn't know at the time
that he had a nuclear program until we had a defector who came
before this committee and told us that our intelligence
community said there is no program and didn't accept his name
or that he was in charge of it.
We then discovered where the nuclear program was when his
two sons-in-law came to Jordan. They were debriefed. I spoke
with one of the briefers. We were immediately able to send our
colleagues the inspectors to those sites. They uncovered the
nuclear program. So we had a clear one then. We destroyed the
systems that he had, and then when we started to talk to the
men and women who were making those chemical, biological,
nuclear programs, Saddam became very belligerent. He started to
threaten the inspectors, and we withdrew them. The fact is that
he had one before the war, he had one after the war, and he
kicked us out when we started to tear out the roots, not just
destroy the weapon systems.
So I really think that the burden is on Saddam to explain
to us what he did with those programs and what he did with the
people. He hasn't done that, and section 1441 makes it very
clear he needs to cooperate with the inspectors, and he needs
to disarm. He has not done either the disarming or the
cooperation.
Just to give you another example, just finding the empty
canisters, the rockets that were empty, we had testimony in our
committee that made a point that you don't load your weapon
system with a chemical. You do it just before. Hans Blix
pointed out they were in a new facility.
I could keep going. I don't know how much longer you want
to yield to me, but our testimony before this committee was
that we know he has a nuclear program. Our allies know he has a
nuclear program. Our opponents know he has a nuclear program.
The question is do we wait until he actually has the weapons-
grade material? We had testimony before this committee that
pointed out the weapons-grade material is the size of a
softball if it is plutonium--excuse me, the size of a baseball
if it is plutonium, the size of a softball----
Mr. Kucinich. So you are saying based on that we should
launch an attack against him?
Mr. Shays. No. I'm saying that he is within months
potentially of getting nuclear weapons, and I don't even think
Jimmy Carter would allow Saddam Hussein to have nuclear
weapons. So your description to me is answered by that, but I
could go on.
Mr. Kucinich. Wait. But this is--and I appreciate the Chair
being willing to engage in this colloquy, because we need to
explore the ambiguities which exist. It is ambiguous that
Saddam Hussein has nuclear capability right now. I think that
actually it's less than ambiguous. He has no nuclear capability
at this moment. According to information that has been made
public from our own government, he's at least 10 years away
from developing any nuclear capability. However, North Korea,
North Korea at this very moment, North Korea is mentioned in a
number of these security documents, and North Korea has the
nuclear capability and is actually rattling a nuclear saber,
yet no one is talking about a preemptive attack on North Korea.
Mr. Shays. There's a reason.
Mr. Kucinich. Mr. Chairman, I think you're right, there is
a reason, and the point is that if we are able to use diplomacy
in dealing with North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, which
is rattling a nuclear saber, we can do the same thing with Iraq
which doesn't have nuclear weapons, even if they have a program
that might not be viable for 10 years.
I want to add to this----
Mr. Shays. Could the gentleman just yield?
Mr. Kucinich. Of course, Mr. Chairman. I think this is
important that this debate take place.
Mr. Shays. Our CIA didn't even know he had a program and
denied any program. It was not until we had a defector and his
two sons-in-law pointed out that he had a very active program.
It was--so your comment about the CIA suggesting or someone
suggesting that 10 years away, we had testimony before our
committee that said it could be 6 months away. So, I mean, this
very committee----
Mr. Kucinich. Mr. Chairman, I would respectfully suggest
that the Central Intelligence Agency, however its defects, is
vastly more equipped to make an assessment of the capabilities
of another government than would be a defector whose very
presence in a committee room suggests that there's some
political motive to his participation.
Now, I want to add this, and that is--and just for the
record, I think that the Chair has made a case that inspections
worked to destroy weapons, and that's actually what's going on
right now. The inspections worked in the past to destroy Saddam
Hussein's weaponmaking capability, and the U.N. inspectors are
working to continue to do that right now. And all that I'm
saying, Mr. Chairman, you know, with due respect, because I
have the greatest respect for you, is that this doctrine of
preemption, it doesn't appear that Iraq measures up to what
would be the basis for preemptive action, that they haven't met
that level, and on the other hand, North Korea presents a
greater challenge, and I would not advocate a preemptive attack
against North Korea, but I'd be less inclined to advocate one
against Iraq, because it hasn't met the test, which would be
the threshold of the national security doctrine of preemption.
And a final point here on this, and that is that inasmuch
as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had officials who
have indicated a concern that an attack in Iraq would bring
about terrorism to our shores, would create lone wolf attacks
inside the United States, then we have to make an assessment
whether this doctrine of national security runs actually--
calling for preemption runs actually contrary to this doctrine
which calls for homeland security.
And, Mr. Decker, it goes back to the earlier question I
asked you, and that is we are prepared to spend--depending on
the estimate--Lawrence Lindsey's estimate, $200 billion,
Professor Northouse of Yale, anywhere from $99 billion to over
$1 trillion for a war against Iraq, a preemptive strike,
occupation, reconstruction, all that money involved, and yet
we're not devoting anywhere near the amount of money to secure
our borders, our ports against the kind of attack which the FBI
says is more likely if the United States launches a preemptive
attack.
So do you have any comment on that? I mean, in your work,
do you get a sense of proportion or priorities or anything like
that, or are you just counting beans? What are you doing?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I really can't comment on what you've just
raised. I don't count beans. I look at issues, try to ensure
that these strategies make sense in the implementation, and
that they have the right component pieces to allow success.
Mr. Kucinich. OK. Now, I raise this point, Mr. Chairman--I
know my time is expired. I'll make it quick. You would think
that these strategies would be integrated. I mean, I would
think that's optimum, to have the strategies integrated. It
would seem to me that an integrated strategy said that if you
had to use preemption, that would then be in the defense of our
home; however, if you see the possibility that the use of one
strategy might run counter to another strategy, it's an
opportunity for discussion.
I want to thank the Chair for engaging in this discussion.
Thank you.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman for his yielding to me.
At this time, Mr. Janklow, I'd love to ask if you would
yield a second.
Mr. Janklow. Yes, sir.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Just to put on the record, we may be looking at the FBI
data slightly differently. The FBI data that I've seen
basically has said we will have terrorist attacks whether or
not there is interaction with Iraq, and that potentially, if
anything, they may just wait, but the attacks will still come.
We're not going to respond to the blackmail of Iraq, and I
just wanted to make sure that I corrected for the record the
number. I think it's very legitimate to raise some real
questions about the amount of money that the military action
will take, but the rebuilding of Iraq, it's very clear, the
administration said will be spent on Iraqi oil for the Iraqi
people. We are feeding them--the people have been starving;
giving them medical help--the people hadn't been getting the
medical help. And I just want to point out that expense, which
will not be small, will be paid for by the 10 percent of the
world's oil owned by the Iraqi people, just to make sure that's
part of the record.
I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Janklow. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, other members of the committee, I hear people
all the time using data to run figures around and the comment
that there's some professor that thinks the war--a prospective
war would cost $1 trillion. That professor must be in the
English department writing fiction and couldn't possibly be a
person that understands anything about the current world
events.
You know, some people make the suggestion that in the event
that there were to be a war with Iraq, that America is going to
be attacked by terrorists. I don't know what America did to
become the recipients of the World Trade Center incidents. I
clearly don't know what we did to precipitate the individual
that was coming down from Canada that was apprehended at the
border with the attempt to blow up things in our country. I
don't know what we did to encourage the individual to get on
the airplane and fly across the ocean with explosives in his
shoes so he would try to blow up an airliner. I don't know what
we did to precipitate the Cole incident where they blew up one
of our ships in Yemen, but maybe someone could explain that to
me at some point in time, and I won't be quite so ignorant on
the subject as I apparently am right now.
But, Mr. Decker, if I can go back to questions with you,
I'm really concerned about the fact that all these documents
are well honed. People that sit and write them put a lot of
thought and effort into them, but they do it in somewhat of an
isolation within the sphere where they're working, and they're
not looking at the big picture.
You know, it's going to be terribly difficult in this
country to come up with an overall strategy, because of the
nature of our Federal system, because of the nature of the way
that this country is structured and the division of
responsibility and how we operate. In any State, the Governor
thinks that he or she is the chief ultimate law enforcement
official. The mayor of the city knows he or she is. The chief
of police really knows it's in their department, until you talk
to the sheriff who says, it's my jurisdiction, and the State's
attorney says, no, you're all wrong, it's my jurisdiction. The
county commission thinks that they have it, and we sit around
complaining about the way the Federal agencies try and interact
with each other.
Given the fact that these documents are drafted within the
political system, where no matter what you do, someone is going
to pick on you for not having done the right thing, for not
having given the right emphasis to something, for not having
given the right focus, wouldn't it be helpful if this was--
there was legislation passed that basically mandated an overall
document, if I could call it that, an overall strategy, that
once it's prepared by the executive branch, then will be picked
apart, critiqued and analyzed by the American people, by all of
the various special interests, and by the Congress, so that we
can respond to it, because the way we're doing it now, we're
never--do you think we're ever going to bring it together into
one structure, given the way our system operates?
I realize that's a compound question, but I think y'all--by
the nodding of my head, you understand what I'm getting at,
sir.
Mr. Decker. Sir, let me break your question into two parts.
One had to do with what legislation is needed, to pull this
together to make sure it's integrated. The second part is
whether this is mission impossible?
Regarding the first part, we've not done enough of the work
that we have to look at--we know it's confusing, but where are
the true gaps in the integration of all these strategies, and
does it make sense to have one overarching national strategy to
combat terrorism with key component pieces.
Mr. Janklow. Do you think it does?
Mr. Decker. Well, I think what we did determine--I think
there's a merit to having one strategy. However, if you look at
that one strategy and break it in two parts, like Mr. Caldwell
mentioned, you have a homeland security piece, and you have the
overseas combating terrorism piece. They represent the domestic
and international sections, if you will. Those two component
pieces, in my view, could be very nicely crafted into one
combating terrorism strategy with, obviously, the homeland
security piece.
When you talk about money laundering, weapons of mass
destruction, cyber and critical infrastructure protection and
those issues, those are more functional, strategies that would
dovetail into not just those two combating terrorism
strategies, but perhaps even some larger issues. For instance,
the cyber--protection of critical infrastructure and the cyber
piece, you have threats that come from other countries, you
know, not just from terrorist groups. So that has to be a
broader strategy to deal with things that come out of the
National Security Strategy.
When I talk about a pyramid, this is not a pyramid with
nicely shaped, equal-sized boxes and blocks that would look
really pretty. This might be, you know, a hybrid, if you will,
of an Egyptian pyramid, a Mayan pyramid and some other type----
Mr. Janklow. But, sir, if we do that, if I can interrupt
you for a minute, if we have all these different structures,
how is anybody ever going to comprehend it? Who could pass the
test on what it all says and what it all means? Who is going to
figure it out?
Mr. Decker. Well, that's why there's a crosswalk that
hasn't happened, at least in our view, and that crosswalk, one
of the indications we can tell--meaning has this document, this
strategy, been linked into this other strategy--some of these
key goals, objectives and references to this is a support piece
for this other strategy, and we've only seen that in one or--
you know, a couple of the strategy documents.
There was one revealing anecdote that my team mentioned.
During an interview with a department, they were talking to a
detailee from another major department that plays in combating
terrorism, and the mention was, did you know about this
strategy which came from the detailee's parent department. He
had no idea that strategy was even being drafted.
Mr. Janklow. But isn't that always going to be the case the
way we're doing it?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir.
Mr. Janklow. So we need another method. This one has proven
to create a lot of nice documents, but they're not--they may be
interrelated, but they're not coordinated, and if people are
never going to figure it out----
Mr. Decker. Well, I'll say they're not integrated. That's
for sure. And if you have problems with integration with the
documents, you're going to definitely have problems with
coordination and----
Mr. Janklow. We talk about integrated working groups,
integrating working groups. Just the mere fact that we've got
to bring all these working groups together, you know, somebody
once said that God so loved the world, He didn't send a
committee, and this is what we're dealing with with all these
interagency working groups all the time. When one member of the
group quits and goes and gets another job, you've got to start
all over again in bringing people up to speed.
Isn't there a better way to do it? When there was the old
NATO and the new NATO, there was a Supreme Allied Commander.
There was a person who was in charge. The military is a great
model for this pyramid of getting things done, albeit they have
difficulty dealing sometimes with the Army, Navy, Air Force and
Marine Corps coordinating, far less today than they used to
because the decision was made to really integrate these things
into one operating sphere.
Please tell me, if you can, why can't this be done with our
National Security Strategy as it pertains to terrorism?
Mr. Decker. Sir, I think it can be done, and that's the
role of leadership, the President, the National Security
Adviser getting the team together and making sure that this
constellation of strategies can be understood.
Mr. Janklow. Without bringing in ego, is this a job for the
executive branch, or is it a job for the legislative branch?
Mr. Decker. Well, I think legislation of some sort may be
very useful in coming to closure on this issue. The actual
degree, the mandating of what that language would be, I think
I'd have to think about that. The pressure, I mean, through our
oversight, I mean, having someone from the executive branch
explain why this cannot or is not being integrated or what
would it take to integrate would be very useful.
Mr. Shays. I might say that the gentleman's time is up, but
we certainly will make sure that the administration is, in
fact, represented and testifies before the committee to point
out how they're going to be integrating these; all of them
being very important strategies, but how are they integrated?
And I thank the gentleman for his questions.
At this time the Chair would recognize Mr. Bell for 10
minutes.
Mr. Bell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think I share some of my colleagues' frustration in that
there does seem to be somewhat of a grab-bag approach to
fighting the war on terrorism. It's everybody's responsibility,
and then at the end of the day if something happens, where are
we to look? Who is responsible?
