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You said just a few days ago that there will not be a signing ceremony on the U.S.S. Missouri to signal the end of the war on terrorism. But what will victory look like? How will I as John Q. Citizen know that I have accomplished my objective? What is the objective beyond what has been said: We will keep them on the run, we will run them down, they cannot hide, we will bring them to justice, victory will be ours. What is victory? What is going to be our standard of measurement?

Also, the President in his State of the Union Address singled out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. He said: "All nations should know America will do what is necessary to ensure our Nation's security. We will be deliberate. Yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril grows closer and closer."

Now, what does this mean? How about North Korea? The President included North Korea in his axis of evil. I wonder if the President has the authority to send U.S. troops into North Korea on the strength of the September 14 resolution?

These are questions which I will ask. Now, it may be that you will not be able to answer these today. Maybe you will not have the time. But the questions ought to be asked. I have a responsibility to ask these questions, and I hope that we Senators will keep in mind this Constitution, which I hold in my hand. Yes, President Bush is the Commander in Chief, but take a look at this Constitution and see what powers this Constitution gives a Commander in Chief. Take a look also at the congressional powers in section 8.

Let us not forget this Constitution. We are in a conflict now and we intend to win, but when will we know when we have won? How many more years will we be appropriating at the rate of a billion dollars a day, when we have the baby boom generation looking at it?

We who are here are going to have to answer these questions. It may be the popular thing today to say "me too." So I say "me too," but I also say that "me too" has a responsibility under this Constitution to look to other responsibilities to which the President referred in his speech at the Citadel, "other great responsibilities." So if I may just ask those two or three questions. Let me ask them again so that we will be clear: What is our goal? What is our goal in the war on terrorism, number one? How will we know when we have achieved our goal? What will victory look like? Finally, the specific question: How about North Korea, which the President included in his axis of evil? Do you believe that the President has the authority to send U.S. troops into North Korea on the strength of the September 14 resolution, for which I voted? I thank you.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, Senator Byrd, for your comments and your questions. There is no question that the defense request is an enormous amount of money. However, the fact is that it is about 3.3 percent of our gross domestic product. It is a much smaller demand today than it has been during my adult lifetime in terms of use of funds for defense purposes as opposed to nondefense purposes.

As a percentage of the Federal budget, it is down from over 50 percent to about 16.9 percent. So it is demanding a smaller per

centage even though, as you point out, it is a much larger total number of dollars.

Those questions are important questions, and I quite agree that it is appropriate for members of the House and the Senate to pose them and to pose them vigorously. I will do my best to respond to the first one, as to what is the goal. The goal is to recognize that we are living in a dramatically different period than we did in my time in Washington, dating back to the 1950s.

We had a big margin for error in those days, when weapons had shorter reach and less power. There were not multiple nations with weapons of mass destruction. Today we have a very modest margin for error. An error today, with the existence of weapons of mass destruction, changes the effects dramatically. So we cannot afford to make a mistake.

It seems to me the goal is to recognize that the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorist states that have those weapons and that have relationships with terrorist networks is a particularly dangerous circumstance for the world. You know that well and that was the essence of the President's State of the Union address.

How will we know when we have won, so to speak? It is a very difficult thing to say, because there are not armies, navies, and air forces arrayed against each other. Instead, there are these terrorist networks that are hiding out there. We know thousands and thousands were trained in these terrorist training camps in 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 countries. We know that they are well trained, and we have seen the training manuals that taught them and we saw the skill that was demonstrated on September 11.

The complexity and difficulty of the problem is that we are putting pressure on them. You said we are chasing them, we are running them to ground, we are trying to root them out. That is true, and it is part of the law enforcement effort that is taking place. All across the globe, people are being arrested, people are being interrogated, intelligence information is being gathered, and intelligence information is being shared.

The cumulative effect of the pressure that is being put on these bank accounts are being closed. We are chasing them out of Afghanistan. We have other countries making arrests. Singapore just made a series of arrests that very likely stopped some very serious terrorist acts. All of that pressure is making life very difficult for those people. They are not going to be as successful in terrorizing and killing innocent people as they would otherwise have been.

So how do we know when we have succeeded? I suppose we will know we have succeeded when our collective free world intelligence-gathering apparatus tells us that, in fact, countries are no longer harboring terrorists, that the countries where these terrorists have found haven have decided it is not in their interest to do that, countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya, and all the others that have been on the terrorist list. Everyone knows those countries. They are no longer harboring terrorists; fewer people give money to terrorist organizations; fewer recruits are signed up by terrorist organizations; more people are fleeing terrorist organizations; and more people are functioning with a heightened degree of awareness and sensitivity, turning in people

that in fact look like they may be engaged in terrorist acts. We have had some good success there.

Is it as simple as World War II? No, it is not. It is much more complex. I appreciate your question.

With respect to North Korea, I do not know that I can answer that question effectively. Obviously, these are judgments that the President of the United States makes. We do know certain things about North Korea. We know that they have probably 100,000 to 200,000 people in detention camps, that they are repressing their people, and that they are starving their people. We know they have a very active weapons of mass destruction program, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. We know that they will sell almost anything to anyone on the face of the earth for hard currency, and they do it. They do it every single day.

I would submit that the President's State of the Union message was very likely to let the world know what I just said: people best be careful about spreading weapons of mass destruction to terrorist networks, as the North Korean government has been wont to do. Senator BYRD. Mr. Secretary, I have greatly overextended my time. Thank you very much.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir.

Senator KENNEDY. Senator Sessions.

Senator SESSIONS. Thank you, Senator Kennedy.

I serve under Senator Kennedy on the Subcommittee on Seapower and we have some real interest on those issues. I would like to join his expression of concern.

