(5) The Senate defense reorganization bill. The Senate Armed Services Committee is at present engaged in drafting a defense reorganization bill. Although the subcommittee will focus on the areas outlined above, Members will be interested to receive testimony from witnesses on other issues raised by the Senate bill, if it becomes available. Recognizing your policy against appearing before subcommittees, we request that you, or your designee, and other appropriate Department of Defense officials testify before the Investigations Subcommittee during the coming organization hearings. Although the subcommittee will attempt to hear from all of the officials you nominate, we request that the following be scheduled to testify: the secretaries of each military department; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; several unified and specified commanders; several defense agency heads; and the officials of the Office of the Secretary of Defense responsible for manpower and oversight of one or more defense agencies. We hope that you, or your designee, will be the first DOD witness. We would like to schedule that appearance for Wednesday February 19 at 9:30 a.m. in room 2216 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Remaining Department witnesses will be heard on February 20 and 21 and during the following week. Our contact for witness scheduling and other arrangements is Mr. Archie D. Barrett, 225-4256. We realize that this letter imposes an additional burden on Department officials at a time when other pressing demands must also be met. It is important, however, that the Members of the House Armed Services Committee inform themselves quickly and thoroughly on the issues we have outlined. Increasing public demand for a reassessment of defense organization, and the Senate action in response, have placed the subject on the committee agenda. Consequently, we hope that you and your department will cooperate fully in assisting Members as they assess the full range of issues associated with defense organization. Sincerely, BILL NICHOLS, Chairman, Investigations Subcommittee. We're going to adjourn the committee, and I call to the attention of everybody that tomorrow at 2, we're going to hear from the service Chiefs. Thank you, gentlemen. [Whereupon, at 4 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.] HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Thursday, February 20, 1986. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:57 p.m., in room. 2216, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Bill Nichols (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. STATEMENT OF HON. BILL NICHOLS, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ALABAMA, CHAIRMAN, INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE Mr. NICHOLS. The subcommittee will come to order. Gentlemen, in the interest of time, I think we will go ahead and get started. Í hope we have some members here a little later on. Today, we are going to hear from the Service Chiefs, Gen. John Wickham, Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. George Gabriel, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Adm. James Watkins, Chief of Naval Operations, and Gen. P.X. Kelley, the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Let me just say as an afterthought, if anybody had ever told me, 40 years ago when I was a second lieutenant, that I would have 16 stars out here in front of this table, with all this fruit salad, I would have said, "No way." Gentlemen, we are delighted to have you with us today, and we look forward to your testimony. Gen. Wickham, I have your name first. STATEMENT OF GEN. JOHN A. WICKHAM, JR., CHIEF OF STAFF, U.S. ARMY General WICKHAM. Thank you, sir. Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit a formal statement for the record, which we provided to the committee earlier, and if I might, just summarize those views quickly here. I will proceed. Mr. NICHOLS. Let me say that all of the Chiefs who have formal statements, if you will present them, they will be included in the record without objection. General WICKHAM. Thank you, sir. I bring to this committee a reasonable amount of experience in the joint arena, 14 of the last 18 years have been in joint assignments, including Director of the Joint Staff, Military Executive to two Secretaries of Defense, and as a commander-in-chief of a subordinate unified command in Korea. So, I think I bring a reasonable degree of perspective about the issues that this committee is wrestling with, and the Senate as well. I want to commend this subcommittee and the full committee, for the work that has been done in building an evolutionary approach toward changing the defense structure, the national security structure. Mr. Aspin, asked the Secretary of Defense, in his letter, that we address five areas, so I would like to cover those very briefly. They are already contained in my statement, but let me state them just to give you the top of the iceberg. First point, dealing with unified commands. As you know, Mr. Chairman, the Chiefs are now in the process of reviewing the JCS Publication No. 2 which deals with the role of the CINC's and the authority that they have. The statute gives the CINC's full operational command over the forces that are apportioned to them in peacetime as well as in wartime. I had no difficulty with full operational command of the forces that were assigned to me in Korea, in terms of managing them and in terms of moving resources around, in terms of establishing training standards, and in terms of rejecting people that I did not feel were of high enough quality to go on the unified staff. We need to be sure that when we are making changes, that we are not making changes to