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so that they could then, either on the one hand hope that those targets not be hit, and if they are hit, use disinformation about the damage that has taken place. They have used human shields on any number of occasions where they take prisoners and use them in the front as shields.

And your last point is the problem. It is that nexus between terrorist networks, sleeper cells which exist around the world today, the openness of our country and other free people and therefore our vulnerability at the hands of those kinds of weapons.

Mr. ANDREWS. Mr. Secretary, you have said it as well as I have heard it said this morning, and I thank you for that service that you have done, but I think it needs to be said by a lot of us as often as possible. The notion that there needs to be Iraqi conduct-further Iraqi conduct to justify the conclusion that this is a risk with which we can no longer live is wrong. The capacity to enable such conduct by someone else is the risk that we face, and this idea somehow that the charade of governmental cooperation with weapons destruction is good enough I find to be a very dangerous misconception. I thank you for your time.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.
Mrs. Wilson.

Mrs. WILSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I did want to underscore, Mr. Secretary, something my colleague Mr. Snyder said and the need for clarity when the time comes for that clarity. I understand the collage that you and the President and the administration face of laying out now what the threat is, what the challenge is, what the evidence is, building support for addressing that, building the coalition and putting it together and the support in the Congress, but at some point there will be a time for clarity, particularly because I believe that our political objectives should drive our military strategy and our military strategy will drive our forces and so forth. And I hear differing objectives, and maybe they are all part of this, but I think that there will come a time when there will need to be that clarity of objectives, whether it is stopping Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction or enforcement of the U.N. sanctions or a regime change. All of those objectives will require very different military strategies. They will have different risks and different probabilities for success, and at the appropriate point I hope we will hear exactly what the President wants, what the objective is with respect to Iraq.

I did have some questions, probably principally for you, General,

about our readiness to move forward.

We have heard reports that the Army's 10 divisions are at low levels of readiness. They have been rotating in and out of different missions over the last year. Our U.S. fighters, reconnaissance and refueling capability and command and control are also not necessarily at high rates of readiness. Could you comment on that and how long and how you are going about getting them up to speed for what may be a new operation?

General MYERS. You bet. Over the last several years, as you well understand, because Congress has been such a big part of it, there have been many resources put into the readiness equation, and that continues again in 2002. Part of that was in the 2002 supple

mental. So, our forces, our Army divisions, our carrier battle groups, our wings, our Marine expeditionary forces, they are in a very high state of readiness, and they are ready for-again, for whatever they might be asked to do.

Obviously, there are some resources that we just don't have enough of, and again, some of those have been addressed by Congress. Some of our intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities. We know some issues we had with our tanker fleet. But taking all that into consideration-and we do, and we have to prioritize today. We had to prioritize it at peacetime. We had to prioritize, like I said, today in our war on terrorism. We are going to have to prioritize it in any future operation. Some of those issues have been addressed by Congress. We have added more airplanes, more P-3s for the Navy, EP-3s. We have added more RC-135s. We have added some training and simulation capability to help mitigate the impact on the operational assets, but we are still going to have to prioritize those and work those very hard.

Having said that, I will go back to my original statement. The units in our armed forces are prepared for whatever is asked of them, and their state of readiness right now is quite good.

Mrs. WILSON. General, I get kind of that same answer of we will do what we are told to do; by God, we will go do it. At the same time I also get conflicting information about, yeah, we have done 20,000 sorties over the United States and there is a lot of flying hours but not necessarily the combat hours and the bomb-dropping hours and the hours for the guys in back of AWACS doing intercepts to keep their skills up. And I wonder if you could comment a little on that.

General MYERS. Well, those are all valid comments, and I understand those in particular because I used to do that mission. Having said that, we have forces for the defense of this country. The air defense forces. We have other forces that are committed to deploy, and, again, without getting into a lot of detail here, I think we are ready-we are trying to mitigate that. That is what I talked about earlier. What we have to try to find is a rhythm that we can get into that mitigates those kind of impacts and ensures that our people are ready.