I also want to, I know as Senator Kennedy intended, to try to take a look at where we are in seapower and what we can do to strengthen that.

Mr. Secretary, we have come a long way since September 11. Our Nation was in shock and in a state of real unease. Through President Bush's vigorous leadership, the professional leadership of General Myers, and the effort of all the men and women in uniform, we have a good vision about where we need to go as a Nation. I salute you for it.

I never thought that we could guarantee that Osama bin Laden would be captured and you made that clear from day one. But one thing that both the President and you said was that nations and governments that harbor him are going to be in big trouble. The Taliban, that government that harbored bin Laden, allowed him to operate and plan his attack on the United States to kill innocent American citizens, has fallen. It no longer exists, and I salute you for achieving that. I think that was very important as a signal to the world of the seriousness with which the United States takes these kind of activities.

I am hopeful other nations in the future will think twice if they were to consider allowing terrorists to operate from within their countries or in fact support them directly.

I say that with great appreciation for the leadership that you have given us. I also was a strong supporter of your initial vision for defense, that we must transform our Defense Department. President Bush said there may be generations of technology that we could leap. We never have enough money to do everything that

we need to do. It is essential that we be as creative and as technologically advanced as possible.

I am very appreciative of your commitment to transform our Defense Department, which was clear and unequivocal before September 11. I am sure that within the vast Defense Department, the defense contracting crew, and the politicians here in Congress, there is objections all along the way.

My question to you is, after this military effort, after seeing at least this face of what a modern battlefield might look like, are you more or less convinced that we need to transform and what are some of your ideas in that regard?

Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you very much, Senator Sessions. There is no question of the many hours that General Myers and I spend together with the chiefs and with the senior officials in the Department. But what has taken place in Afghanistan has underlined and underpinned the efforts that we have been engaged in with respect to transformation. We have seen significant changes from the Desert Storm to Kosovo to Afghanistan, and it has pointed up the importance of information, battlefield, and situational awareness. It has pointed up the importance of connectivity and interoperability, as General Myers said in his opening statement. It has, in my view, underlined the importance of seeing that we exercise and train like we fight, and we are taking steps to see that we do a better job of that.

I think that it is probably true of every war, every conflict, that you immediately begin the process of saying what are the lessons to be learned. We have started that already. Even though we are far from finished in Afghanistan and we have a lot more to do with respect to the war on terror, we have begun that process of trying to capture the important things that we have experienced already. I would say one thing about transformation. There is a tendency for all of us to think of it in terms of a weapons system or a new unique way of doing something. I think of it also in terms of people. General Richard Myers, General Peter Pace, and General John Jumper are three individuals that have very recently been placed in their posts by the President of the United States. All of us had discussions about transformation during the decisionmaking process as to who should be the new chairman and who should be the vice chairman.

We now have 6 to 10 combatant commander openings coming up in the next 12 months. I would hazard a guess that 5 years from now, looking back, we will say that the single most transformational thing we did was to select those people. They will then fashion their staffs and their key people and they will be involved in the promotions of the people under them. Those decisions that are going to be made in the next 12 months will affect the United States of America for the next decade and a half.

Senator SESSIONS. I think the American people have had an unusual opportunity to see you and your leadership style, and they have great confidence in you and your vision for our Defense Department. I think that there is a window of opportunity here. I hope that you will push it. Please know that I would like to support you in it.

There are a number of issues on seapower that I am wrestling with. I am not exactly sure what the right number of ships should be for our Navy, but we need to know that. We need to know whether or not we can use some aging ships. We are decommissioning ships with projected life spans of 10 years or more left. I am not sure that is wise.

We know that it takes three ships to keep one ship on station. Perhaps we can do a better job of forward-deploying or forward-stationing ships, and increase our effective ship force structure in that regard.

There are a number of things that we could do there. Mr. Secretary, I would just ask if you are going to be looking at some of these potential changes that could effectively allow us to have more ships deployed than we have today, without maybe building as many new ships as we would like to build.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Senator Sessions, thank you so much for your support on transformation and your generous comments. There has been the beginning of an analysis of shipbuilding_and the size of the Navy, that is coming close to being completed, I believe

Mr. ZAKHEIM. That is correct, sir.

Secretary RUMSFELD. It has not been presented to me, but it addresses the issues that you, Senator Collins, Senator Warner, and so many others who have such an active interest in shipbuilding and the importance of the Navy and seapower have raised. I do not know the answer to your question as to reactivating ships. It is going to be a part of that study and I expect to be briefed on that some time in the period right ahead.

I do know that there is not anyone involved in the Navy that made the recommendations for this particular shipbuilding budget, which we have all agreed is skinny. Everyone agrees that the number of ships, if you did a straight line projection using five ships a year, results in an unacceptably small Navy. There is just no question about that.

We have no intention of doing that. As I believe came up in the discussion with Senator Warner, the fact is that the average age of our ships is relatively young. I think it is 15 or 16 years and that is why the Navy made the choice they made. We can afford for a year or two to be underbuilding, as long as we recognize that in the out years we simply must get back up to the 7 to 10 level. In the meantime, we have to do a good job with respect to the shipyards of recognizing the importance of the industrial base and finding ways to balance the tasks that need to be done by way of engineering and other aspects of shipbuilding, even though we are living in a period with relatively low number of total ships.

Senator SESSIONS. Just briefly, would you comment: Do you believe that the importance of dominance in space and unmanned vehicles is adequately addressed in this budget? Have you provided increases for those two areas that I think are clearly proven to be essential for the modern battlefield?

Secretary RUMSFELD. I am personally satisfied that we have addressed the space issue in a responsible way. We have the kinds of increases that are going to be necessary to assure that we do not persist over a sustained period of time with a high degree of vul

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