And I want to take just one area, one of the strategies,
and that is the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, because
in looking at the document that was provided, the public-
private partnership has suggested it will be again sort of
everybody's responsibility, the Federal Government, the private
sector, State governments, local officials. Who is going to be
responsible for implementing the National Strategy to Secure
Cyberspace?
Mr. Decker. Sir, let me direct that question to Mr.
Caldwell.
Mr. Caldwell. Let me answer your question. In terms of the
cyberspace, we have difficulties in a lot of these areas,
because we've created a new department. There are incredible
challenges ahead for this department, and the infrastructure
protection is one of those responsibilities that has now
shifted even within the Federal Government from the President's
Critical Infrastructure Protection Board to a Cabinet-level
department, and it has a division within there that would look
at those kinds of issues.
And the problem that you were talking about in terms of the
private partnerships, the partnerships with State and local
governments as well, I mean, these are just things we're going
to have to get used to in terms of the Federal system we live
in, and the sovereignty and autonomy of our State governments,
and the autonomy we give to the private sector, and rightly so.
I don't think we want to change some of our basic precepts here
in terms of what should be private and public in government and
what shouldn't, because of these other things. I think that
there are incentives, and government will use the normal
incentives it always uses to try to get the private sector to
do things, to do either taxation, revenue, subsidization, other
types of partnership that--to try to get the government to--or
the private sector to----
Mr. Bell. And that's fine. Let me interrupt, because that's
all well and good, but at the end of the day somebody has to be
responsible, and it needs to make sense, and it needs to be
logical. And the area of cyberspace, if you're to believe the
story in the Washington Post, and it appeared to be quite
credible, that appeared several weeks ago, the Department of
Defense is in the process of engaging in massive plans and
having regular discussions about the ethics involved in
cyberwarfare and mounting a giant cyberwar effort, if you will.
It seems that it would make sense that the Department of
Defense would actually--or would also head up the effort to
decide how to best guard against cyberwarfare in this country.
Those who are developing the offense, it seems logical, would
be in a pretty good position to also design a defense. Does
that not make sense to you?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir, it does, and, in fact, I believe in
the cyberdefense area, there are quite a few participants that
are in the Federal area, some in the State, local, private.
Some of the different institutions are involved. There are
national security issues. There are criminal issues. There are
terrorism issues. There are private citizen issues. I mean,
there are a lot of participants in that.
One comment I would make with what Mr. Caldwell said about
the strategy. When we looked at the strategy, there are some
things that are directed, and then there are some things that
are hoped, that are less--more of a voluntary nature, and my
sense is that when you're dealing with Federal, State, local,
private sector, international partners, it's a very delicate
walk between what you can direct and what you hope will be the
outcome of voluntary participation. I think that's one of the
challenges with the critical infrastructure piece and the cyber
piece is people have to be willing to agree with your strategy
and maybe the investment in those areas that they have to allow
for this comprehensive security framework. That's going to be
the real big challenge.
I heard this when I was out in California last year,
talking to an audience of people that were involved with the
port authority at Los Angeles and Long Beach. The issue was how
much funding was the Federal Government going to give to help
on port security. There were partners in there from the union,
from private owners, from the State, local, the Federal
Government. What came out of the private sector was, you know,
when we need to fix the security here, we're also going to need
to fix a lot of the infrastructure issues, because these ports
were built back in World War II-era, and the ships can't get
close enough. There are a lot of issues.
So it's very complicated when you're asking people to put
investment in for, in this case, security, be it cyber or
physical infrastructure, and there's other ramifications on
that investment, and it's very difficult for a lot of entities
outside the Federal Government to know exactly what to do.
Mr. Bell. While there's still time, I want to touch on one
other area that I consider quite important. Obviously, as the
Chair pointed out, I'm a freshman member, so I've just been
here a couple months. Most of the focus has been on Iraq. A
tremendous amount of the focus has been on international
terrorism, and I've always felt that we have a very reactive
government, and we tend to adopt this mindset that yesterday's
problem mattered yesterday. Now we need to move on to today's
problem and tomorrow's problem, forgetting that yesterday's
problem can very easily creep back and become today's problem.
And not too many years ago back in 1995, 1996, the major threat
to many people or many people considered one of the major
threats on the terrorism front to be domestic terrorism, fringe
groups within our own borders.
Now, as I said, I've been here 2 months, and I've heard no
talk about domestic terrorism whatsoever or any efforts to
infiltrate and to make sure that those types of extremist
groups are not going to be creeping back into the forefront and
doing the kind of damage that we saw in Oklahoma City several
years back. I'm curious, have we moved on? Are we just focusing
on international tier and threats from abroad? I understand
obviously there will be some overlap in these efforts that
would not only be effective against international terrorists,
but would also be effective against those types of efforts
within our own borders, but it does seem that an overwhelming
amount of the concentration is on terrorists abroad, and I'm
curious as to what that's doing to our focus here at home, if
you could comment on that.
Mr. Decker. Sir, recently the FBI has released a national
threat assessment, which we have asked for and the committee
has requested that this be done as well going back to 1999, and
we've not had a chance to review it in its totality, but if
it's a good threat assessment, it should have the domestic
whether they are the home-grown variety or farm variety threat,
be it from terrorism, in that document. My understanding is
that it is a classified document, and there's two versions, but
there's a law enforcement sensitive. We plan to review that
document to better understand is it a comprehensive assessment.
Mr. Bell. Just to humor us, if you all could start
including some of these domestic efforts in these overall
plans, that would be great.
Mr. Decker. Sir.
Mr. Bell. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much, Congressman Bell.
We are joined by Mr. Turner, who is the vice chairman of
the committee, and it's kind of interesting for me to think
that one of our Members is a former Governor and had that kind
of chief executive approach to his questions. And Mr. Turner is
the chief executive in Dayton and helped balance budgets, and
we're just delighted that you're the vice chair of the
committee and just would recognize you. And I think your wish
is that we get on to the next panel; is that correct?
I would just note for the record that last week we had--
this committee did have a briefing by the FBI on the threat
assessment of the FBI, and one of the challenges we have is
that--and I say this to you, Mr. Bell--is that it is basically
a classified document. It's not something the press can talk
about. But while some people are focused on Iraq and some in
Korea, we've got some who couldn't tell you anything about Iraq
or Korea, but can tell you a lot about the threat assessment
that we're dealing with domestically. A lot has happened. It's
pretty impressive.
At this time I thank you, Mr. Decker and Mr. Caldwell. I
think the highlight for me was the question to you on the
cyberspace stuff, and I thank both of you for your very fine
answers and for the committee's participation. We've been
keeping the other panel waiting a bit longer than I thought,
but it's been very interesting having you both testify.
At this time we will go to the next panel. Is there
anything I guess I should have said, Mr. Decker, that you want
to put on the record before we go?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir, if I could make one comment. I would
hope in a year from now when this issue is revisited, that it
will have been totally sorted out so that we are on an
effective path for implementation.
Mr. Shays. Guess what? We're going to have you here in 6
months, and we're going to hope in 6 months it's done. Is that
a deal?
Mr. Decker. Yes, sir.
Mr. Shays. And you guys will be pushing the administration,
and we will, and we're kind of the catalyst, and they'll do
their job, too.
Mr. Decker. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much.
At this time the Chair will announce the second panel. Our
second panel is the Honorable James Gilmore III, former
Governor of Virginia; chairman, Advisory Panel to Assess the
Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons
of Mass Destruction. That's why we call it the Gilmore
Commission. I think if you want to have a commission named
after yourself, you just give it a long title, and then they
just decide to use the chairman's name.
We have Dr. Michael O' Hanlon, senior fellow, Foreign
Policy Studies, the Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair, the Brookings
Institution.
We have Dr. Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment; and Mr. John
Newhouse, senior fellow, Center for Defense Information.
I welcome all four to the panel. I'm going to have you
stand up, and stay standing, because I'm going to swear you
guys in. If you'd raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Shays. Thank you. We'll note for the record a response
in the affirmative.
Mr. Newhouse, I'm going to have you move your chair over a
little slightly.
Dr. O'Hanlon, you can move yours over slightly, too.
OK. We're changing the batting order a bit. We're going to
have Governor Gilmore speak first, and then, Dr. O'Hanlon,
you'll be second. Mr. Newhouse, we're going to have you third,
and we're going to have Mr. Krepinevich be the cleanup batter
here.
Let me say to you first, Governor Gilmore, you have been
before our committee on a number of occasions, and if it hasn't
been you, it's been someone else on the Gilmore Commission, and
we appreciate what you did before September 11th, and we
appreciate what you're doing now. I have read the testimony
that was submitted that was available to me last night, and
this is an excellent panel. We're really delighted you all are
here. Looking forward to what you'll have to say.
Mr. Gilmore. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much----
Mr. Shays. I'm going to have you turn that mic on. Let me
just do what I said before and ask unanimous consent that all
members of the subcommittee be permitted to place an opening
statement in the record, and that the record remain open for 3
days for that purpose, and without objection, so ordered.
I ask further unanimous consent that all witnesses be
permitted to include their written statements in the record.
Without objection, so ordered.
I would say to the witnesses that if you want to touch on
any of the questions that you've heard, we forced you to listen
to the first panel but if there are some points that you think
need to be addressed, feel free to do that. Regretfully, some
of your statements are even longer than 10 minutes, so I know
you'll have to summarize, so we welcome that, but your
statements were excellent.
Sorry for the interruption. We'll start all over again,
Governor.
STATEMENTS OF JAMES S. GILMORE III, CHAIRMAN, ADVISORY PANEL TO
ASSESS THE DOMESTIC RESPONSE CAPABILITIES FOR TERRORISM
INVOLVING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION; MICHAEL E. O'HANLON,
SENIOR FELLOW, FOREIGN POLICY STUDIES, THE SYDNEY STEIN, JR.
CHAIR, THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION; JOHN NEWHOUSE, SENIOR FELLOW,
CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION; AND ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH,
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY
ASSESSMENTS
Mr. Gilmore. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, and I will
summarize, I believe, within the timeframe, maybe offer one or
two additional thoughts than are contained within the written
presentation.
Mr. Chairman, I'm pleased to be here with you and with the
others--not only with the other Members of Congress. Thank you
very much, gentlemen, for the chance to be here with you, and
particularly my former colleague Governor Janklow, who is an
old pal of mine. So nice to see you, Governor--Congressman.
Ladies and gentlemen, the September 11th, of course, has
changed everything. It seems to me like that much of what we
are doing and what we're thinking about and the way we're
evolving as a Nation is simply being driven by the September
11th attack. It certainly was traumatic and continues, in my
judgment, to be traumatic to this day, and as a result we're
dealing with issues we previously have not dealt with, and we
may even deal with them in ways that we probably--would be
different than the previous time.
Our reports--as you know, we have now four reports. We are
the official advisory body to the U.S. Congress. We were
established through the House of Representatives. Congressman
Curt Weldon, I think, initiated it. The Congress passed it. The
Senate did as well, and we're your official panel.
The Commission was accomplished in January 1999. At that
time there was no public commission involving this kind of
issue. We began to go to work on it. In the first year, in a
somewhat academic way, we established a threat assessment. We
called it a national strategy. We, I believe, appropriately
assessed the threat, and our most recent discussions have
confirmed all that.
The second year we did major policy work, recommending an
Office of Homeland Security; recommending the formation of a
national strategy; focusing on the Federal, State and local
involvement, not just Federal involvement; focusing on the
difficulty of intelligence stovepiping; and beginning to
establish, I think, the framework for debate. That was
presented to the Congress and to the President in December
2000.
In the year 2001 we focused on some major primary areas and
began to get ready to go to business on our 3-year Commission
when the September 11th attack occurred. This Congress then in
its wisdom extended our Commission 2 more years.
We have now completed our fourth Commission report. I
believe each of you has a copy of this report that has been
delivered to your offices. We are now beginning our 5th year
of--the 2-year extension for our 5th year of the Commission.
What are my opening remarks? No. 1, things have gotten a
lot better because we do have these strategies. I think that
the committee here is doing a real service to the Congress, to
the public, by focusing on the plethora of the different groups
of strategies and how they interrelate with each other and how
that bears upon our national security. But at least we have
strategies. We have the topics being laid out. That is a
judgment call in itself in key and important areas. It looks to
me like we're in large measure dealing with the correct types
of issues.
Our panel in its 3rd year focused our attention on the
value and the focus of State and local involvement within the
national strategy and how you engage State and local people; a
major portion on health care, which has been a primary focus of
our Commission through all of its 4 years, the importance of
health care in the health care system; the importance of border
controls and beginning to watch people going in and out and
maybe protect our borders in an appropriate way; the
appropriate use of the military, a very profound issue at this
time as we begin to key up the U.S. military to operate within
the homeland, an extremely sensitive and important policy area;
and cyberterrorism. These are the areas that we focused on.
What are the national strategies focused on at this point?
There's an overarching strategy for the defense of the United
States of a geopolitical position. There is a strategy to
counter terrorism; a military plan to operate overseas in order
to interdict and disrupt people who would attack us from
foreign countries; a homeland security strategy; specific areas
of weapons of mass destruction, a strategy for that; money
laundering in order to break up the finance for people who
would conduct these kind of military operations such as those
we saw on September 11th; a cyberterrorism strategy; and a
critical infrastructure protection strategy.
This is similar to the types of issues that we laid in over
the last 4 years. And all of the topics are beginning in a
rough way to come together in the appropriate ways. The trick,
it seems to me, is to strive for focus in order to make sure
that we come together to do the right things. I think one of
the earlier speakers said that we need to get to the proper end
state, and indeed we do. We need to focus on what we are trying
to get to with these proper strategies, not just simply saying
that the Nation shall be more secure, homeland shall be more
secure. What are we looking to achieve here? What is the
ultimate goal of all of these strategies?
