that is how we usually come out of the DRB session, with everybody just about as unhappy as the next one.

Mr. NICHOLS. General Gabriel.

General GABRIEL. Well, the CINC's have many ways to get their story told. They go through their components to the Services, they come through the JCS, and they go directly to the Secretary of Defense. As I said, earlier, they work on the Defense Guidance-and that is the bible. That is what we are all supposed to salute, and go out and try to build those forces to meet that guidance.

But, let me give you an example. When I was the commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe-I was there for a couple of years-I really hammered two subjects when I come back here to Congress-both through my CINC and when I came directly. The first was chemical weapons. That was the most destabilizing thing in Europe at the time, I thought, and it probably still is in terms of what the Soviets have, what we have, and how chemical weapons might be used. The second subject was the collocated operating bases (COB's) program. We could not get them off the dime because NATO infrastructure funds-the pot of money that everybody has to draw from to support their bases-could not be obtained to support them unless the U.S. Congress would provide prefinancing. Congress said at that time, if it is NATO-eligible, NATO pays. So we were caught in the middle.

Bernie Rogers came back every year and stomped and I stomped. Finally, the last 2 or 3 years we have done some good. We have gotten some funding, and within another few years we ought to have at least minimum, essential facilities for all COB's. The ones we have identified, about 70, are located throughout Europe, so we can hit the ground running when we get there.

But, that is the way the system worked. We have all kinds of different ways to get the story told. And, I think the CINC's do it well. All of them are not going to get everything they want. It cannot be that way.

Mr. NICHOLS. General Kelley.

General KELLEY. Well, given the planning, programming, and budgeting phases during those kinds of formulations, it is an iterative process, with our components working on a day-to-day basis with the CINC. But, let me recapture the conversation I had with you to show the intricacies of the more formal process, where the CINC really has a tremendous interface in every level of planning, programming, and budgeting. And this is new. This is not old-hat. It has only been going on for several years.

The guidance that the Secretary puts out, is called Defense Guidance. Two times during the formulation of the Defense Guidance, the Commanders in Chief come in and sit with the Secretary of Defense, the service Secretaries, all of the service Chiefs, all of the Assistant Secretaries, and all the Under Secretaries, and he has a presentation, and he says what he likes and does not like.

Then, after we go back and do our programs, the CINC comes back in and he critiques these. Meanwhile, he is working all the time with our components. Then, the last time is when we formulate the budget. The CINC's come back in again and it becomes a report card in front of the Secretary of Defense, where the CINC actually gets up and critiques our budgets, our service budgets, as

to their adequacy to perform his missions as assigned by the national command authorities.

So, it is an iterative process. But for anyone to say that the CINC does not have the authority and the voice in the current planning, programming, and budgeting system, is quite frankly, Mr. Chairman, probably smoking something that is illegal in the United States.

Mr. NICHOLS. Do any of you have any suggestions that would improve the relationship with the CINC's this year?

Admiral WATKINS. Yes, sir. I think we all do, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. NICHOLS. I am not saying it is bad-

Admiral WATKINS. No, we all do, Mr. Chairman. And, I think you will see in our statements, in our formal statements, that we have been very aggressive in saying what needs to be improved. We, the Chiefs, about 9 months ago, all agreed to open the famous JCS Pub. 2, the Unified Action Armed Forces Pub-it is the bureaucratic bible that needs modernizing. We all know that. It has got some elements in there that need to be cleaned up. We have opened that publication up with the idea that we are going to strengthen the CINC's, streamline our process, and eliminate the unnecessary bureaucracy in there that leads people to use such terms as "logrolling" which none of us understand, but it is a common term that was used in the last decade, and we reject the concept. We do not do that kind of thing today. We do not hold up anything.

In fact, in many cases, we do not even follow the strict procedures in JCS Pub 2, because we do think they are bureaucratic. We have opened that publication up, and are going to submit a report in June to the Secretary of Defense on what we can do to change it. We would like the Congress to give us a chance to come back later to you and say, "here is the way it was before, here is the way it is now." We think it is a very aggressive, very progressive modernization of a publication which was not changed by the very critics of the last decade who are chastising us. Why didn't they do it when they were there? Why do they raise all of these issues now? Where were they when we needed help? We are the reformers. We have been reforming up a storm in the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the past 4 years. And we are quite proud of that fact. We would like you to admonish us to come back and tell you what we have done to streamline, to strengthen the system. Then have the CINC's come in and ask them, "Well, have they done it? Or are they just giving us a fog job?" If you would let us do that, we think we could do a pretty good job for you without a lot of legal hassel, without a lot of laws that specify or tell us how to "suck eggs.