For instance, in the Balkans, most of the forces going into the Balkans in the future will be from the reserve component. So, the active duty forces will be ready for other tasks perhaps, and that is a conscious decision. As you know, we have tried to mitigate the impact on our air defense here in the United States, and again, without going into a great deal of war-level detail, we have tried to reduce the times when we ask the AWACS to be present. And we have supplemented land-based radars with other radars to try to make up for that capability. So we are trying to take steps across the spectrum to ensure that we don't run any particular aspect of our force into the ground.

Having said that, we have some forces that are working very, very hard, absolutely.

Mrs. WILSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentlelady. The gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Larson.

Mr. LARSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and let me add to the chorus of those who have congratulated you both for your outstanding service, and Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers, especially for your moving and fitting tribute last week at the Pentagon, as well.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank

Mr. LARSON. My question, I think as Mo Udall said, most of what needs to be said has been said; it is just another one that has said it. But moving forward, we distinguish ourselves from other nations by the rule of law, and obviously the case that has been made by the President from in front of the United Nations I think warrants us taking Saddam Hussein to the court of law and trying him as a war criminal. I would like to know your feelings about that. Second, General Myers, I am recently back from the Middle East as well, and having been to Incirlik and Prince Sultan and to Doha in Qatar, again, the men and women who were in the uniform in this country are outstanding, well equipped, well trained, a credit to this Nation. But one thing that came up in our discussions was the need for us to get out the humanitarian story about this Nation and all the things that we have been doing, and particularly, we talked about maybe even the need to embrace al-Jazeera and those in terms of the ongoing things that we are doing in a very positive nature. If you could comment on that.

And my third and probably most poignant and salient question from my standpoint is this whole idea of the war on terrorism. We have been saying from the outset that we have got to dry up resources. And when you look at Saddam Hussein, it becomes clear to me that the great enabler for Saddam Hussein is oil. It becomes clear to, I think, many of us, some from different perspectives than others, that in order for us to ultimately be tactically successful, when you look at the very nations and those who have gotten around sanctions from what I have read and from what we have heard in committee, it has been that they have end-run the sanctions in their desire to get control of oil. And whether that is France, whether that is Russia, whether that is China, whether that is multinational corporations, at the end of the day it is all about oil.

My question, then, is if in fact the President deems that with the Sword of Damocles hanging over the head and creating this regime change that has been sought in 1998 and is being pressed forward today, who will and what strategies-who will once we take over Iraq, who will control oil in Iraq?

Secretary RUMSFELD. Well, I will take a couple here real quickly. The subject of war crimes of course is something that has been discussed. I don't know that there has been a resolution within the administration. With respect to the situation in Iraq and the fact that sanctions haven't worked well, I think historically they tend not to work over time. They get relaxed. The borders are quite porous. There is an awful lot of military equipment that flows back and forth across Iraq's borders. And you are quite right, the money comes from oil. They have that capability.

The answer is that, with respect to the last part, the President has obviously not made a decision. Those issues are not fully resolved, but there is no question but that the circumstance of Iraq

were the regime to be changed would be that they do have revenues from oils, and it would be managed by whatever government, temporary in the first instance and permanent thereafter, would exist. And

Mr. LARSON. Could those revenues be used to pay for the humanitarian effort in the rebuilding of Afghanistan and actually getting the money directed at the people that have been denied that money from the outset?

Secretary RUMSFELD. You would certainly think so and

Mr. LARSON. And that is the kind of thing that I think should be clarified.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Absolutely, and needless to say, they wouldn't be being spent on weapons of mass destruction and conventional capabilities to threaten their neighbors. That is where that revenue is going right now, the oil revenues. It is going for things that are in direct violation of the U.N. resolutions.

With respect to the humanitarian assistance, you might just want to comment.