One key, of course, is to continue to tie in the State and
the local authorities. Federal strategy alone will not do that,
although most of these strategies, I think, do make reference
to the role of States and locals within the respective
strategies, and that is certainly a positive point. But the
truth of the matter is that you have to have a national
strategy, not a Federal strategy, and that means that Governors
and key mayors and key law enforcement officials all across the
50 States have to be tied in and included within an overall
national strategy. We have to determine from their point of
view what they need in their respective States, how it develops
into a statewide program, how that interacts with their
localities, what kinds of equipment and processes are needed in
order to support that kind of strategy, how does the Federal
Government play that kind of role, how do you develop the joint
types of fundings, and then how finally do you get into
exercising and then measure the results of what that end state
is to be.
So, therefore, there has to be a compete focus on State and
local and with the Federal partnership, and that is the end
state that our Commission has focused on for several years.
And then I think we have to ask ourselves at the end, what
is the goal that we are trying to achieve here? Is absolute
security an obtainable goal? Is it attainable? Historically the
answer is probably no. This is not a unique time that we face
here today, although the violence of the September 11th attack
has created a trauma that only replicates itself several times
in American history. But we have seen the previous
assassination of President McKinley, and then so shortly
thereafter, only a few years later, the shooting of Theodore
Roosevelt at a political event, the shooting and killing of
President Lincoln. One might argue that was, in fact, a
terrorist attack in and of itself here in the homeland, the
Oklahoma City bombing, a domestic catastrophe of tremendous
proportions, lead up of other areas as well. But this is not
necessarily a unique time, but we now have to gain the
perspective to make sure that as we react to it and we put
together our strategies and programs, that we remember the
longstanding values that we have as Americans, and that we
don't impinge upon any of those.
And that primarily, of course, leads me back to the theme
that we very frequently stress, and that is the civil liberties
of the American people.
It would be so easy to strive for absolute security and to
try to persuade the American people that we are going to reach
for absolute security and to ask them to surrender all their
civil liberties in order to attain that end. Our Commission
believes that would be the wrong approach, and that the goal
here must be to gain the maximum possible security within this
country and then to tell the American people in a
straightforward and honest way that total and absolute security
is not possible; to get to the maximum level of security we can
reasonably do consistent with the values and safety of the
people of the United States, naturally spending a great deal of
focus on weapons of mass destruction, because that would be the
most terrible possible violation of the security that we might
have; but within all those goals, that we believe that the
eight strategies are a step in the right direction.
We congratulate this committee for going about the
oversight work now of determining how the eight could be
harmonized best together and work together for the national
security, but I urge you to think closely about the value of
making sure the States and the locals are contained within the
national strategy.
Mr. Shays. Thank you, Governor. It's a nice way to start
this panel. I had forgotten that Curt Weldon had led the charge
on this. He has been one of the heroes, I think, on the issue
of terrorism well before September 11th, and I'm not sure he
gets the credit he deserves. He gets a lot of credit, but I
think he deserves more.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Gilmore follows:]
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Mr. Shays. At this time we would call on Dr. O'Hanlon.
Dr. O'Hanlon. Thank you, Congressman and Mr. Ranking
Member. It is an honor to be before this committee on this
important topic on this distinguished panel. I really want to
just make three broad sets of opening comments in keeping with
your request that we be brief. I have a longer statement, as
you know, for the record.
Mr. Shays. I want to make sure, though, that you cover the
territory that you need to.
Dr. O'Hanlon. OK. Thank you. I do want to respond, and that
is to your--to many of the questions that were posed to the
first panel, and just give a couple of quick thoughts on the
issue of how many strategies is too many and what kind of
overall structure should we have. And I just have a couple of
observations.
It strikes me that you do need more than one strategy,
because there are so many aspects to the war on terror. And it
is hard to put all this into one document, and I fully agree
with Congressman Janklow's comment that if you have too many,
you lose track of them all. But if you have too few, it would
make, I think, for an excessively dense document that might get
weighty of its own simple detail.
And so what I would propose is thinking in terms of three
principle documents, and one is the National Security Strategy.
And that has to be the lead document, has to be seen as the
integrating document. Certainly in traditional terms that has
been the first document that has been produced before the
military has done its quadrennial reviews and its national
military strategies. And then below that, the National Military
Strategy and the National Homeland Security Strategy are the
two natural next pillars.
And there are certain things that are going to be left out.
Military strategy and homeland security strategy, for example,
don't give a lot of time or attention to economic assistance
toward developing countries. And we all know we need to worry
about the problem of failed states, rescuing failed states,
because they are a concern in the war or terror. They can be
sanctuaries for terrorist organizations, they can help provide
resources to terrorist organizations.
But that is part of the National Security Strategy, and I
think President Bush--speaking of people who don't get enough
credit, President Bush does not get enough credit for his
foreign aid initiative, the millennium challenge account, which
I think is a very good idea and I think needs more attention
and more reinforcement, because we need to hold out hope to
developing countries that they will be brought into this
globalization procession, and that also we will prevent their
territories from being used as sanctuary or sources of income
for terrorists. So I commend the President on that point.
I think there is more that has to be done dealing with
failed states, and I've got some of that in my testimony. But
the National Security Strategy brings in economic assistance,
brings in intelligence operations, brings in broader economic
strategy as well. Those things are not part of the military
strategy or the homeland security strategy quite as much, but
that is OK. You don't have to emphasize each and every thing
equally. At some point there is a tradeoff between having 12 or
15 or 20 strategies and having clarity. And I think the
National Security Strategy can provide enough detail on issues
like economic policy toward developing countries and
intelligence that we don't need major additional documents.
So again, that pyramid of three separate documents,
National Security Strategy, Military Strategy, Homeland
Security Strategy, for me is enough.
Mr. Shays. I feel like I'm in church.
Dr. O'Hanlon. And I will stick with the trinity theme and
go on now to my two other topics. One is on the issue of
homeland security and the homeland security strategy, and now I
am getting more specific.
Within this strategy I just want to make a couple of
observations about how well this one particular strategy is
working. It is so new, it is so important, and I think we have
to spend a lot of time looking at it in detail. I will just
offer a couple of thoughts based largely on the Brookings work
that we have done in the last year and influenced by the work
of the Gilmore Commission and others who preceded us with
various studies.
And first of all, I want to commend the President and the
Congress again for a very good start after September 11th. It
seems to me there were a lot of very important things done
immediately after the tragic terrorist attacks to make sure
those sorts of attacks would be difficult to be carried out in
the future against us; a lot of work on airport security, a lot
of work on bringing together intelligence briefings for the
President, a number of preparations on the biological weapons
front largely motivated by the anthrax attacks. And I think a
lot of that work was very good, but I think Congress and the
President got bogged down a little in 2002. I think the debate
over the Department of Homeland Security became seen as the big
issue. And it was a big issue, but it can't be the only issue.
We have to worry about our actual vulnerabilities, and we can't
wait for Secretary Ridge to, 1 or 2 or 3 years from now, when
he finally has his shop in order, get around to then addressing
vulnerabilities. We have to have a debate today on the homeland
security strategy and its specifics, what it does well, what it
does not do well.
I think what it does well is to try to prevent the last
kind of attack, try to prevent the last war, to use the old
adage, about military operations. You know, people tend to
fight the last or refight the last war. And I think we are
getting pretty good at stopping airplane attacks, at stopping
biological attacks. We haven't gotten as good at a number of
other things, and let me just tick off a couple, and you are
very well aware of them in this committee, but it is worth
emphasizing.
For example, private sector infrastructure. There is this
report that just came out that tries to be remedial and talk
about some of the things we need to do, but it is not nearly
enough. If you look around this country, there are thousands of
chemical production facilities which are vulnerable to attack,
and if they were attacked, they could produce clouds of toxic
fumes that could produce threats to population centers similar
to the Bhopal tragedy in India in the early 1980's. You could
have thousands of people die from chemical fumes if these
facilities were not well protected.
After September 11th, we did a very good job of trying to
improve security at nuclear power plants, perhaps not enough,
but we put quite a bit of effort into that, because there are
only 103 of them, and we could focus on that problem. But
meanwhile, you need to have a longer-term strategy for
protecting chemical infrastructure. We have not really done
that. So, the administration is trusting the private sector to
protect its own assets, but an individual private sector owner
or businessman, that person's incentives are different from
society's because the individual owner is trying to make a
profit, trying to deal with a competitor, and not very worried
about a terrorist attack against his facility. The chances of
that are astronomically low. So that person's incentives are to
compete with his competitors; but as a society, our incentives
are to make sure we're not vulnerable to catastrophic attack
against our chemical facilities, against the trucking that
ships a lot of these facilities, against a lot of the ships
going into Houston and other ports that are carrying these
sorts of chemicals.
Chemicals I just take as one example, but it is a very
prominent example, and one that does not get the attention of
nuclear issues, but probably should.
Another area within homeland security where we are not
doing enough is the area of bolstering Customs. I think there
was a great deal of good thinking done on Customs and the
container security initiative last year by Mr. Bonner and
others. A very good idea: Put American inspectors overseas and
watch cargo being loaded before it heads toward American
shores. The problem is we are not giving Mr. Bonner any
resources to do this job more effectively. In the 2003 budget,
there was no additional money, as I understand it, for this
effort, and in the 2004 budget, Customs is supposed to get
$60--$62 million more, not nearly enough for the kind of
broader, more rigorous inspection regime we need.
We inspect 2 to 3 percent of all cargo entering this
country. It is not nearly a high enough percentage. You don't
need to reach 100 percent, but you have to do much better than
we are doing today.
Another area within homeland security that is not getting
enough attention is the surface-to-air missile threat against
airplanes, and there has been a lot of discussion about this in
the last few months since the attempted attack against the
Israeli airliner. I think we need to consider government action
to help airlines either protect themselves with
countermeasures, or at a minimum help them and help airports
patrol the grounds around the airport. This is a threat that
has become very plain, and if those missiles had hit the
airplane and brought it down, I am sure we would be responding
much more quickly to what is a real threat around the world.
And so we should not be taking great comfort in the fact those
two missiles happened to miss by a small distance. They made
the airplane feel a bump. How much more of a bump do we need?
That's a pretty good impetus to policy right there, and yet we
seem to be waiting for the airplane to actually be brought down
before we make this a national priority.
One last area within homeland security, and then I will
wrap up on my final topic. Information technology is a very
important area to pursue and promote. As you know, Mr.
Chairman, there is some more money in the 2004 Homeland
Security budget for information technology, but it really is
not nearly enough, because today we are not able to integrate
in a real-time basis State, Federal, local, international
players into data bases that would look to try to connect dots.
We can share information on suspicious individuals pretty fast,
and that is a big improvement since September 11th. We can tell
an airliner or somebody else, watch out for this individual, A,
B, or C. That individual is on a terrorist watch list. That is
a good improvement. However, we are not able to process
information, the kind that we saw before the attacks in 2001,
Phoenix memos, dots that need to be connected to discern
patterns of terrorist behavior that may be emerging. We don't
have the ability yet, in other words, to tie together these
information systems in a large data base that's capable of
processing and looking for patterns of behavior.
So we can share names, but that is not good enough. That is
a very primitive level of information and infrastructure
sharing of data. We have to do better.
Finally, on another matter, and I will just stop here after
briefly mentioning the issue of preemption. And I know that
time is out, so let me just quickly say, the preemption
strategy is the national security strategy sort of benchmark or
famous slogan that went along with the national security
strategy last fall. To me, it shows that if you try too hard to
make a splash with your national security strategy, you may get
yourself into more trouble than you want. Sometimes it's better
if these documents are a little more boring and understated,
because I personally think the preemption concept is a major
mistake as an articulated matter of national security policy. I
think it's fine to find out----
Mr. Shays. Why don't we debate that issue with you. OK?
Dr. O'Hanlon. OK. I will just quickly mention one last
sentence, please.
For me, the problem is on North Korea. North Korea seems to
have been influenced by this strategy. At least it's one
possible explanation for the current crisis. And I worry that
stating the doctrine so plainly has actually contributed to the
crisis with North Korea. I like the logic behind the preemption
concept, but I'm not sure the U.S. Government ought to be
stating it so boldly and so plainly.
[The prepared statement of Dr. O'Hanlon follows:]
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Mr. Shays. I was trying to figure out why I liked you, and
then reviewed your bio, and you were a former Peace Corps
volunteer, and so that speaks well of you, sir.
Dr. O'Hanlon. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Newhouse.
Mr. Newhouse. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
opportunity.
Mr. Shays. If you could turn on your mic. Is it turning on?
The green light should do it. If it's orange, watch out.
Mr. Newhouse. I was about to say, I appreciate the
opportunity to offer a few thoughts with regard to this tough
and complex subject you are dealing with.
Mr. Shays. Well, we appreciate you being here, sir.
Mr. Newhouse. And I would like to make a few comments on
our government's approach to various sources of instability as
I see them since the attack of September 11th.
Huge opportunities were left in the wake of September 11th.
Stated simply, most of the world was ready and willing to
accept American leadership. We are all Americans, proclaimed
the page 1 head line in Le Monde, on September 12th, a
declaration of solidarity from a most improbable source.
In seizing the moment, the administration could and should
have set about stabilizing the most serious sources of
instability, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and Northeast
Asia. In the Middle East, they could have deployed their new
leverage to push Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organization into serious negotiations. Quite clearly, Israel's
Likkud Government expected exactly that to happen, especially
when on October 2nd, Mr. Bush endorsed the idea of a
Palestinian State. Two days later, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
warned Washington not to try to appease the Arabs at our
expense. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia, he said. The
administration listened. Regime change on the West Bank became
more attractive than taking on Israel's Likkud Government and
its allies in Washington.