Mr. NICHOLS. I wish we had the time that we could wait until June, admiral. I hardly see how we can do that and expect to get legislation out this year. And, of course, we intend to hear from the CINC's-I believe on the 10th and 11th and 12th of March. Mr. Hopkins.

Mr. HOPKINS. No more questions.

Mr. NICHOLS. Mrs. Byron.

Mrs. BYRON. No, I have no questions, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Carney.

Mr. CARNEY. No, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. NICHOLS. Chairman Stratton, do you have any questions? Mr. STRATTON. Mr. Chairman, I gather from these papers that the Senate bill is the one that is being considered. Is that available to us?

Mr. NICHOLS. I do not believe the Senate bill is available. It has started to be marked up, I understand, Mr. Stratton. When they are going to get it out, I am not sure. I know they have been engaged this past week in markup sessions over there. I think the papers that you are looking at refer to a staff report, a rather voluminous staff report that was made at the request of Senator Goldwater and Senator Nunn. And, I believe that when they talk about the Senate proposal, that is the document to have in mind. Mr. HOPKINS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Hopkins.

Mr. HOPKINS. I think, Sam, what the situation is, as I understand it, is that Chairman Aspin has asked this subcommittee to come up with its proposal, knowing that the Senate is going to be marking the bill, so that we will have something to go to conference with. Would that be accurate?

Mr. NICHOLS. That is correct, and he has asked that the bill prepared by this committee be available at the time of the markup of the authorization bill. So, for that reason we are looking at somewhere around mid-March. Any further questions, anyone on the committee? Mr. Lally, do you have a question?

Mr. LALLY. I have only one, Mr. Chairman. General Wickham addressed this in his statement, and gave his views on the pending legislation; but before this committee now is a bill, H.R. 4068, which would abolish the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency and transfer their functions to the military departments. The bill would also prohibit any increase in the civilian personnel authorizations of the military departments in order to carry out the transfer of these functions.

I was just wondering if I could get the views of the other three chiefs on this proposal, this legislative proposal.

General WICKHAM. As I indicated earlier, Mr. Lally, the Army uses about 1.2 million items, food, equipment, and so forth, that we procure. Some 900,000 of those are managed by the Defense Logistics Agency. Were we to have to absorb that requirement of managing those 900,000 items that we do not do now, without any additional people, I think that this would be a monumental stewardship problem. I think you would have them in spades. We do not have the people to put into the plant to oversee the quality control of items that are being procured by various parts of the Government. So, I think that it would be a serious mistake to break up DLA and have each service take over its own responsibility, but with no more people. There was wisdom in creating the Defense Logistics Agency. That is not to say that it cannot stand some efficiencies in terms of strength, authorizations, adjustments, and that kind of thing. It probably could. But, I think there was wisdom in creating a centralized organization to procure common items for the Defense Department. I would be against disestablishing it.

The same applies with the Defense Contract Audit Agency. If we did not have the Audit Agency, we would need to have more auditors. That goes back to the whole stewardship issue. To do away

with the Defense Contract Audit Agency, and say: Army, take care of that with your Army Audit Agency, but with no more people. We are spread too thin as it is now, and I think that we would have less ability to provide solid stewardship for the resources that are entrusted to us to do that.

Mr. NICHOLS. Admiral.

Admiral WATKINS. My only additional comments would be, Mr. Lally, is that I think it is very important that there be some kind of a clear look into the potential redundancy for execution of certain functions. I personally believe, for example, that we have established too many inspectors general. I believe that we should be given, in the services, the responsibility and the accountability for proper execution of policy. Where we can consolidate resources, and have common sources of staffing, we should do that.