General MYERS. You bet. I think first, we can do a better job of talking about what we have done in the humanitarian area. If you take Afghanistan, it was just after we started the conflict there that we had C-17s flying over the country dropping humanitarian rations. Now, these were not routine missions. We had F-15s and F-16s with them to protect them against the potential ground threat. They would slow down to a very slow air speed, making them very vulnerable to ground fire if they were to be engaged. So, I mean, it was not done without some risk, but it was thought to be so important to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe that we did that. And that is always part of any planning of any military operations. That continues in Afghanistan today, as you are well aware, with humanitarian, civil affairs projects, trying to make the life better for the Afghan people.

Have we communicated that perfectly? Probably not, and we need to do a lot better job of that. I totally agree with you.

Mr. HUNTER. Thank the gentleman, and the gentlelady from Virginia, Mrs. Davis.

Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, gentlemen, for being here. Mr. Secretary, I think we all know the war on Afghanistan, we couldn't have done it without the carriers out there, and that is-I have two questions. One is when can we expect to see the public release of the Defense Science Board study on the CVNX? I think it was due last March, and as of yet I don't have any information that it has been released, and I would like the opportunity to review that.

My biggest question to you is at the beginning of your statement you said, "Iraq is part of the war on terror." Then later on you said, "Our job is to connect the dots before the fact." I have heard a lot of testimony about Iraq being somehow involved as terrorists or in the war on terror. Could you give me any specifics to tie them to the war on terror right now so that I can connect the dots back home?

Secretary RUMSFELD. Well, I don't know what you can do back home.

Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. With my constituents.

Secretary RUMSFELD. It is not clear to me what is public. There is no question but that there are that Iraq has been listed as a terrorist state for many years. Iraq has engaged in terrorist acts. Iraq has-is currently offering rewards to the families of children who do the suicide bombings. I think it is 20-$25,000 per family. There are currently al Qaeda in Iraq. There are other terrorist groups in Iraq.

The connection it seems to me, however, ought to be looked at slightly differently. There is no question but the Intelligence Community can give you a good deal of detail if one is looking for it, and they would be happy to do so.

But I don't know that. It seems to me the critical point is the one that Mr. Andrews raised, and it is that nexus between a country that is actively developing weapons of mass destruction that is known as a terrorist state and the use of those weapons, whether by them or through a proxy terrorist network, and it is that that has changed the equation in the world in this 21st century. So even if they did not have terrorist connections, which indeed they do, the potential they have to use terrorist networks to dispense weapons of mass destruction is what is qualitatively different in our current circumstance.

General MYERS. Could I add one thing? It is probably obvious, but I think it bears repeating, and that is, as you know, in Afghanistan as we would recover documents from al Qaeda and equipment, it left no doubt of their quest for weapons of mass destruction. I mean, there is absolutely no doubt that they have tried to make them. They have manuals on how to use them, how to disperse them, and it goes back to that nexus again. And I would say for one of the threats we are facing, al Qaeda, that they clearlythere is no doubt in anybody's mind that they want weapons of mass destruction and would use them.

Secretary RUMSFELD. I will look into the Defense Science Board for you.

Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, gentlemen.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Mr. Chairman, may I just make one comment to Congressman Kirk?

Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Someone checked, and the answer is that today is September 18th, and this says that on September 17th, Operation Northern Watch aircraft reported receiving fire on three occasions at: 3:14, at 3:20 and at 3:30 a.m. eastern standard time on the 17th.

Mr. KIRK. So after the arrival of letter, Iraqi armed forces fired on coalition aircraft implementing a U.N. resolution?

Secretary RUMSFELD. I don't know what time the letter was delivered. I do know what time we were fired on.

Mr. KIRK. Thank you.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentlemen, gentlewoman. Maybe the air defense folks in Iraq were at the Dairy Queen when the letter was sent out. They never got the word.

The gentlelady from California, Mrs. Davis.

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