Since World War II, the Arab world has been largely shaped
by transient passions, notably anticolonialism, nationalism,
socialism, and Islamism. The single constant, apart from
corrupt and/or incompetent regimes has been the Arab-Israeli
conflict, and a perception throughout the region and most of
the world that Washington shares responsibility with Israel for
the plight of the Palestinian people.
In his speech last week, Mr. Bush offered some hope saying
that, ``If the terror threat is removed and security
improves,'' Israel, ``will be expected to support the creation
of a viable Palestinian State. As progress toward peace
develops, settlement activity in the occupied territories must
end.''
Mr. Shays. Excuse me, Mr. Newhouse, I'm going to have you
move the mic down a spec. Just bring it down a little bit. It's
on.
Mr. Newhouse. However, Mr. Bush provided no specifics. Who
will judge whether the terror threat has been removed or
sufficient progress toward peace has been made? A skeptic would
say that if the recent past is any guide, Israel's Prime
Minister Mr. Sharon will make those calls.
On April 4 last year, Mr. Bush said, ``Enough is enough.''
And he added, ``I ask Israel to halt its incursions into
Palestinian-controlled areas and to begin the withdrawal from
those cities it has recently occupied. Israeli settlement
activity in occupied territories must stop, and the occupation
must end through withdrawal to secure and recognizable
boundaries.''
Mr. Bush also announced that he was sending Secretary
Powell to the Middle East to push for a political settlement.
Two days later Mr. Bush called Sharon and said: Israel must
pull its forces out of the West Bank, ``without delay.'' And
the White House appeared to support Secretary Powell's idea of
bringing the parties together in a peace conference. Then Mr.
Powell left on a 6-day trip to the region, and General Anthony
Zinni, the President's special envoy for the Middle East,
conveyed to Sharon Mr. Bush's call for Israel to withdraw at
once from Palestinian cities.
On April 9th, 3 days after the call from the President, Mr.
Sharon said that Israel would press on with its offensive in
the West Bank.
On April 17th, Powell returned without the cease-fire he
had been seeking and unable to secure a withdrawal of Israeli
forces from the West Bank. Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer, the White
House press spokesman, was stressing that Sharon was, ``a man
of peace.''
The tilt toward Mr. Sharon reached a peak of sorts on June
24, 2002, when Mr. Bush told the Palestinian people they would
have to replace Yasser Arafat as their leader before Washington
would support an independent Palestinian State. Without
mentioning Arafat by name, the President made his meaning
clear, ``Peace requires a new and different Palestinian
leadership so that a Palestinian State can be born.'' Until
then, Mr. Bush has resisted the Sharon position that no
negotiations could take place until Arafat was gone. Polls on
the West Bank have shown that Arafat's approval rating has
steadily declined in recent years; it spikes, however, when he
is attacked by Sharon. They appear to need each other.
Again, in last week's speech, Mr. Bush made the case that
regime change in Iraq would provide the conditions for
weakening terrorism and helping Palestinians achieve democracy.
I disagree. The case for and against attacking Iraq now is
complex. It should not be tied into the campaign against
terrorism. The connection between Iraq and terrorism is, I
think, tenuous at best. Most of the people I know who have
followed the affairs of the Middle East over the years would
argue that the single unchanging precondition for regional
peace and stability is measured but steady progress toward a
settlement of the Palestinian issue, starting with an end to
Israel's occupation of the West Bank.
If the United States gets too far adrift from reality in
the Middle East, the sole beneficiary would be Usama bin Laden
and his legatees if he is dead. Their purpose, indeed their
raison d'etre, is to divide the West from Islam, starting with
the Arab world.
In the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Government reacted to
September 11th by authorizing American search and rescue
operations on its soil, the transit of humanitarian assistance
and cooperation in the formation of the new Afghan Government.
In many Iranian cities there were meetings to express sympathy
for the victims of the attacks on the United States. Both hard-
liners and reformers denounced the attacks, and at that pivotal
moment, Iran's reformist government would probably have been
politically free to extend its reach to America even further.
The combination of sensible steps by Washington on the Arab-
Israeli front and improved U.S.-Iranian relations would have
further isolated Iraq politically within the region and, hence,
appealed to all sides. But the administration's failure to
respond and its harsh reaction, notably the President's axis of
evil remark, damaged prospects for beginning to repair a
bilateral relationship with Iran of surpassing strategic
importance.
Pakistan, a nominal ally, is the country that most nearly
fits the President's profile of evil. Two of its provinces are
controlled by Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers. Although the
issues that divide Iran and Pakistan have never reached the
level of crisis, relations have worsened in recent years.
Pakistan's heavy involvement with the Taliban is partly
responsible. It is a bone--the Taliban is a bone in Iran's
throat. Pakistan's Islamic schools, the madrassas, have become
training grounds for terrorists and other radical groups in
much of the Muslim world.
For now there may be little that the Musharraf government
can do about the chaos and anarchy in parts of the country, but
it can and should be held to account for its remarkable
decision to make possible North Korea's highly enriched uranium
program. Pakistan is known to have provided much or most of the
program, weapons design, gas centrifuges, materials to make
centrifuges, data of the sort that would enable the customer to
avoid having to test its devices. The two-way traffic between
Pakistan and North Korea involving ballistic missiles and
nuclear weapons technology could have a dangerous ripple
effect.
The campaign against terrorism generated a sense of common
purpose, but at another level also became divisive. Most of Mr.
Bush's advisors regard the first and best answer to threats to
security as lying in preponderant military force. European
governments along with most others see military force as a
complementary tool in the campaign against terrorism, less
essential than a soft-power mix of intelligence, law
enforcement, border, and financial controls.
Terrorism is generally seen as part of a larger problem,
not a single problem. Thus far, however, the administration's
concern with the causes of terrorism has been minimal, in my
view. Its focus instead has been on identifying and destroying
the terrorist threat, ``before it reaches our borders,'' if
necessary, acting alone and using preemptive force. This
thinking is contained in the novel doctrine laid down by the
administration last September.
Other governments assume, doubtless correctly, that in its
reliance on massive military power, the new doctrine downgrades
alliances. They also worry that the administration may not feel
bound by the body of international rules and restraints that
developed after World War II. Taken at face value, the new
doctrine justifies preventive war waged without allies and
without U.N. Sanction.
A doctrine of preemption that relied on very high-quality
intelligence to identify an impending attack well in advance
and then head it off would not raise eyebrows, but the Bush
doctrine is based instead on prevention and preeminence; that
is, taking military power to a level never before seen, one
that would so intimidate all parties that no one would even
consider an attack of any kind against the United States.
Threats to American interests would be not just discouraged,
but precluded. ``Full spectrum dominance,'' was a term for it
in defense circles. Anticipatory self-defense is a phrase that
Secretary Rumsfeld has used.
In practice, such a doctrine harbors many risks. If I am
banging on too long, please cut me off, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. Keep going.
Mr. Newhouse. It exaggerates the role and utility of raw
military power. The government could find itself unable to
carry out programs in other realms, unable, for example, to
cooperative effectively with other governments to combat
terrorism. Special Forces and smart weapons can help in that
battle, but other tools starting with good intelligence and
good police work are more important.
No matter how good the performance of the Intelligence
Community, surprises are probably unavoidable. Thus, measuring
performance by the standard of prediction is unrealistic and
can damage the standing, morale, and performance of
intelligence agencies. They are engaged in not winning a war
against terrorism, but in managing it, restricting the
activities and options of hostile forces. The Bush doctrine, if
taken seriously, would mean that prediction would become the
measure of performance, because a prevention-based strategy
would require sustained and timely collection of the kind of
intelligence that is rarely available, least of all in a form
that connects all the dots.
Effective intelligence collection must be conducted
bilaterally, but with a wide array of countries. After
September 11th, offers of help, large and small, poured into
Washington from around the world. They were rejected. Another
opportunity lost. Accepting these offers would have harmed
nothing, generated enormous goodwill, and, most important,
helped at another more important level. What the United States
has needed from other countries, then as now, is information, a
process through which intelligence may be shared with countries
best equipped to penetrate terrorist organizations and cells.
Many of these countries took part in the sanctions against
Iraq, and most of them have experienced serious difficulties of
one kind or another with the terrorist groups located in the
extensive region they share.
Terrorism may be contained if intelligence services and
police agencies acquire the habit of cooperating closely with
each other and suppressing their competitive instincts and
preference for acting alone. The United States would be the
chief beneficiary of such activity, first because it appears to
be the primary target of al Qaeda and sibling terrorist groups;
second, because it lacks adequate human resources for gathering
the intelligence it needs; and third, because its ability to
eavesdrop on global communications is declining. The rapid
growth of commercially available technology is reported as
allowing for the creation of all but unbreakable computer
codes. Fiber-optic lines give off no electronic signals that
can be monitored.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my statement. Thank you.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Newhouse follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Dr. Krepinevich, you have a lot of pressure on
you because you really have three colleagues who preceded you
who have outstanding statements. But I am comfortably able to
tell you that I am sure you will do well, because I took your
statement home last night, and I thought it was a wonderful
summary of the issue. But we do need to get you the mic, don't
we?
Dr. Krepinevich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Like my
colleagues, I will summarize my remarks.
Mr. Shays. Like most of your colleagues.
Dr. Krepinevich. First, let me applaud the subcommittee,
for tackling this issue. It really is the missing link.
Strategy is about connecting ends and means. We know the ends
we want to achieve: the defeat of international terrorism. And
we know the means that we are going to apply, in the terms of
the budget and the resources and the capabilities that we are
putting to the task. What we need to worry about is that
although the means are impressive, we only get to spend them
once. If we choose the wrong strategy--or if we choose the
right strategy, but do not have sufficient resources to
implement it--what we end up doing is not only wasting
resources, but also wasting time, neither of which can be
recovered. With that in mind, I would like to offer some
comments on the administration's set of strategies.
I do not believe that there is anything inherently wrong
with having a hierarchy of strategies as long as they are
comprehensive, consistent, and, of course, as long as the
strategy is effective. What I think is somewhat remarkable is
that we actually have public statements about strategy in
wartime. For example, after Pearl Harbor I don't recall
President Roosevelt saying, it's Germany first, which was our
grand strategy, going after Germany before Japan. I don't
remember anyone saying that General MacArthur would be pursuing
an island-hopping strategy, avoiding Japanese strong points, as
his approach to solving the problem of defeating Japan in the
Pacific. Football coaches don't advance or announce their game
plans in advance, nor do chess masters before a chess match. So
I do think that--and I would assume, and, quite frankly, I
would hope that there are some key aspects of our strategy for
waging war on terrorism that are not public, that are
classified, to include some of the capabilities and forces that
support this strategy.
On the other hand, we have to find some way of squaring the
circle, because Congress is responsible for the power of the
purse, they are responsible for the war powers of this country.
And so Congress must identify a way to assess the
administration's strategy. I have no solution for this dilemma.
With respect to the strategies themselves, I think there is
much to applaud in terms of the effort on the part of the Bush
administration. We need to recognize that this is not just a
variation of former strategies. In fact, what we are dealing
with here is a dramatically different kind of threat or
combination of threats: the prospect of rogue states developing
weapons of mass destruction and perhaps having to these weapons
fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. Certainly this
is about as big a shift in the kind of threat environment as we
have seen since the early days of the cold war.
Second, I think this set of strategies is clearly an effort
to provide at least some point-of-departure strategic guidance
both in general terms and in terms of the key specific areas
that may define the competition, such as cyberspace, the issue
of financial laundering and so on.
If that is the glass half full, I think we also need to
examine the glass that's half empty. If you look at historical
experience, we only have a few data points. We did not really
come up with a strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, a
comprehensive strategy, arguably until 1950, when you had NSC-
68.
We also found that we had to constantly evolve the strategy
to reflect changing circumstances. As you pointed out, Mr.
Chairman, we had in 1953 the Solarium group meeting, when
President Eisenhower took office, to revise and revisit the
strategy that had been laid down several years earlier. So,
again, this is not a situation where you come up with a
strategy overnight. It is not a fast-food approach to strategy.
This is going to require a lot of work, a lot of hard,
intellectual work to address a lot of the questions, quite
frankly, raised by you and by my colleagues here today.
I would point out also that both NSC-68 and the Solarium
group were classified undertakings.
The strategies that I reviewed, to the extent that I could,
given that at least one of them was classified and, as our
colleagues pointed out, there were several of them just
released recently, do lead to some unanswered questions. This
gets back to my point that further work is going to be needed.
I will just raise a few here for your consideration.
One, as Mr. O'Hanlon said, is this issue of preemptive
attack. If we really do decide to pursue this policy, or this
strategic pillar, against terrorists or rogue states, we are
going to have to get a lot better at things like surprise,
stealthy deployments, operating along short time lines, and
operating over long distances. I don't think you can conduct a
surprise attack with a precursor being months' long
negotiations with allies as to whether or not you can use their
forward bases. So, initiatives by the Defense Department such
as converting Trident submarines to provide for the stealthy
insertion of Special Operations forces or the increase in the
size of Special Operations forces, would be consistent with
that kind of strategy.
Of course, we are also modernizing our Air Force to deploy
large numbers of short-range aircraft to forward bases which
may not be available, at the same time developing no new long-
range air capability.
So, again, I think at some point you have to begin to look
at the strategy and the means and see where the links and the
disconnects are and, again, to paraphrase from my colleagues,
to see if the dots all connect correctly.
In terms of port security, I think the issue was raised by
Michael O'Hanlon. Where is the emphasis? Is it at the port of
origin where the goods coming to our shores originate? There
has been talk in the Pentagon about a maritime NORAD, about a
naval force that will intercept suspicious cargo ships the way
our missile defenses are meant to intercept incoming warheads.