something that is already working reasonably well. Second, the proposals that have been floated around here in the House as well as in the Senate, argue that we need to give the CINC's far more authority in the programming, budgeting, administrative, and logistic area. I think these efforts would divert the CINC's from their wartime responsibilities. You need to be very cautious, in my humble opinion, about moving too far in that direction, lest you build staffs that complicate the warfighting focus. Furthermore, having been a CINC myself, CINC's argue from a regional standpoint; CINC's argue for short-term interests, readiness and sustainability. If we are not careful, by giving the CINC's budgetary responsibility and greater authority in programming activities, we are going to break up our ability to integrate resources on a global basis, and to balance short-term versus long-term interests. The Chiefs are responsible to you, by law, for integrating the service budgets and defending them on a global balance basis. If you are not careful, you are going to sunder that authority and break down the accountability for integrating service budgets. Furthermore, I think the committee needs to recognize the extraordinary progress that has been made in giving CINC's greater visibility over their requirements for resources. I have watched the Defense Resources Board activity in the Pentagon for at least a dozen years, and the process we now have is the best I have seen in terms of giving the CINC's adequate visibility over the needs for resources and the ability to argue for resources. The second point that Mr. Aspin raised in his letter asked us to comment on the quality of officers that we are providing to joint service. I speak from the Army's standpoint, and the Army officers that we send to the Joint Staff are selected for promotion ahead of their contemporaries on the Army Staff, and from the Army at large. As a matter of fact, last year, all of the eligible Army majors in the Joint Staff were selected for lieutenant colonel. So, I think we do put quality there, and they are being selected ahead of other folks. In respect to giving the chairman the authority to specify Joint Staff qualifications, I would support that. I believe that is something that is already in the House bill. I also support use of a skill identifier that would track people who have had joint experience. We should try to capitalize on that joint experience in the future. I do not support the proposal for assignment of permanent Joint Staff officers, because we would tend to vitiate the strengths that come from cross verticalization of line officers. As you know from your experience in the line, Mr. Chairman, the line officer that moves back from the line into the staff arena brings balance that the Nation benefits from. We do not need, I believe, people that are in the ivory tower staying in the joint business all the time. The third point that you asked about in the letter were comments toward the service staffs and the secretariats. Should they be merged? The law now says that I preside over the Army staff and that I am responsible to the Secretary of the Army for the efficient management of the Army. I think there is wisdom in that law, and that wisdom is that it provides me the authority to manage the staff in the interests of Army operations and in the interests of Army programming, yet being responsible to the Secretary of the Army. Were I to be severed from the Army staff, and to put civilians under me as Assistant Secretaries, I think that we might run the risk of diluting pure military advice. The Congress, in its wisdom years ago, put the service Secretary in charge of departmental provisioning of forces, and put the Chief of Staff in the business of responding to him on service-departmental issues, but also serving as a member of the JCS for joint operational matters. If you take the staff away from me, by merging it with the Secretariat and putting it under the service Secretary, I think you will dilute the opportunity for pure military advice through the joint arena-the joint chain of command. Then, I would have to clear everything, even of joint nature, as well as of service nature, with the Service Secretary. I think there is wisdom in the separation that we have now with the Secretariat. It is a small Secretariat in the Army, about 10 percent of the Army staff. We probably could have some more consolidation, but I do not recommend a total merger of the Secretariat and the Army staffs. The fourth point that you asked about was defense agencies. I will not go through the historical background of how these things grew up, but I think they grew up for sound reasons. The defense agencies do provide a degree of efficiency, in a joint way, in the management of resources. We do provide, in the defense agencies, the opportunity for joint participation and they are jointly manned. They provide support for the CINC's, and furthermore, as separate agencies, there is visibility of resources for those agencies in the Defense Resources Board process. They have to justify their programs and they have to bear the brunt of their decisions. If those agencies were broken up and submerged in the departments, I think we would lose the joint flavor and clearly lose the visibility that we have in the Defense Resources Board process. For example, I think it would be a grave mistake to break up an agency like the Defense Logistics Agency into the military departments. The DLA manages 900,000-line items for the Army. The Army only uses 1.2-million-line items, and they manage 900,000 of them. To break DLA up, and say, Army, you take your share, but no more people to manage its functions, we could not do it. So, for |