WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1986. FISCAL YEAR 1987 NAVY POSTURE WITNESSES HONORABLE JOHN LEHMAN, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY ADMIRAL JAMES D. WATKINS, UNITED STATES NAVY, CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS GENERAL P. X. KELLEY, COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS INTRODUCTION Mr. ADDABBO. The committee will come to order. Today the committee will hold hearings on the Navy's fiscal year 1987 budget request. Mr. Secretary, your budget request totals about $101 billion excluding military construction programs, and represents an increase of nearly 10 percent when compared to the Navy's fiscal year 1986 allocation after adjusting for Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. Today we intend to discuss your budget request along with a number of issues, including competition in Navy programs, military personnel issues, the mine countermeasures ship programs, the HARM missile program, the Mariner Fund, JCS reform, strategic homeporting, and a number of R&D issues. We again welcome you, Secretary Lehman, along with Admiral Watkins and General Kelley. This morning's hearing will be open. This afternoon's session will be closed by a motion duly made and passed in open session in order that we may discuss any classified material. Gentlemen, in the interest of time, your entire statements will be made part of the record and we would ask you to summarize your statements. SUMMARY STATEMENT OF SECRETARY LEHMAN Secretary LEHMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to be back for my sixth time to present the Navy posture to our favorite subcommittee. We are deeply gratified to see the new high tech era that we are moving into in the subcommittee with the new machinery. I hope it works as advertised. I would just like to touch the high points of our posture statement, which you will find represents a consistent continuation of the program that we first set forth here at this table five years ago. We have a program that is derived from the national strategy provided by the President and the National Security Council as to what our national security objectives are. From that, the defense guidance provides us specific missions to accomplish in pursuit of that national strategy. This, of course is to, protect the vital interests of this country represented in our 40 plus treaty relationships and the energy and commerce dependencies that we have around the world. The budget that we are presenting today continues the process of budget building that we have maintained over the last five years. The budget process starts with these national commitments and national strategy and logically derives from them the investment in readiness and so forth that we are putting before you. This is a budget that is formed by the combatant commanders, and is based on the wisdom of the deck plates. It is a set of priorities based on where the fleet operators and the joint combatant commanders believe the problems are. Their needs are represented in maintaining the most optimum war fighting and war deterring capability. We have accomplished a great deal, we think, over the last five years. We have stayed on course. The 600-ship Navy thanks to your support, is now in being, under construction. We have added more than 60 ships to the fleet, and have nearly 90 more under construction. We have essentially achieved the force expansion that will be in place by 1989. We have done this while increasing overall readiness some 40 percent. I am sure, Mr. Chairman, you take a great deal of satisfaction when you look at the Mediterranean, for instance, and see the Saratoga at the end of a six-month cruise. Having operated in the Mediterranean and having accomplished the Achille-Lauro hijacker intercept, and it has never gone below 80 percent readiness for the air wing. A year ago, the air wing averaged 62 percent readiness on that ship. That is representative of the readiness and first-rate capability that is deployed throughout the world now thanks to the overall improvement that our recovery program has brought about. While the figures you quote with regard to real growth are certainly accurate if taken from the reduced Gramm-Rudman base. If taken from the base that was represented by last year's 1986 budget as presented, the Navy has only 1 percent real growth based on a the Zero Three Three agreement that the President made with Congress last year. It is essentially a flat budget. We think that we have been able to keep to our goals and accomplishments these past five years because we have fundamentally changed the philosophy of the way we do business in the Pentagon, and I want to recognize very directly the key role that this subcommittee has played. The initiatives that Secretary Weinberger has been pushing for five years and the Navy has been implementing, in bringing in second sources and competition have cut across the grain of the bureaucratic way of doing business that had become the norm in the defense establishment over the previous 30 years. It was this subcommittee that provided the continuing strong support and the prods to establish and hold the second sources in so many of our programs that have not been quite so popular elsewhere in Congress and certainly hadn't been popular in the defense bureaucracy. So the accomplishments that we have achieved are in no small measure the accomplishments of this subcommittee because it was here that we got our strong support for these second |