Or is it at the port of entry? Or is it a combination of these
things? If so, which has priority? And over what time will we
phase in these various elements of our strategy? What is the
standard of performance? How many cargos are we supposed to be
able to intercept and check out?
So, in the area of port security, it seems to me that we
know there is a danger there. We know there is a threat. We are
devoting means to address it but not quite clear what the
linkage is between the means and ensuring that we achieve our
ends.
If you have a strategy that recognizes that deterrence
doesn't work against terrorists and you may not be able to
intercept every terrorist attack, than a big part of your
strategy has got to be damage limitation, or what we call
consequence management. How do you limit the damage of a
successful attack? Because that can go a long way toward
defeating terrorism. Where is the responsibility? With the
Federal Government? With State governments? With local
governments?
For example, once an attack occurs in an American city, is
it that city's responsibility alone to deal with it? I would
suspect that we would want to mobilize resources and flow them
toward that city. Well, who controls those resources? Can the
Federal Government put the arm on other cities' resources now
at its disposal to go to the city that's been attacked? Have we
built in the transportation assets that allow us to rapidly
reinforce the city that's just been subjected to attack? Is it
that way across the board?
Or do we recognize that, for example, in the case of first
responders, those people who are on the scene first, you are
not going to be able to reinforce them. Either they are going
to be able to do the job quickly, or it's going to get out of
hand. Have we really thought through the process, the linking
of ends and means, to make sure that we have an effective
defense in dealing with consequence management?
There are other matters that deserve consideration. The
role of our allies. Our alliances were formed in a different
era, when there was much more common agreement about what the
principle threat to our security was. We find ourselves needing
allies more in the global war on terrorism but perhaps in some
cases being able to rely on them less. Certainly we want to
rely on them for different things.
There's a new division of labor. We don't want tank armies
so much as we want good intelligence, for example. So how do we
devise a new division of labor, and what does that say about
our strategy? What resources can we free up to accord to other
priorities?
I will just speak very quickly on cost-imposing strategies.
It's kind of an arcane term, but it's a strategic term. Bottom
line: they spend $1 million, we spend $100 billion. That's an
awfully effective strategy. Part of our strategy, part of our
strategic development, has got to answer how are we going to
off set their ability to pursue cost-imposing strategies on the
United States.
In summary, I would say that the administration's efforts
represent an important initial effort to address the most
dramatic shift in our threat environment since the early days
of the cold war. The effort is both impressive and, I would
argue, incomplete. We are only at the beginning of a major
process, primarily intellectual, to come to grips with this
threat and make sure that we have a strategy that can
effectively apply our limited resources to achieve the very
worthy ends that we seek.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Shays. I thank the gentleman.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich follows:]
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Mr. Shays. I really appreciate all four of your
testimonies. I am so eager to jump in, but I am going to call
on Mr. Janklow to start.
I would just make a comment that will tell you where I'm
coming from. At this table, we had an individual who was a
doctor of a major medical magazine; and he said, before--he
said, I want to put something on the record. And this is what
he basically put on the record. He said, my greatest fear is
that a small group of dedicated scientists within a country can
create an altered biological agent that could wipe out humanity
as we know it. That to me was a very real statement of why we
can't wait for a lazy country to step in and stop a small group
of scientists from creating a biological agent that could wipe
out humanity as we know it.
In other words, it's not just those countries that seek to
work with terrorists but those who tolerate them. And there is
not a chance in heck that I would think that we would wait.
Which gets to a topic that you had brought up, Dr.
O'Hanlon, and all of you did, and that's the whole issue of
preemption. My view was that what we would have over the course
of the next few months and maybe years is, with the world
communities, how do we define when preemption has to happen?
So I took an advantage that I don't often do as chairman to
just jump in here, but, Mr. Janklow, you have the floor for 10
minutes.
Mr. Janklow. Thank you, Mr. Chairman; and thank all four of
you gentlemen for your testimonies.
Dr. O'Hanlon, you were specific with respect to certain
areas. When we look at the structure of America, I will call it
the infrastructure of this country, given the way history's
developed or we have developed, but for the military bases, the
banks, the jails and prisons, nothing has been built secure.
Everything, 100 percent of our country is open. Closing those
doors and getting into a public safety mentality is just an
incredible cultural and physical shift for us. What do you
think is the threat assessment with respect to our public
utilities, specifically the electrical grids? All we have are
fences that say high voltage, keep out, where we have the
transformers. Yet disabling a transformer is probably one of
the easiest things in the world to do.
There isn't a backlog of transformers in this country on
the shelf. In the event someone were to start to bring the
electrical system down, you could make whole areas of this
country uninhabitable for months. Were it to be done in the
wintertime, it is incalculable how we could deal with it and
maintain our standard of living or not turn on each other. Have
you ever had a chance to assess the question with respect to
the electrical utilities or the natural gas utilities where
every so many miles they come up out of the ground, with the
pumps and the monitoring, and it would be a no brainer just to
throw a log chain around them and drive off, pulling them
apart. Do you have any comments, sir?
Dr. O'Hanlon. Those are very tough questions, Congressman.
I share your understanding and your concern on electricity in
particular because it's so hard to fix. My understanding--and
I'm not an expert in this area--but it could take several
months to repair some of the kind of damage one might imagine.
Mr. Janklow. That's correct.
Dr. O'Hanlon. During that period of time, as you say, the
economy and even the basic ability to ensure heat and other
needs for people would be really at risk.
I think the way you have to prioritize homeland security,
because, as you pointed out, we don't want to protect every
restaurant and every movie theater in this country, at least I
hope we don't have to get to that point, but you have to
prioritize. And I think the way you do is to say major loss of
life, major economic damage, or major damage to the
institutions of this country such as government. Those are the
sorts of things we have to focus on most intently. If there is
a plausible risk in one of those areas, you should think hard
about doing something about it if you can.
As Andy Krepinevich says, there may be situations where the
cost is just too high. But I think you have identified a couple
of areas where the cost is not that high, and it's a matter of
scrutinizing our vulnerability, and I think you've identified a
couple of important ones that I should have added to my list.
Altogether, by the way, I think we can make very good
progress on about a $50 billion a year Federal budget for
homeland security. So, we're moving in the right direction, but
we're not there yet.
Mr. Janklow. Thank you.
Mr. Newhouse, I gathered from your testimony you're rather
critical of the way things are going under the current
administration; and I notice from your resume that you were a
senior policy advisor to Strobe Talbott with respect to Europe.
But I was wondering, did he take your advice on how to deal
with Europe during the time you were an advisor to him?
Mr. Newhouse. You can say, yes, sometimes, but rarely.
Because I found myself in persistent low-intensity conflicts
with the State Department bureaucracy. As I'm sure you know,
when you go up against the organized bureaucracy, the cards are
weighted against you. But it was fun. I wasn't there very long.
I was there for the last 3 years of the Clinton era.
Mr. Janklow. And, sir, if I could ask you with respect to--
a lot of your testimony dealt with our relationship vis-a-vis
Israel, our policy, the policy enunciations by the President.
Do you know of any strategy that any President has ever
employed with respect to Israel that worked, or the Middle
East, Israel vis-a-vis its relationship with the Palestinians,
given the uniqueness of the threat to Israel, the constant?
I mean, I just--I was there last week--2 weeks ago on an
International Relations Middle East Subcommittee trip; and it
was amazing, just amazing that, to go into grocery stores, you
go through magnetometers. You go into malls, you have the wand
put over you. You can't go into public parking. The cost of the
society for public protection, none of it contributing to
economic growth, is an unbelievable drag. And that country is
so small you could put six of them inside my State. I just--I
can't even imagine a United States with that kind of drag.
My question is, do you know of any administration that's
had an effective policy with respect to the peace aspects of
that area?
Mr. Newhouse. Well, I would say there were two. First, the
second Eisenhower administration. After the Suez crisis began--
and I no longer remember what became of that effort. Maybe it
was the political calendar. I don't remember.
But I think the most striking example of this was the
Presidency of George W. Bush after the Gulf war, starting with
the Madrid Conference. What transpired during the Madrid
Conference when he had all the key players around the table led
eventually to the Oslo Peace Process. I think the Oslo Peace
Process set in motion other agreements, and they kind of
sustained what appeared to be a sustained process which ended
abruptly in 1995 with the assassination of Prime Minister
Rabin.
I would submit that the time between the collapse of the
Soviet Union and September 11th was a kind of parenthesis
during which the one event of lasting historic importance would
have been the assassination of Rabin, because that ushered in
instantly a Likkud government, and things began to go from bad
to worse.
Now it's not as if the blame falls largely on Israel. I
mean, it also falls with great weight on the Palestinian
Liberation Organization and its leadership. But I think the
Palestinian moderates by and large understand what's been
happening to them, and they--and since it has been happening to
them in the most injurious and painful way, they would like to
change things, including changing the leadership. They can't
change their leadership so long as you have got this nexus of
political heavyweights starting with the Likkud party and
government that lashes out at the PLO leadership and
quarantines it, makes a hostage of its leader, says that you
have to change this.
Mr. Janklow. Sir, if I can ask you, let's just assume that
in this country we were dealing with an element, a group of
people, where the leader funds--contributes funds toward those
that are blowing up our people and our facilities, where they
contribute support, public rhetoric to give aid and comfort to
those that are trying to drive us out of the area. I'm not
being overly sympathetic to the Israeli position as much as I
am to say, put yourself into their mentality and then deal with
what Yasir Arafat and his group have done with respect to the
safety in the area or the neglect. It's not benign neglect,
it's far more than the benign, and one can understand the
activity that individuals take as self-preservation.
You know, I visited the American military when--Patriot
missile units that were in Israel a week ago, and I frankly was
dumbfounded at the attitude that all of those soldiers had, the
men and women had, all the way down to the lowest enlisted
ranks as to what their mission was and how important they felt
they were for the security and stability in that particular
area.
I am just wondering if you have any insight, sir, as to--
coming back to homeland security. What is it that we can do in
this country to make it safer? I mean, obviously, September
11th, we found out how vulnerable we were. To the extent
anybody's committed and was willing to commit suicide, you can
wreck a powerful lot of damage over and over and over. What it
is that we are not doing that we ought to be doing
specifically?
If you could list the things, Mr. Newhouse.
Mr. Newhouse. Well, I began my statement by suggesting what
I thought we should do first and foremost in bringing stability
or greater stability to the region--and I mean the entire
region. That is to restart the Middle East Peace Process.
Mr. Janklow. No. No. I mean the United States, here.
Mr. Newhouse. Yeah. But only we can do that. Nobody else
can restart the Middle East Peace Process.
Mr. Janklow. So you are suggesting----
Mr. Newhouse. The Europeans can't do it. The quartet, that
is to say, the combination of the United Nations, the European
Union, Russia, they cannot do that without the other member of
the quartet, the United States, taking the lead. It is just
wholly unrealistic.
Mr. Janklow. So what you are suggesting, sir, is to the
extent that the Middle Eastern Peace Process gets started or
gets on a better track, things will be safer in the United
States?
Mr. Newhouse. Yes, indeed. Because I think that not only
does the region use the Arab--the Palestinian-Israeli issue as
the principle--one of the principle tools for generating
recruitment in the region, but I think that the larger part,
most of the Islamic world is profoundly sympathetic to the
Palestinian cause.
Mr. Janklow. Would that explain the explosions then, for
example, in Bali, in Indonesia?
Mr. Newhouse. I don't know, sir. Partially. Because--I
mean, I think these things are really all connected. What is it
that inspires an organization like al Qaeda? It's more than one
thing. I mean, I think the leadership probably wants to divide
Islam from the Western world if it can. But it uses whatever
grievances, tools, that it has available to it; and this is
certainly a big one.
Mr. Janklow. Thank you.
Mr. Newhouse. Sir, can I just make one--with response to
one of your other questions, when you said that these people
are being terrorized and being killed, I'd just make two
comments. The number of people being killed over--since the
Second Intifada began, there's been a great disproportion, a
tragic number of Israeli citizens have been killed, that's
true. But a considerably larger number of Palestinians have
been killed in the process and a great number of Israelis, if
they were sitting here, Israelis whom I know personally, would
strongly agree with what I've said here. But they feel
frustrated because they have very little control.
Amos Elon, one of the great Israeli writers, wrote
recently: Israel's military power increases on a daily basis,
and its security diminishes on a daily basis, because Israel is
a small state with a low birth rate that lives in a huge sea of
Arabs.
Mr. Turner [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Newhouse.
Mr. Gilmore, would you like to comment on some of the
questions?
Mr. Gilmore. Mr. Chairman, respectfully, it is a policy
decision about whether the foreign policy of this country is
going to shift with respect to support of Israel or their
policies. That is not really the topic that we are discussing
here today. We are discussing here today the question of what
actions the Congress can focus on in order to try to make the
homeland more secure. I think that was the essence of
Congressman Janklow's ideas about this.
I'm concerned, frankly, about some of the things that I'm
hearing here today. I think there is a risk here that we are
being led down the path of trying to address all
vulnerabilities in the Nation. You cannot address all
vulnerabilities of the Nation. Again, that was also said from
the dais a few moments ago.
This Nation is a free country. It carries within,
therefore, inherent vulnerabilities. But vulnerability is not
threat. Threat is different. Threat is the things that the
enemy has the capability of attacking, and they don't have the
capability of attacking everything. They don't--the motivation
to attack things and what things are vulnerable, and that is
the threat, and that we can address. We can address that. If we
tried to address everything that anyone could imagine, any
terrorist could imagine, we are driving ourselves into being a
financially exhausted martial state, which is exactly what the
enemy probably would like to see us get to.
Instead, we have to address that, and then I think you go
to a little different question, which is, how are we doing it?
