Secretary of Defense said: "Well, he did not mean that." So, when you get that kind of relationship that you have to deal with in our democracy, you have just got to face it. The way I handled that from then on was that I never sent out a message to the forces involving combat that I did not get the Secretary of Defense to initial before I sent it out.

The Secretary of Defense will never know how to write messages to his military people. If the President approves an operation, like, say, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, and the Secretary of Defense approves it, it must take 15 or 20 messages to carry out that one sentence directive, by the time you line up all the people that have to know about it and have to be involved in it. So, whether the chain of command goes through the Chairman is a moot point. It will always go through the Chairman because a Secretary of Defense does not know how to write the message and he never will know because they keep changing.

So, the National Command Authority works, I think, in a commonsense way. It has to. But I think, in this bill, you have loaded the Chairman down with details about budgets and personnel selections and things like that, so that he is either going to have to have a very large staff or he simply will not be able to take care of his primary duty, which is to supervise and manage the strategic direction of the Armed Forces.

So, I would hope that these things in the Senate and House bills will be toned down, in both bills. I have resigned myself to the fact that there is going to be a major change because it has been picked up by the media and it is hyped through and through. All this hype about everything has gotten everybody's momentum going so that I do not think it can be stopped. But I do think that I would just caution you to apply some common sense and please take a real look at the impact of these changes on military people. Recognize that you cannot change the political system, and also that the relationship between the President and Secretary of Defense is very important.

It is not always hunky-dory, you know, and the Chairman has to deal with that. But, I think it is impossible to make a neat little package and, so, even though you pass this bill, word for word, do not be surprised that in less than a year, the thing starts falling apart again.

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Hopkins.

Mr. HOPKINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Admiral, I want to thank you for your testimony today, and let me tell you, first of all, that I am not here to disagree with you. Anything that I might ask you is only an effort on my part to challenge your mind and your past and your history in an effort to come to a good conclusion myself. I have listened to probably 90 percent of the testimony before this subcommittee, and I must tell you that I have not signed on to any of the bills at this point. I may be looking for a combination of those bills. I may vote against it all. I do not know that. But, I am interested in some of the things you said, and I would like for you to use your experience in helping me come to a better conclusion. I remember early on that you said that you and Admiral Crowe and General Vessey and others disagreed with the basic thrust of this legislation. You also

said that young soldiers are not happy dodging bullets when they know that their leaders did not have much to do with the decision. I can appreciate that. I remember the testimony coming before this subcommittee on the hostage rescue attempt in Iran, where eight Americans died, and I remember the chain of command in effect during that operation. I remember the testimony that came before this subcommittee on the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the changes in the rules of engagement and the chain of command that they went through.

The point, I guess, that I am making, Admiral, is that these examples occurred. Under our current setup, I know that we do not live in a perfect world, and I do not have all the answers for those things. I do not want to imply that at all. But I would like to make it as perfect as I can for our world and for our people. To that end, that is what I am trying to do. What would you do to improve this situation, based on your experience? What would be your priorities? If you cannot change it all, knowing that it is not perfect, but based on your history and your experience, what would be your priorities for change to make it a better situation?

Admiral MOORER. Well, thank you, Mr. Hopkins.

I think, as I said earlier, that the organization as now set up, in effect, was put together on the basis of the requirements for World War III. The Beirut and Iranian incidents that you mentioned, and Grenada also, are the kinds of low-level confrontations that we have to deal with today with terrorism and so on. Remember, for instance, that when we intercepted the Egyptian plane during the Achille Lauro incident, which I think involved about seven aircraft, the President, during his press conference that night, could not even talk about the budget because the press only wanted to talk about that one incident.

