Friday
22 Jun 01

The Continuing Crisis.

The Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) Thursday passed its version of the $6.5 billion FY '01 supplemental appropriations bill that provides $107 million more for weapons procurement and $140 million less for research and development programs than the version passed by the House Wednesday. The Senate funding for procurement is $45 million over the DoD request and R&D is $55 million less than the request.

Rumsfeld's Hill testimony 21 Jun 01

SecDef Rumsfeld testified before both National Defense Authorization Committees Thursday, his first appearance before the panels. Questioning by Senators mostly about BMD, a couple of DD-21. The House got in some Q's on Vieques. Rumsfeld promised the FY02 language by Wednesday next. But it's probably out of his hands. OMB is scrubbing hard and bouncing a lot of Q's back to the Pentagon.

Among Rumsfeld's priorities

• Unmanned systems: Build robotic ground, air, sea and space vehicles.

• Space surveillance: Provide nearly continuous space-based monitoring of critical areas of the world.

• Missile defense: Defend the United States, allies and forward-deployed forces.

• Precision strike: Enable forces to strike targets rapidly on a global basis with larger payload and higher degree of discrimination.

• Rapidly deployable standing joint forces: Quickly initiate and sustain operations across the spectrum of military missions

• Experimentation: Create innovative military units.

• Information operations: Increasingly integrate information into operations in peacetime, crisis and wartime.

Other remarks

"Because we've underfunded and overused our forces, we find that to meet acceptable levels of risk, we're short a division. We're short of airlift. We have been underfunding ageing infrastructure and facilities. The aircraft fleet is ageing. The Navy is declining in numbers, and we're steadily falling below acceptable readiness standards."

Mr Rumsfeld said the US... had failed to deal with waste in the department of defense. "The waste, the inefficiency, the distrust that results from the way it functions will over time, I fear, erode public support to the detriment of the country."

He was fiercely critical of the financial reporting systems at the Pentagon, which he said were in disarray. "They're not capable of providing the kinds of financial management information that any large organization would normally have," he said, saying they would take "years" to put right.

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Ted Cormaney
Editor & Publisher
HILLINT
Program Analysis Assocs.