We are setting up a major bureaucracy with the Department
of Homeland Security, but what are we doing it for? That is the
point to keep the eye on the ball about here. We don't want to
get so tangled up in the administrative efforts to get it all
to coordinate and work together we lose track of what we're
trying to do, which is to address the potential threats of this
country in a reasonable and prioritized way and to address what
we really think the potential threats are.
And for what purpose are we doing that? I don't think it's
to make ourselves a martial state. I think at some point it's
to return to some sense of normalcy in this country, not a
country like was being described someplace where we are
constantly watched and constantly going through security
measures at the grocery store and things like that, but to get
back to the point where we protect ourselves to the greatest
extent possible from reasonable, foreseeable risks and threats
and then get on with our lives as free people. Otherwise, the
enemy's won.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Governor.
Now, Mr. Bell, you will have 10 minutes.
Mr. Bell. Governor, I couldn't agree with you more when you
suggest that there is no way possible for us to do everything
to keep the homeland safe. I have said for a long time that you
could take every security precaution known to man, some even
unknown at this particular point in time, and still have
someone willing to kill themselves in order to kill other
people. That you're not--there are going to be instances where
you can't defend against that.
I do believe, though, that after September 11th we live in
a new world in some negative ways but also some rather positive
ways, one being that there has been an awakening and there is a
sense of alertness in America that has never been seen before.
Things that not too long ago would have probably been taken for
granted, an unattended piece of luggage in a crowded facility,
will now be pointed out to a security guard. I daresay if an
individual like Timothy McVeigh went and tried to purchase an
inordinate amount of race car fuel that would be reported to
some authority. If someone signed up for a flight class and
expressed no interest in taking off or landing the aircraft,
that type of suspicious behavior would be reported.
What I am curious about is that the only way that works and
that sense of alertness leads to greater security is if there
really is communication between the various law enforcement
authorities; and I hope that is something positive which has
come out of September 11th, too, because we have all heard the
stories of turf wars between various law enforcement entities,
the breakdown in communication, information not being
transmitted to where it should be going. I'm curious as to what
your feelings are on that particular subject, whether we really
have seen better communication between the different levels of
law enforcement.
Mr. Gilmore. Congressman, of course, it has to be addressed
on two levels, one is technological and the other is cultural.
The technological part is the part we still have to reach
for, the ability to have some interoperability to address the
spectrum issues, to get local responders some capacity to have
the ability to use their intercommunications, even to allow
some spectrum to allow people in the private sector to be able
to have some communication capacities within themselves; and
that remains I think ahead of the Congress. But that's the
easier part.
But that's the easier part. The more difficult part is the
cultural problem and that is getting intelligence organizations
to communicate with each other. This is an issue we first began
to address in the year 2000 with our report to the Congress on
December 15, 2000, where we pointed out that there was not
information passing back and forth laterally among Federal
intelligence organizations--FBI, NSA, CIA, all the rest of
them. And more importantly, there was not information traveling
vertically up and down the line between Federal, State and
local people.
We pointed out that while within the Federal system,
clearances are granted routinely to elected officials in the
Congress, there are no clearances granted routinely to people
in the State bureaucracy who actually have the primary
responsibility to deal with these issues. I was the Governor of
one of the two States directly attacked on September 11th, New
York and Virginia were the two States directly attacked, and
based upon that, I know from personal experience that there was
difficulty with that.
In this past report, our fourth annual report, we
recommended that there be a fusion center of intelligence
information that would also have a role to play with Federal,
State and local people all within the fusion center, the
communication back and forth between Federal organizations as
well. And a form of that was adopted by the President in his
State of the Union address, and we are optimistic that will be
structured in a way that it can be made to work.
There is a major issue of how you are going to conduct
counterterrorism activity in the United States to gain that
information to go into the fusion center from within the
homeland. That remains controversial even on our commission,
but we think that progress is in fact being made. I was briefed
at the White House recently by Admiral Abbott, the acting
Homeland Security adviser to the President, who has pointed out
that there are efforts being made to create those channels up
and down the line between Federal, State and local people.
Last point, condition orange has been widely criticized
when it came to pass, but it does have some value, value in
communicating with the terrorists, value in communicating with
the American people so that there is not a shock if there's
another attack, which would cause a stampede, an overreaction,
which I think we are all concerned about; but also that
condition also triggers automatic communications between
Federal, State and local people which I thought was maybe the
most significant point.
Mr. Bell. Dr. O'Hanlon, Chairman Shays pointed out that he
liked you when he realized that you had served in the Peace
Corps. I liked you when you started making my case for me on
port security, and I greatly appreciate that. And when I was
home a couple of weeks ago, I started talking to people about
this, basically to raise the flag and see who might salute it.
But I am curious where we go from here, because it is a
very legitimate point that when you look at the number of
petrochemical plants we have located along the Houston ship
channel and realize the vulnerability of those plants, and I
hope the point you are trying to make is, right now, you can
look at that and say, well, that is your problem or that's
their problem. But if there is any kind of strike against that
type of plant, then as you point out, it becomes our problem.
So, given that, I am curious as to what you would recommend.
And one thing that I've considered--haven't actually
proposed it yet, because I want to get input from other people
such as yourself--but should we be looking toward some type of
subsidy program for those types of facilities, to provide a
certain amount of Federal assistance, because I do agree with
you there, there is a line and there is an economic line that
they will reach.
I think most of the plants in my district have taken
extraordinary measures. There's one chemical plant that I
visited that I thought I was going to have an MRI conducted
before I gained admittance. They go through extraordinary
precautions, but there are limits. And before they are going to
go to the full extent, I think they're going to be looking to
the Federal Government for some kind of assistance; and I am
curious as to what your feelings on that would be.
Dr. O'Hanlon. Thank you, Congressman.
Also wrestling with the point that Governor Gilmore made
about how we don't want to get so caught up in homeland
security that we bankrupt the country, it's a tough balancing
act to work out. In our Brookings study, we came to a couple of
conclusions. One of them is at the Federal level, we do need
some more capability in institutions like the Coast Guard and
in some of the port security funding to develop port security
plans that, right now, I think Federal money needs to go up. It
doesn't necessarily need to go up astronomically. The Coast
Guard budget already is increasing, but I think the Coast
Guard's fleet needs to get bigger. That's one piece of it, but
it's not really your primary concern.
Your primary concern is actual site defense at the place
we're talking about. And there, I think--personally, I am not
strongly opposed to the idea of subsidies, but I am more
intrigued, just based on my research and discussions with
economists at Brookings, by an idea they came up within the
course of our study, which is, require a certain minimal level
of regulation, minimal level of security legislatively, but
leave the primary effort to the private sector; require many of
these facilities to have terrorism insurance, and then the
insurance market will work to give people incentives to adopt
best practices because they can offer lower rates to people who
are adopting better security practices.
So that's a partial answer. It still doesn't get to your
real concern of how do we make sure that these facilities
aren't themselves bankrupted because we are asking them to
adopt a more secure workplace. If the level of Federal
regulation or State regulation is relatively modest, and we
say, you have to do certain basic things, have monitoring of
all your major entrances, have a certain number of security
guards on duty, have a certain number of tests per year of your
response capability, and then leave it the private-sector
insurance markets to help give these people incentives to
develop best practices, that may work better than either
Federal subsidies. Because there are so many facilities to
subsidize, I don't know how you draw the line or simply
trusting the private sector to get it right on its own.
One more point, if I could bring in a separate example and
I am sorry to go on, but skyscrapers, I worry about anthrax
being introduced into the air intake of skyscrapers. As far as
I know, there is still no Federal requirement or State
requirement in most places that these air intake systems be
elevated above street level or otherwise protected.
We don't want to fortify every building in the country and
we don't want to mandate this happen immediately, because it
would cost too much. But I think for large buildings, there
needs to be a certain push by the Federal Government for these
buildings to get more secure on how they handle their air
circulation systems. And then, again, the insurance markets can
give them incentives to do even more, and they can choose for
themselves whether they can afford the additional measures like
filtering systems in their air, circulation devices and that
sort of thing.
I am not yet prepared to endorse subsidies because of the
sheer number of facilities and the sheer cost of doing so, but
I haven't ruled it out either, and maybe there are certain
places we have to at least keep it in mind if the economies of
these plants and facilities--if their budgets are so stressed
by additional security they simply can't do it on their own, we
may have to at least give them a temporary helping hand.
Mr. Turner. Governor Gilmore, I appreciate your comment
concerning the sharing of information between local, State and
Federal Governments. I served as mayor for the city of Dayton,
and we actually were one of the few cities and communities that
actually held weapons of mass destruction exercises prior to
September 11th. Attorney General John Ashcroft attended those
exercises, and it was phenomenally helpful to our community
when September 11th occurred, because we knew who was in charge
of what; what streets were to be closed. We didn't run to the
phone book to figure out what agencies we needed to coordinate
with; there had already been an effort to put together
coordination with the FBI, the sheriff and the like.
Recently, I attended a presentation by NCR concerning the
application of business data collection software to homeland
security issues, and one of the things that they discussed is
that the business process of handling data and information
technologies starts with the question ``what information do we
need to know in working backward in designing your systems.''
So the question I have for you, Governor and Dr. O'Hanlon,
is, in this process of making certain that we are sharing
information, what should we be doing or how is it going--in our
efforts to define what we need to be doing, what information is
it that we need to make certain that we avail ourselves of as
we look to sharing that?
Mr. Gilmore. I think that's a new topic. The issue of what
type of data, I suppose you're really referring to, if you're
talking about a National Cash Register-type of presentation,
CR-type of presentation----
Mr. Turner. It was interesting in the discussion because
they talked about, do you start looking at what data you have
and start sharing that, or do you start with the question of
what do we need to know and what levels do we need to know it.
And they clearly indicated, even from the business process, and
they believe from the government and homeland security process,
that there should be a process of defining what are those
things that we believe that we need to know as we go through
setting up our systems and sharing that information.
Mr. Gilmore. There has certainly been a lot of discussion
going on about the DARPA program that the Pentagon was
attempting to conduct, the total information awareness. It was
depicted at its inception as being so broad that it just scared
the living daylights out of everybody. And I think this
Congress decided to put the clamps on that somewhat. So that
was, I think, maybe a starting effort to determine what you
need to know, and it may have been defined so broadly that it
wasn't going to go anywhere.
So it may be that if we can go through a definition
process, we can preserve civil liberties and the privacy and
anonymity of people as Americans at the same time we are
providing for the capability of our counterterrorism people to
focus on the right kinds of individuals or people. But that's a
definitional process that still has to be gone through.
I think it has to be handled with the greatest care, and
the reason is that today we live in an America that has two
elements. I am not sure it is unique, but yeah, it might be.
One is the American media to fix and manage our problems. If we
say we have this problem here and this great managerial class
called United States of America 2003 is going to try to find
some technological or managerial approach to fixing the
problem, that would go to the question of how you define that.
And the second, that is probably unique in the history of
mankind, is this enormous technological society we live in and
the capacity to gather data and to hold data and to keep data,
which does threaten the potential privacy and character of the
values of the American people.
Do you have to strike that balance? I think it is entirely
a policy question. You will be led, Congressman, to the sense
that it is a technological question and a managerial question.
It is not; it is a policy question of how much you are going to
permit to be accumulated in order to preserve the security of
the country. That is a judgment call based upon the values you
bring with you to the Congress.
Dr. O'Hanlon. Congressman, in this dichotomy you put forth,
do you take what information you have and process it more or do
you go out and look for more? You have to do both, but I want
to emphasize the second piece. I want to do the equivalent of
Phoenix memos as much as we can.
So what I mean by that, I would like to see local, State
and Federal law enforcement authorities sharing information. If
we happen to see 10 places in the country where there are
people casing airfields on the same day or two, you want to
know that it's not just one isolated place, and if it happens
in one place in South Dakota and one place in Virginia and one
place in Maryland, no one ever knows that it's happened at all
these places simultaneously.
What you want to do is piece that information together or
have it in some kind of a data base where somebody with a
creative idea can write a computer program and say, am I seeing
any suspicious behavior that is systematic?
So you want to have data entered into your National Law
Enforcement Information System that allows that kind of
correlation analysis to be done. And whether it is medical
supplies being stolen, airfields being cased, crop dusters
being rented, there are a lot of things that can fall into the
category of flight training--that we know very well from 2001--
that you would want to know about, especially if they were
happening at more than one place at a time, suggesting some
kind of a conspiracy. And that's where you need to generate the
data and probably more of the data than we have today, get it
into the data bases and then allow some kind of central
analysis through Homeland Security's Threat Analysis System.
That is the sort of thing I want to see much more of. And
that is going to require cultural improvements and
technological improvements, as Governor Gilmore said before. I
think the Federal Government is going to have to ultimately
support improvement in information technology at the State and
local level much more and maybe even subsidize some of it.
Mr. Turner. Mr. Newhouse, your comments were very
interesting. Some of the analysis, I was concerned, certainly
was so one-sided that it left out elements of what we all know
is occurring.
You state that one of the issues that needs to occur is
starting with an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank. I
didn't notice in your comments the call for the ending of
suicide bombing attacks. Your statements appear to be solely
placing responsibility on what we believe are the responsible
states and democracies, instead of the parties that are doing
very egregious acts; and I would like some of your comments
about that.
Mr. Newhouse. They certainly are egregious and self-
injurious. They are also, if you like, a response to what they
see as the illegal occupation of their territory and the
settlement activity, which everyone has said, including
President Bush, has got to stop.
There are also acts being committed by, if you will,
rejectionist groups who are also terrorist groups. And the
leadership, Mr. Arafat's leadership, which--his is really an
awful leadership. It is corrupt and it doesn't advance the
interest of the Palestinian people in any way, but because it
is weak, inherently weak, it is unable to do anything about
these acts. It has actually tried and failed.