And, I believe there is a role for DLA in that regard. DLA, for the U.S. Navy, handles about 55 percent of our line items. Now, how much can be efficiently transferred, I just do not know. I have no personal feel for that. But, I do believe that we should decentralize the execution to the extent we can. Then hold us accountable, not the Secretary of Defense, for each toilet seat or diode or something that is outside limits, but be bought with a contract specification. We would like to get into that to the extent we can. And, yet we could not absorb 55 percent of the DLA line items today under the ground rules you laid out. I believe that is the kind of answer you want. I cannot give a better answer, because I do not have the detailed knowledge. But, I think there is potential for redundant and confusing accountability and responsibility lines for audit and for ownership accountability. Where they are crossservice in nature, clearly we should have central organizations controlling those common items. Where they are service-specific, I question whether or not we should be in some massive organization that does not have a sense of urgency, accountability and responsibility by law.

So, I would give us what is rightfully ours to do, and do right, and then bring the common items into a common agency, such as DLA. I think the abolishment is heavy-handed, just as the abolishment of the Joint Chiefs of the Staff was a heavy-handed item in the initial Senate report.

General GABRIEL. Yes. I think it would be a mistake to break up DLA and DCAA, and I would agree with what both Jim Watkins and John Wickham have said. The agencies should handle common-user items. That is the reason you have DLA in the first place, to handle common-user items. If they have gotten beyond their bounds and they are doing some things that are strictly single-service, then I think we ought to take a look at that-spread it out again. I think there probably are some management efficiencies that still could be made in the organization. I say that without having been through the 50,000 people and what they all do.

Concerning the DCAA, we do need objective audits.

General KELLEY. I think to consider giving up DLA and assuming all of those tasks and functions within the current service staffs makes a very erroneous assumption-that the current service staffs are underemployed. They are very much employed.

It also ignores the tremendous magnitude of the tasks currently performed by DLA. So I agree with all the comments of my colleagues; but I want to emphasize that to consider doing away with the Defense Logistics Agency and thinking that you are going to have manpower savings, is a very, very dangerous route to go. Mr. LALLY. Thank you.

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Stratton.

Mr. STRATTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to address a question to Admiral Watkins and General Wickham. It is my understanding that the President today is revisiting Grenada and I recall that, during the debate on this legislation, the point was made not only in the House bill, but also in the Senate bill, that one of the failures of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was that there were not-there were different telephones for the Navy and for the Army. It seems to me that a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not the person who ought to be determining what were the proper telephones. That ought to be the responsibility of the Commander of the operation. I wonder if Admiral Watkins and General Wickham would agree with that?

General WICKHAM. Yes, sir. I think we would agree with that. We covered this to some extent here-about some of the issues with Grenada earlier, before you arrived sir. However, let me just cover one point here. That is a subject that probably needs to be done at the unified commander level. He has a communications specialist that can deal with that. There were some communications problems in Grenada, to be sure. The Navy did not have all of the secure Vinson equipment. It has a 5-year program to distribute it out, the same as we do. We happened to have it, because of our Rangers being on the alert, and our 82d Airborne, being our premier force for alert, had the Vinson gear. So we had some discontinuities, but that was fixed quickly with liaison teams and the equipment got to where it was needed.

I think we had some difficulty with satellite equipment keeping in sync with the satellites as the ships moved around. Those also were things that were fixed quickly.

As Admiral Watkins indicated, the issue about credit card use by people in Grenada, that is, those observations that we had to use credit cards because we could not communicate elsewhere. We have tried to find the truth to that, and there is no truth to that.

[The following information was received for the record:]

A U.S. Headquarters used in-country commercial communications when Seals had broken their radio and were trapped in the Governor General's residence. (Key phone numbers were obtained as part of the planning process). Fire support requests were made to the US HQ at Point Salines Airfield, then relayed by TACSAT to supporting AC-130.

Prior to execution, US personnel in Barbados may have used credit cards to call Ft. Bragg. U.S. SOP calls for issue of credit cards during operations of this type. The 82nd ABN DIV did not use credit cards to call for fire support. They did have an element in Barbados for aviation support that used commercial lines to call Ft. Bragg for needed supply items.

At day 7 or 8, Civil Affairs personnel may have used credit cards to make calls back to their headquarters.

Use of available commercial communications during tactical operations is acceptable military procedure. Use of such techniques was consistent with our doctrine.

We have talked to people who did use credit cards, and the reason they did. One called from Point Salines Air Field to the