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

palace where the Governor General was, because there was a radio in the palace that the Seals had that temporarily went out. They used the telephone. We encourage our people to be very resourceful, and they used the telephone until the radio came back on. So, I do not think it was a means of stumbling around because we did not have the communications. The Chiefs did not get into that in any detail, as you suggested, and we should not.

Mr. STRATTON. Well, my understanding of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from experience in World War II, is that you are the strategists, you are the wise men of military activity and you are not concerned with whether somebody has a telephone or the right telephone or whether he has got his mess-kit. This is handled at a lower level. And, I think the attacks that were made in this debate in the past, and what I judge is even a more severe misunderstanding in the Senate, is that somehow the Joint Chiefs are supposed to nurse every G.I. along to make sure that he gets everything he needs.

The JCS should be a body of wise men who are determining what our strategy should be. One of the problems, incidentally, that I discovered in the Philippines is that they have got a crisis because they have got an Army that is superannuated of generals and they do not have anybody there that can fight the MPA. Mr. Marcos, supposedly the commander in chief, has no strategy whatsoever, and the Communists are moving gradually up from the south. The people who would develop the strategy are missing, and they do not have a very good JCS over there.

General WICKHAM. Thank you, sir. I would say, amen, to that. I think the burden of everything that these four gentlemen have been saying before this committee and before the Senate Committee in writing and orally, is: "Do not denigrate the role of the JCS in providing corporate advice in the strategic areas that you talk about".

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Kasich.

Mr. KASICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, gentlemen, for taking the time to come up today. I know we spent a little bit of time plowing the CINC side of this reform. It is one area that I am concerned about, and asked questions about yesterday.

I understand the concern about not wanting to lay additional layers of bureaucracy on our commanders in the field, with responsibility for massive budget justifications-things that would require an awful lot of bureaucracy out there in the field. I wonder how you feel about establishing separate accounts for the CINC's in the area of, for example, command and control, joint training, joint exercises. I know there is a growing realization, that was obvious yesterday from the Secretaries' testimony and from your testimony today that the CINC's are being taken more into account in making budget decisions. Somebody said that the four appearances before the Defense Resources Board and those kinds of things are bringing them more into the action. But, as you know, six former Secretaries have recommended dramatic changes in the ways in which CINC's are brought into resource management decisions, along with some of the present or former CINC's themselves-General Rogers, and Admiral Crowe, for example.

And, I wonder how you feel about the establishment of a separate budget in these areas that are clearly related to their responsibilities.

General WICKHAM. I have been a CINC. I would not want it. I have been, also-

Mr. KASICH. You have been waiting for that question. [Laughter.] General WICKHAM. I have been a military assistant to two Secretaries of Defense and neither of them found problems with the current system. I have been Director of the Joint Staff with one chairman, and I have served another chairman as his assistant in the Joint Staff. They never raised that issue. So, I do not understand what is at work here. Yes, the Congress can legislate that, and I think what you would do is give yourself a very difficult job of trying to pull together a coherent justification for what it is you are spending your money on. I do not know how we, in the Department of Defense, would allocate_joint training moneys among CINC's. There is not enough of it. For example, I do not know how we would allocate enough steaming hours for naval bases to each CINC to meet their needs. By giving the CINC the budget to control it you would have to have the CINC's up here justifying the stewardship of resources that you had legislated they have in the way of separate budgets.

What you have now is the best of all possible worlds, Mr. Kasich. You have the service Chiefs, that must come to you accountable by law for justifying a coherent budget and programs that are globally-balanced and that are balanced in terms of near-term and longterm interests of the Nation. We are the "crew chief", and if you break that up and give parts of it to the unified commanders you blur our obligation, and you blur our ability to manage those resources in an efficient, coherent way. I think the Nation is illserved by that kind of a procedure and you are then going to require the CINC's to have a substantial budget program and analysis staff to prepare them to come before the Congress. They are going to spend more and more time back here in the bureaucracy and less and less time in learning how to fight.

Mr. KASICH. General, I appreciate that strong statement. The Secretary told me yesterday, "Well, we now are starting to get the CINC's more involved in the budget process. Three guys come down here every year and spend time working with the staff in putting a budget together." And, I said, If you mean the CINC's send three in, then that means you have about 600 budget people here within the beltway." He winked at me, and said, "We probably have more than 600 budget people.'

General WICKHAM. That's a cute observation, Mr. Kasich, and it is not true.

Mr. KASICH. OK.

General WICKHAM. When the CINC's are involved and come up with their own priority list I get involved in it personally. All of the Chiefs do when the CINC's come in with their own priority lists. For example, for General Rogers, the CINCEUR, we send teams over there telling him what we are doing about his priority list. My staff has to justify to me where we have met them, and where not. That is justified also to the Secretary of the Army, whether he has 3 people versus our 30, and that is about the ratio