These acts you speak of are being committed by the
terrorist groups, and these are not terrorist groups that
export, but they are devoted entirely to harming Israel. But
there is very little from here that we can do about it, other
than--in my opinion, except for doing what I suggested that we
do, which is restart the Middle East peace process.
Mr. Turner. I would take it that you would not indicate
that you believe that the suicide bombings are advancing the
cause of a Palestinian state or resulting in a greater
likelihood of that occurring?
I mean, it sets back, obviously, the peace process. And
when their occurrence is neglected, in your comments, as merely
a responsibility of--or the setbacks are a result of Israel's
reaction, I think it doesn't provide us with the information
that we need to come to a conclusion as to what really the
United States needs to be doing.
Mr. Newhouse. Well, I would agree with you that the acts of
terrorism committed against Israel are certainly from the point
of view of Palestinian interests and are deeply
counterproductive. As of now, there seems to be very little
that anyone can do about that directly. The Palestinian
leadership has been unable to do anything about it; the
Israelis themselves are unable to do anything about it because
retaliation simply invites more of the same.
So it is kind of a demonic process going on, and as I said,
there is very little, if anything, that the United States can
contribute directly to heading it off, stopping it. But I
think, in a larger sense, generating some stability out there
and getting the sides together in a peace process, I think, is
really the only weapon available.
Mr. Turner. In your comments, you also talked about your
concern about the preemption doctrine having an impact of
exacerbating the threats in the United States, and you ended a
paragraph with ``Terrorism may be contained if intelligence
services and police agencies acquire the habit of cooperating
closely and with each other and suppressing their competitive
instincts and preference for acting alone.''
When the intelligence services and police agencies are
cooperating, what action would you think would result from
that?
Mr. Newhouse. Well, if they are cooperating, then I think
we are in very good shape. The problem is getting intelligence
agencies and police agencies to cooperate systematically.
Frequently, they will cooperate. Going back to 1984, the
Los Angeles Olympics--this may have been a first, maybe it
wasn't the first, but we do know at that time the CIA and the
FBI worked together very closely. They were under a lot of
pressure from the White House to do exactly that. Not only
that, but they were cooperating with their counterpart agencies
in other governments, so that in the days preceding the Los
Angeles Olympics, the FBI was able to assure Members of this
body at that time that nothing would happen. They categorically
said, nothing will happen at the Los Angeles Olympics; we've
got these groups so penetrated, we know what they're thinking
about before they think or what they're going to do before they
do.
Much was the same at other major events: Y2K was an
example, or the Gulf war when we rolled up 30 different plots
to commit terrorist acts. The problem is, when agencies, both
within our country and in their dealings with other countries,
ramp up, in a phrase, for--to make sure nothing happens at a
given time, the tendency then is--after nothing has happened
and the event is over, is to ramp down and go back to the so-
called ``stovepipe method'' where information is gathered at
one level, or low level, if you will, and it drifts upward to
the top and then it stops there, it isn't transferred.
Because knowledge is power, and an agency that has
information that perhaps another agency doesn't have and uses
that information to advantage, sometimes in the budgetary
process--anyway, it's counterintuitive to cooperate.
Mr. Turner. Thank you.
Chairman Shays.
Mr. Shays. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am very
eager to get into this dialog. I love this panel, and I guess I
am fascinated by the issue because we fought for 4 years about
this.
You know, in the beginning, Governor Gilmore, it was almost
theoretical because, you know, we just didn't come to grips
with it fully until September 11th, but this is what I want to
first start out with.
After September 11th the eight National Strategies to
Combat Terrorism--this is what I am hearing from this panel--
that after September 11th, the eight National Strategies to
Combat Terrorism are a good start, but there is more work to be
done.
And then, Dr. Krepinevich, I look at your statement and you
say, you know, the National Security Act of 1947, it took until
1958 before it was structured. The structure was refined, and
then you put in parentheses ``and even then it was only
partial.'' We looked for a number of years before we had a
reorganization that fit into this, in a sense, the strategy.
Now, so--and you had Eisenhower in 1952. I mean, you had
all these stages of trying to improve this response to what was
then the Soviet Union.
So what I want to know is, do you think this is a good
starting point, if you all agree, and that we need more--more
work needs to be done. And these are the areas I sense you are
saying: Interrogation among the strategies; intelligence
strategy, big question mark because that was pointed out as not
existing. Should there be an intelligence strategy, or is there
one that we just don't sense? Ensuring that our national--not
Federal strategies; I think, Governor Gilmore, that was your
point, interesting concept of national versus Federal. And the
need for more clear measures of effectiveness.
So that's where the work needs done. And would you agree
and would you want to speak to it, and would you want to add a
fifth or sixth?
Dr. Krepinevich. I think we are off to a good start; we're
better off than we were a couple of years ago. I'm not sure
what to compare this to.
Are the strategies integrated? I think, as certain members
of this panel have indicated--let me speak for myself. I think
there are certainly gaps that have raised a number of issues
that we have not come to grips with.
Do we need an intelligence strategy? I think if we are
going to do what Governor Gilmore suggests, which I think is
probably a way to get around the cost-imposing strategy that
the terrorists intentionally or unintentionally are pursuing,
the way to do it is to get them, as opposed to trying to
provide an airtight defense ourselves.
Doing that certainly is going to require expert
intelligence. We have underinvested in human intelligence of
the kind that is typically crucial to breaking down these
organizations.
Mr. Shays. So would your point be that we need an
intelligence strategy added to this list of strategies and then
integrate it?
Dr. Krepinevich. Certainly you need a strategy for how you
are going to employ your terrorist assets. It should fall out
of your overall strategy. For example, if you are going to
emphasize preemption, then I think the weight of your
intelligence effort is going to be overseas. If you are going
to emphasize a layered defense of the continental United States
and Alaska and Hawaii, then more of your intelligence efforts
may be at our borders and internal to the United States, which
require a different kind of intelligence.
So I do think the kind of strategy you choose begins to
inform how you are going to apply your intelligence assets and
what kind of priorities you are going to place on them.
In terms of measures of effectiveness, I think we've only
begun to scratch the surface on this. For example, I think the
National Strategy for Combating Terrorism says, we'll know that
we've won when Americans feel safe and secure and free of a
terrorist threat. That's probably true, but it doesn't really
give the person who has to execute a strategy much of a sense
of what they need to do to try and achieve that end.
I would say two strategic measures of effectiveness that I
would certainly consider are: one, what is an acceptable level
of damage for the United States to incur? If it's impossible to
provide airtight security over the United States, what's an
acceptable level of damage and can we achieve it? What
strategic alternative can give us the best prospect of
essentially suffering an attack and having an acceptable level
of damage?
The other is our freedom of action, because success is not
only our ability to defend ourselves here at home, but it's our
ability to protect our vital interests overseas. If we feel
under such risk of attack here that we forgo our ability to,
for example, protect critical areas whether it's East Asia, the
Persian Gulf where we have vital interests, then we will have
been deterred because of our vulnerability here at home or our
ability to deal with the threat abroad.
So I do think that in terms of measures of effectiveness,
again you can go up and down the line, whether it's dealing
with cyber attacks----
Mr. Shays. Bottom line, there needs to be a lot more
improvement and the whole issue of whether we're effective or
not in determining how we'll even measure effectiveness?
Dr. Krepinevich. Absolutely.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Newhouse, do you want to speak to the issue
of improving integration? Do we need an intelligence strategy,
national versus the Federal issue and measures of effectiveness
and any other strategy?
I am asking you, Mr. Newhouse. If you don't want to speak
to it, I will go to Dr. O'Hanlon.
Mr. Newhouse. Mr. Chairman, I think we spent a lot of time
on this today, and I think Governor Gilmore and Dr. O'Hanlon
would have a lot more that would be useful.
Mr. Shays. Let me get to you in another question.
Dr. O'Hanlon, one thing I say about a Peace Corps volunteer
is, we were taught to understand the people that we lived with,
and there were things that we did and said that when you
understood their culture, you were able to interact and
communicate with them.
Is there a role that needs to be played here in our
strategy on terrorism as well? I am jumping ahead--do you know
what I just asked you?
Dr. O'Hanlon. It's a tough question. Clearly the answer is
yes. You need to understand your partners and the needs of
other countries. I don't know how to build it into a formalized
process like this with today's focus on security strategies.
Maybe what I would say is that the National Security
Strategy, which really should be at the pinnacle and does have
some discussion of the needs of developing countries, to take
one category of overseas partners, it sort of gets cheapened
when there are all these other strategies that are out there.
And I worry about the proliferation of documents, because we
should all still be reading and developing and debating the
National Security Strategy, and we did for awhile in the fall.
And then preemption was the flavor of the month for a few
weeks, and now we're on to other documents. And there's a lot
of stuff in the National Security Strategy that has nothing to
do with preemption, as you well know, largely this economic
assistance issue for developing countries who are very
important partners of ours in counterterrorism.
So it's not a very clear issue.
Mr. Shays. I kind of got you off the topic here. I was
eager to share a bias that I have here without thinking it
through.
Let me ask you to address the issue--the eight strategies
are a good start, better integration. Do we need an
intelligence strategy--national, not Federal--and the whole
issue of effectiveness. Comment on any of those?
Dr. O'Hanlon. I will comment on a couple of them. I had the
opportunity to at least tangentially talk about a couple of the
others already.
The issue of national versus Federal response, it does
occur to me that we need to spend more time thinking about the
State and local role. Obviously, Governor Gilmore has more
experience than I do. But I, for example, have some contacts at
the L.A. city council who were very concerned about the delay
in the first responder fund over the last year. And Washington
let down the States and the local governments in having this
stalemate on that.
And one can look for different people to blame, but the
bottom line is, I think, Washington didn't get the job done
until too late. We spent a whole year when we should have been
dealing with first responder capacity, improving that, and we
really didn't do much.
In fact, I'm told that in L.A. city council debates,
advocates of doing more were often stymied because others would
say, Washington is going to help us pretty soon, we don't have
to find the money, just wait and the $3.5 billion is going to
start to come our way. And people who wanted to find local
funds had their own argument for finding local funds undercut
by this promise from Washington that was not fulfilled for a
full year.
So maybe--you know, I hate to call for more strategies, but
maybe we do need to get the Federal versus national distinction
a little more prominent in our thinking and spend more time--I
was delighted to see the Governors put some pressure on
Washington a couple of weeks ago, and I think we'll need more
of that.
Mr. Shays. Governor Gilmore--and I will take my next round
to talk about the whole issue of multi--unilateral, and this
whole issue of preemptive.
Mr. Gilmore. Congressman, it is a good start. We didn't
have a national strategy before September 11th, of any kind;
now we have eight strategies. And I guess I would like to think
about them a little bit and the Commission will think about
them a little bit. I believe that will be a topic we will
address in this 5th year for the Congress and for the President
and try to think through that.
I think we should make sure they don't contradict each
other or that they don't place different emphases. But I think
we're going to find that these are--supplement each other. Some
of the strategies like the cyber and so on like that are points
of emphasis, and I am not sure that I see them as something
where you have to try to conglomerate them into one overall
strategy. I think it might work out all right, but we will look
at that.
The intelligence piece is really tricky. This is very, very
difficult. We have placed a great emphasis on this all of our 4
years that we have been in existence and recommended that
stovepiping be broken through and fusion center be created and
the culture of separation be broken down between all these
different agencies.
The trick is that you do all that and you run the risk of
contaminating the society by looking over the shoulder of
regular people out there who are just trying to live their
lives every day. This is tricky. It means that we all believe
that you have to do effective sharing of information to get at
the bad guys, but at the same time, you have to find some
method to not be looking over the shoulder of the good guys.
This is a very tricky challenge--national, not Federal,
absolutely. And I think that this is the real, maybe one of the
focuses. I would say to you, Congressman Shays, that the danger
here is, we are going to get so caught up with how you put the
agencies together and the Department together, that you
implement everything, that we lose some focus and momentum
toward actually doing the things that are going to be
necessary. I am uneasy with the idea that every witness who
comes before you for the next year is going through a list of
vulnerability that he sees within his own State and then, of
course, naturally demand money to go into that State to take
care of that vulnerability. That's not a very good approach.
Instead, you have to find an all-hazards type of approach,
one that really focuses on enabling the States to create State-
oriented plans in cooperation with their localities so that
instead of worrying about any individual chemical plant, you
enable your localities and your States to observe that plant,
all the plants, all the railroads, all the airlines, and enable
them to be watched in a reasonable way and to respond if an
attack does occur and to circumscribe the potential attack.
The key issue is implementing that, really not worrying so
much about the organization as implementation of the program
to, in fact, get out here and to get proper funding in
accordance with the proper strategy, in accordance with a
proper State plan and make sure that they are properly
equipped, enabled, and they know who is on first and that it's
properly exercised and ultimately measured.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Chairman, I would love to come back. When
the Governor has had a chance, I would love to get into the
issue of preemption.
Mr. Janklow. Go ahead and then I'll go.
Mr. Shays. Dr. Krepinevich, do you agree with Dr. O'Hanlon
that a policy of preemptive self-defense should be more
implicit than explicit?
Dr. Krepinevich. I agree with him to the extent that, the
option of preemption is nothing new. For example, in the
Solarium Study you cited, one of the three groups explicitly
looked at conducting what was called preventive war against
China. President Kennedy also explored in great detail and
actually engaged the Soviets in discussions about a preemptive
attack on China's developing nuclear facilities.
Certainly, President Clinton debated with his security
advisers the prospect of conducting a preemptive attack on the
North Korean reactor at Yongbyon. So this is not new; it has
always been an option in our strategic arsenal.
I think perhaps by stating it as boldly as the President
did, it might have garnered some unwanted attention on the part
of the administration.