Well, of course, in a real war, there are 15 or 20 such events taking place every hour. The press would not have enough paper, and the President would not have enough time, to talk about them because he would not even know about them. In answer to your question, in my view, I think we need a joint task force for these incidents, I call them, and I would have the joint task force report directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and be allocated forces from the unified commands. The unified commanders should be kept informed as to what is going on, but you would have a direct chain because every President is going to be harassed to death, and he has to keep up with the details of little incidents like the ones that you have mentioned. They were not so little. But, nevertheless, I think that I have problems, for instance, with having a unified commander living in a country that does not approve of our policy. For instance, this happened in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The Germans were pretty difficult, and they did not even want us to take our own equipment out of Germany and take it to Israel, and not one NATO nation would let us land an airplane in the airfields because they did not agree with our policy.

So, I think, to answer your question, I am in favor of setting up a joint task force for small emergencies.

Mr. HOPKINS. May I just follow up on that, Mr. Chairman, just briefly?

Mr. NICHOLS. Sure.

Mr. HOPKINS. Admiral, would that not be contradicting something that you might have just said earlier? Let me ask you, for the record, can you clarify that? Because would that not set up another layer of bureaucracy, something that you seemed to oppose earlier?

Admiral MOORER. No, I don't think so, because I am not talking about a full-scale staff. I am talking about a group in the Pentagon that is the source of passing information from the President to the forces that have been assigned.

Obviously, you are not going to send them if, say, the problem is in the Indian Ocean. You are not going to fly them out to the Indian Ocean. I am not talking about that. You would designate officers on the scene as the commanders of the operation, but you would have them address their messages to this joint task force.

So, there would be no question about the fact that you had rapid back-and-forth communication.

Mr. HOPKINS. I wish I had more time, Admiral.

Thank you very much.

Admiral MOORER. Yes, sir.

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Mavroules.

Mr. MAVROULES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Admiral, for your testimony this morning.

I want to follow up a little bit on what Mr. Hopkins was alluding to, and I want to get back to the Lebanon situation.

Have you had a chance to read the report put out by this committee, Admiral, and the Long Commission report, by any chance? Admiral MOORER. Well, I read excerpts from it. I have not really studied it.

Mr. MAVROULES. I might suggest that you might want to take a look at that for further testimony relative to the chain of command and some of the things that took place during that atrocious time in our history, at least in my judgment. What I am trying to find out is: How can we stop interference with the chain of command and how can we stop the infighting between the Defense Department and the State Department? When the Marines went into Beirut in 1983, there was a specific mission put forth by the President. He referred to the Marines as peacekeepers, and all of that kind of thing; but as we got more and more into details, taking sworn testimony from people, we found that the State Department was making decisions as to even where our Marines would be stationed, geographically, in Lebanon. Then, when it came time to make decisions, the chain of command was not ready. It was in absolute disarray, so that no one person was responsible for making a decision.

Let met give you an example: The battleship bombardment of the Shouf Mountains. That is the kind of thing that really bothers me. You can even trade this back to the Vietnam experience. Who is making the decisions? Was it the White House or the State Department? Were they working in conjunction with the Defense people? Or were some people going one way and other people going another way? Therefore, we did not have a cohesive policy as to where we were going or what we were going to do when we got there.

I think you talked about that a little bit. Could you kind of pick up on that a little bit? Could you just give me your views?

Admiral MOORER. Yes. In the first place, let me say that the State Department always takes a very conservative position. I have never known anybody in the State Department, during my experience-although the press has advertised the difference between the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State recently, about the use of military force who did not, generally speaking, think that practically every problem should be solved by diplomacy rather than by the demonstration of force.

I agree with you-I think there is built into our system an adversarial relationship between Defense and State, just like there is an adversarial relationship between the Congress and the executive branch. The intention of the people that wrote the Constitution was to set it up in such a way that, it would not pin down everything. Everything was not pinned down and was left ambiguous on purpose, I think.

But, what you say is absolutely true, and I call them the handringers. I mean, the State Department, for instance, did not want to mine Haiphong Harbor. They did not want to conduct the bombing in Christmas to get the POW's free, and, so, I have had my problems with the State Department. I guarantee you, what you say is right. I think that the only man that can stop it is the President. He can stop it because he is the Commander in Chief.