On the other hand, I think it's also necessary to point out
to people that the last big threat that we faced, the Soviet
Union, was a threat that we felt could be deterred; and so we
put a lot of our eggs in the basket of deterrence. And that is
why we had public statements of strategy, because again we
wanted to get into the minds of the Soviets. We wanted them to
understand that any unacceptable action on their part would
produce catastrophic consequences for them.
Well, what do you do when you can't deter a group that can
inflict substantial damage on your country? You have to begin
to reweigh your balance of options. And this administration has
argued for preemption--which is really preventive war in the
case of Iraq--and I'm not quite sure how you preempt somebody
you're already at war with; we are already at war with
terrorists--but at any rate, I think you've got to prepare the
American people for the fact that we are going to be acting
perhaps quite differently than we have in the past. And the
reason is because our traditional reliance on deterrence has
been eroded.
And you have to prepare the American public and you have to
make the case to its elected Representatives for their support
to develop the capabilities, because they are not identical to
the kinds of capabilities you would want for a posture of
deterrence.
Mr. Shays. Governor Gilmore, would you speak to this issue
next? I would just preface it by saying, I think this is a huge
issue that there has to be lots of debate about.
Dr. O'Hanlon, I don't come down on your side of the
argument because it strikes me that the world community has to
know that they can't allow a small group of dedicated
scientists within their borders to do something that could wipe
out humanity. We have to be honest with our own folks and say,
this isn't--this needs to be stated explicitly, because this is
the world you live in. It's a different world.
So I am giving you my answer to it, but I'd be happy to
have you comment to it, Governor.
Mr. Gilmore. Congressman, I think we have an obligation to
be very precise on our threat assessment before we decide to
take serious military action. The intelligence community ought
to be able to give us some testable advice about any particular
risk. The chance of a dedicated group of scientists someplace
creating a bio weapon that can destroy humanity is remote, so
you should be cautious.
Mr. Shays. Why do you say, it's remote?
Mr. Gilmore. It's hard to do. All of the information that
our commission has gotten is that it's extremely difficult to
get these weapons, extremely difficult to weaponize them and
extremely difficult to deliver them. We were not prepared to
rule out a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack on the United
States, but in the very first year, we assessed the likelihood
of a conventional attack on this country as being highly
probable, the chance of a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack on
this country as being highly improbable, not completely beyond
the pale; and that's why we have considered it on a continuous
basis as we have gone on.
Our most recent threat assessment contained in our fourth
report changes that analysis not one whit. It's just very
difficult to deliver those kinds of weapons, and we should be
cautious about governing policy along those lines.
Mr. Shays. It's difficult if you are not willing to carry
it yourself. But if you're willing to carry it yourself, it
becomes a lot easier.
Mr. Gilmore. If you can get it.
Mr. Shays. There are two parts. But if you are willing to
infect yourself and others who are very willing to, you know,
be blown up in an airplane that hits a building, it strikes me
that the reality becomes very different.
Mr. Gilmore. It's very difficult to get those weapons. It's
very difficult to create those weapons.
It's very difficult to get smallpox, for example, very
difficult to weaponize it. If our suggestions are put into
place, particularly on the health side--which has been the
greatest extent of our work, by the way, for the 4 years has
been the health piece and the public health system and the
ability of hospitals to deal with this--you could contain those
kinds of attacks, should they occur. But they still remain
highly unlikely compared to that which terrorists can get,
which are explosive devices, hijackings, attacking vulnerable
points. That is very likely and has of course, been borne out.
I think your question with respect to this, I think
September 11th is driving and coloring the policy decisions
that the Congress is making and the executive branch is making.
The threat seems so much more real after September 11th in
terms of the potential attack, which then leads us to the
analysis that if you allow either a terrorist organization or a
foreign country to continue to develop these kinds of weapons,
and with the visceral fear we now have in America with this
kind of attack, then that leads more toward a policy of
preemption, the notion being that we can't allow someone to
develop that kind of weapon and put us in that kind of
position.
Even if they can't get the weapon here, which they probably
can't, they could get it around their neighbors, and then, in
that position, upset the entire balance of a major region where
the national interests of the United States are at stake. This
is the analysis, I believe, of the President.
Mr. Shays. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Governor.
Mr. Turner. Do you have any additional questions?
Mr. Janklow. Let me pick up on where Congressman Shays left
off on the comments that some of you panelists made.
Governor Gilmore, it's extremely difficult to manufacture
these, there's no question about that. But when a State
sponsors the research and the manufacturing, just exactly like
has gone on historically in the Soviet Union, what has gone on
in North Korea and clearly what is going on in Iraq.
I mean, we can all argue and will continue to argue what is
or isn't present in Iraq. But after the inspections started
back in the 1990's and after several years and after Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law came out of the country and then others
talked about what was inside the country, all of a sudden the
world--there was an admission, there was anthrax in the country
in very substantial quantities and research going on.
There was smallpox within the country. There was no candid
admission, but I don't think there's been any intelligence
service from any country that hasn't understood that there has
been smallpox research going on in Iraq.
Clearly, there was research with respect to risin and some
of the other types of weapons of mass destruction.
You don't have to wipe out the human race in order to wreck
it, especially when you live in as sophisticated a society and
economy as we have. September 11th is a classic example of the
hundreds of billions of dollars, the price we're paying for
those particular incidents taking place.
Our country has had a long history of explosions: antiwar
efforts blowing up buildings at the University of Wisconsin; as
I recall, the Symbionese Liberation Army [SLA], back a couple
of decades and explosions they were doing; things that some
other groups were involved in. Europe clearly had the Red Guard
and all of those types of things. Japan has had the incidents
with respect to poisonous gas.
But the point is, it doesn't take much in a society to
change the standard of living, to change the culture.
You keep talking about--very eloquently, Governor, about
how we just have to evaluate all this and then we have to make
policy decisions. But the fact of the matter is, no one who
drafted our Bill of Rights, or subsequently that has dealt with
it, ever had in mind the kinds of terrorism or the kinds of
wanton acts that human beings would do to one another with
respect to deliberately inflicting diseases and those types of
things. So, I mean, we have a tremendous challenge, as you keep
saying all the time, where do we draw that line?
I think hoof and mouth disease, although it has been with
animals, is a classic example of how easy it is to spread--for
example, smallpox is not a difficult disease to spread.
Clearly, it's done by contact. But to the extent that people
are as mobile as they are in today's world, again if someone is
willing to die, to infect themselves with smallpox and they're
willing to die, they can have a huge amount of contact with
others, like at airports or public arenas, what have you,
before they reach the point where they are no longer capable of
being a bomb themselves.
So after having said all of this rhetoric, my question to
you and to you, Mr. Krepinevich, is what is it--what is it that
should be expected to us? If you're a citizen out there, what
is it they should expect of us to be able to do--is there
anything we can do in the legislative sense? Is it our
responsibility to talk about it? What is it that should be
expected of us?
Mr. Gilmore. It's a very great policy question. I don't
think that the American people should expect of their
legislators that they are going to provide them complete
security from all imaginable attacks and terrorism. I don't
think the legislature can do that. It's unrealistic to hold you
accountable for some diseased mind and some idea that somebody
might come forward with--and, you know, it doesn't even have to
be a weapon of mass destruction. It can be a bomb in a local
McDonald's in downtown St. Louis.
Mr. Janklow. It could be snipers.
Mr. Gilmore. And I think we have to begin to go through the
education process that says that we are going to assess the
risk in a realistic way. We're going to take the appropriate
measures that are realistically based upon those threats, those
realistic threats; and then we are going to get on with our
lives and understand that we're going to live like we have
always lived. And I think that's part of the answer of both
expectations.
I mean it's clear that you don't have to have weapons of
mass destruction to wreck a society. I think the society is on
a hair trigger right now, and I think we need to back away from
that a little bit.
The agricultural terrorism--by the way, I want to throw in,
since you raised it, Congressman, that we have a whole chapter
here on agricultural terrorism, so we are not excluding any
possibility as a weapon of mass destruction, hoof and mouth
disease or any other potential attack.
But we think there's an obligation to reasonably assess the
threats in a realistic way. Try to avoid--in a perfect world, I
suppose, trying to guard against everything for fear that if
you miss something and something bad happens, then some
commentator or some newspaper is going to criticize you and say
that you didn't think of that.
Mr. Janklow. That's what they do, though.
Mr. Gilmore. We can't think of everything. And we have to
be honest about it with the American people that we owe an
obligation to reasonably assess the threats, put together a
national strategy and make sure all the resources of Federal,
State and local people are drawn to it, and we all understand
what it is, we're properly funded, not crazily funded, and then
put it into place; and then build this and then explain to the
American people that life has never been risk free and go on
from there and ask them to live free lives.
Mr. Janklow. Dr. Krepinevich.
Dr. Krepinevich. To come full circle, again, Congress has
the responsibility of the purse to provide the means. Congress
is also responsible for declaring war. So I think it's
appropriate that Congress pass judgment on the strategy, which
essentially is, how we are going to go about dealing with this
particular threat to our security?
So what does this mean? I will count off a number of things
that I think Congress has to look for. One is, do we have an
adequate statement of the character of the threat? Is the
threat a renegade group that we're talking about in terms of
international terrorism, or is it a popular movement?
If it's a popular movement, then it takes on the
characteristics of an insurgency; and an insurgency is a
popular movement that has got a fundamental level of support
among a specific group of the population. If this is a movement
in the Arab world, for example, or in the Islamic world, then
it's not essentially a police action. It's an action that at
some point if you are going to get rid of this brand of
terrorism, you are going to have to go after the root causes of
why these people are doing what they're doing.
And it seems to me their objective is to get the U.S.'
influence out of their part of the world, and in a sense, to
keep Americans from exporting their culture, to stop being
Americans in a sense.
So what is the character of the threat that we're dealing
with? What is the goal? What do we wish to accomplish? What are
the means?
And, again, your responsibility is to get a sense of
whether the means can actually be provided. Are we willing to
make that kind of a national commitment to ``X'' billions of
dollars year after year after year because, as we know, the
President said: that this is a protracted conflict which we're
in.
Preemption, strategists will tell you, buys you time. When
the Israelis attached the Osirak reactor in 1981, they bought
themselves time. What do you do with that time? That has got to
be a critical part of your strategy.
Metrics, again, how do we measure progress, not just in one
area, but in a number of areas. But I think that is if we have
these multiple strategies then we ought to have performance
metrics.
Mr. Janklow. Don't you think--and I am cutting you off just
a little because of time, but don't you think when Congress,
when all of America, focuses like they did after September
11th, which we all agree was a focal point for us, and then we
all agreed we needed a homeland security-something, and then we
get hung up and Congress goes home for Christmas and everybody
just takes time off while we discuss civil service protections
for people, doesn't that really--and I am not questioning the
impact it has on individuals that are employed in the
government. I'm not. But doesn't that really trivialize it for
someone out there in Timbuktu, America, with respect to what it
is, the sense of urgency we are trying to convince them we're
dealing with?
And then we still haven't funded it. Now they're all
screaming, where's the money? We told them we would give them
the money. We're not giving them the money. Doesn't this really
fly in the face of what we call a sense of urgency?
Dr. Krepinevich. I think certainly there needs to be a
sense of urgency. One of the political wags opined that the
situation is critical, but not serious and in a sense you could
argue----
Mr. Janklow. Where I come from we call that a distinction
without a difference.
Dr. Krepinevich. Again, the years 1945 to 1950 when we
developed a containment strategy, we were not at war. We were
not being attacked. We did not have military forces engaged in
combat.
We certainly need that sense of urgency. And I couldn't
agree with you more. The question is, what is it going to take
to get that sense of urgency?
Mr. Janklow. We don't have it, and we expect the public to
give--we are privy to folks like you coming before us to give
us information. But out in the hinterland, they don't get that.
They will get a snippet of this. They will get a paragraph of
this in some third rewrite of an AP story.
I'm not being critical. I'm just saying, it isn't fair to
them in order for them to drag their politicians to make policy
decisions.
Mr. Turner. Mr. Chairman, do you have any additional
questions?
Mr. Shays. I would like to thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would
like to thank the witnesses for their participation today and
particularly to thank you, Governor Gilmore, because when we
set this up, you could have asked for a separate panel. It
would have made it not as interesting, and by your
participating with the other three panels this way, it makes it
more informative. I appreciate you not pulling rank like that.
I would like to thank the rest of you--just a tremendous
job.
Mr. Turner. Well, I would like to thank the panelists also
and ask if you have any additional comments or statements you
would like to be included in the record. Do any of you have any
additional comments?
Mr. Newhouse. I remained silent during this brief
discussion, but it seems to me, rightly or wrongly, there isn't
any sense of prioritizing this enormous range of threat.
The so-called ``threat of terrorism'' has a number of
elements. And there was discussion just a few minutes ago about
focusing the public--making the public more aware. Seems to me
the public's attention has been focused, but it has been
focused on Iraq. And Iraq is a real threat, ugly threat. The
issue, really--and it's debated and there's a case to be made
either way, but the case is whether it's an imminent threat, or
if it isn't an imminent threat, how imminent. Is it more
imminent than say the interrelated threat from al-Qaeda and the
Arab-Israeli quarrel. Or Pakistan and the interaction between
Pakistan and North Korea, the fact that this technology
exchange between--could result in the North Koreans selling
nuclear technology to this one and that one, anyone who is
prepared to buy it. It is also the case that while we are
debating a lot of this, that is, to say what to do about Iraq,
that India and Pakistan will shoot their way to the head of the
agenda.
So there's a lot to worry about. But I myself don't get any
sense of prioritizing the range of threats.
Mr. Turner. If other members of the panel have no
additional comments, we thank you again and we will be
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:55 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]