Mr. MAVROULES. Let me just follow up on that, and I appreciate your candor, Admiral. In Lebanon, the Secretary of Defense recommended against sending our peacekeeping force into Lebanon. As a matter of fact, the majority of the Joint Chiefs also recommended against it. If they were overruled by the State Department and by the President, in my judgment, that is a very dangerous precedent we are setting forth as a nation. Even the geographic location where our people were stationed in Lebanon was against the best judgment of those who understand military operation a hell of a lot better than people sitting behind a desk.

Admiral MoORER. Yes, sir.

Mr. MAVROULES. Do you have any comments on that?

Admiral MOORER. Yes, sir. I think that what happened in Lebanon was that the game changed. When they were sent in as peacekeepers, it was thought that the Israelis would just stop and wait along the border. The first thing you know, the Israelis were in Beirut. So, the whole condition changed, I think, and the rules of engagement were not changed fast enough to keep up with the political situation that was developing over there. But, that is a special case. Every case is different. I do not know how you are going to correct that problem. I think we are always going to have it. We had it during World War II all the time. You had a big argument as to whether or not we were going to put all the supplies and forces into Europe or whether we are going to put some in the Pacific and start fighting over there at the same time. Take the Dien Bien Phu situation. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was Admiral Radford at the time, wanted to go to the assistance of the French in full force, but the State Department did not want to do that. The President decided with them, and, so we did not get involved in rescuing the French.

But, I do not know how you are going to avoid having these senior people express their position and win out before the President. If you listen to the discussions in the National Security Council meetings, you would see that those kinds of confrontations come about all the time, and the President has to finally make a decision.

But, I do not know of any way, sir. If you have a single dictator and he is wrong, you are in a hell of a fix. The point is that our system does provide a certain amount of balance and forces the consideration of all alternatives. That is what worries me about this bill. The direction in which we are going is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is going to be the No. 1 decisionmaker in the military organization, and he will not get the full benefit, I am afraid, of the other services.

Mr. MAVROULES. Mr. Kasich.

Mr. KASICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I thank you, Admiral, for coming. You have really a wide range of experience, and not only that, you sound just like the Chairman. You speak like the Chairman with that same accent.

Mr. NICHOLS. Well, he talks so we can understand him, Mr. Kasich. [Laughter.]

Mr. KASICH. Admiral, let me follow up on the chairman's question in regard to the CINC's.

I hear what you are saying about your concerns with bureaucracy. My concern is in having read a variety of books and listened to the witnesses that have come before this committee. They include several former Secretaries of Defense from both sides of the aisle and all philosophies; many of the CINC's, both former and present-and one former, CINC, at least who is now the Chairman of the JCS, who says he has to live with the words that he said back when he was a CINC-and finally the Packard Commission, which, I think, has great respect. Many of those same ideas were reflected in the CSIS study at Georgetown. We have also heard testimony from General Vessey and Larry Korb, who most recently served in the administration.

In the testimony, all of them reflect the need to raise the level of the CINC's authority, even while recognizing that over the last several years, the CINC's have become more involved in the policy process; but yet they all have said we need to do much more to bring the CINC's into the resource decisionmaking process.

What would your objection be to letting the Secretary of Defense look at the CINC's around the world and decide whether they ought to submit proposals for budgets that would include such limited areas as joint exercises, force training, contingencies, and some selected operations? Couldn't we give the Secretary of Defense the option to say we ought to have set aside some of these budget areas? Wouldn't a narrowly defined CINC's budget allowing them to perform joint exercises, force training, and contingencies, answer the concern of everybody that the CINC's do not have enough power? What would your feeling be on that particular point?

Admiral MOORER. Well, I think, in the first place, that by and large, that is what has happened. These exercises you are referring to are scheduled a couple of years in advance, and when the budget is made out, the force levels are examined, and simple things, like