Page images
PDF
EPUB

RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITIES INITIATIVE

Our Residential Communities Initiative or RCI, which really has been championed by many of you over the years in this Committee, to privatize family housing continues to be, I think, an enormous success. By 2007, the Army will have established partnerships to bring every set of family quarters up to standard. We are able to do this because, with an investment of roughly $600 million, we have attracted over $7 billion in private capital. This is a tremendous value for the taxpayer and the soldier and we believe the model of how better business practice can help us with non-core functions such as housing.

We are seeking to apply the same manner and model of publicprivate partnership on a challenge of on-base utilities in our installations, consolidating all installation management under one command, centralizing Army-wide, contracting over $500,000 per contract in our Army Contracting Agency. We are seeking to regionalize utilities contracting and achieve economies of scale that were not possible with our previous business management structure. Private capital would be required to fix the utilities infrastructure on our bases, and we are setting the conditions to attract it just as we did with RCI.

Finally, we are conducting what we call our Third Wave initiative, which seeks to eliminate all non-core functions currently consuming Army people and dollars.

Rest assured we will pursue these business initiatives in full consultation with you and the Congress.

From a risk perspective, balancing the risk associated with nearterm modernization and mid-term transformation has required us to make some very tough choices. We have had to terminate or restructure numerous current force modernization programs to generate the capital to fund transformation. In a nutshell, our 2004 budget submission funds people, readiness and transformation at the expense of some of our infrastructure accounts in current force modernization. We have made judgments only after careful balancing of both the operational risk and the risk of not transforming to provide the capabilities the Army needs to meet the obligations of the mid- and long-term joint operational concepts that we are a part of.

SUMMARY

In conclusion, I wish to return to those who I mentioned first in these remarks, our soldiers. Their performance in Afghanistan speaks volumes: Dead of winter, landlocked country, toughest terrain imaginable, collapsed the Taliban regime, put al Qaeda on the run. It has been my privilege as it has been your privilege to visit them in Afghanistan and Kuwait, in Bosnia and Kosovo, all around our country. You couldn't meet a finer group of young Americans. They are flat out in my 40 years the best soldiers I have ever seen; and we all ought to be very, very proud of them. Rest assured they stand ready, along with our sister services, to accomplish any tasks ordered by our Commander-in-Chief.

Thank you for this opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to discuss the 2004 budget submission of the Army. I look forward to your questions.

Mr. LEWIS. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

General Shinseki.

SUMMARY STATEMENT OF GENERAL SHINSEKI

General SHINSEKI. Mr. Chairman, Congressman Murtha, first let me begin, Mr. Chairman and Congressman Murtha, by expressing my thanks to both of you and the other members of this Committee for the very generous opening remarks.

I have been a soldier every day for about 37 and a half years, and I have enjoyed every one of those days. I have done a few things in that period of time. I think the last four years will always be very special. But part of that privilege has been the high point of working with great patriots here in the Congress and, uniquely, with those members of this Committee who have taken a little bit of risk, listened to a description of what the future could be, and then gave us the support and the resources to generate enough momentum to come back to you and suggest that we had something going here. Then to again demonstrate your confidence in us and Secretary White's leadership has been phenomenal in helping us maintain that momentum. So, to the members of this Committee, thank you for your great support.

Mr. Chairman, Congressman Murtha, I am honored to join the Secretary today, as I have indicated, whose leadership and guidance has produced tremendous momentum for what we have been about in this thing called the Army Vision, my privilege in joining him to report out to all of you on the posture of the Army and its readiness today.

Today, soldiers, as the Secretary has indicated, are serving magnificently as part of a joint team with all of our other members, other uniformed services, tremendous young Americans doing terrific work defending our freedom in this war against terrorism and then preparing for any other contingency they may be called upon to do. In the Army alone, over 242,000 soldiers are deployed forward, stationed overseas someplace. Almost 133,000 of our Reserve Component soldiers have been mobilized at this point in the past 6 months.

All of you, the Secretary, and I have visited a good many of them. I have stood with them where they worked and trained, spoken with them as well, those who arrived back here at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I have spoken to them candidly, had frank discussions with them about their sense of the Army's readiness to respond to the calls of this Nation.

The Army is ready. We have the best army in the world. It is not the largest, but it is the best. It is the best trained, the best equipped, and the best led.

But, as you all know, it is more than just about equipment. We have the best soldiers. Their determination and commitment are as firm as I can recall in all my years of service. They are immensely proud to serve this Nation. They will take any objective. They will accomplish any mission we give to them. I am proud of what I have seen. Soldiers are standing by in a hundred camps and stations

waiting for orders, and they will fight, and they will win decisively this war on terrorism and any other we might ask them to fight.

I am daily reassured of my assessment. America's Army remains the most respected land power to our friends and allies and the most feared ground force to those who would think about threatening the interests of the United States.

We want to project that degree of respect and readiness of this great Army we have today into the future. To do so, over the last three plus years, we have described a need to be more responsive, more deployable, an Army that is more agile and versatile, an Army that is as lethal as this great Army is today and more survivable but a lot more sustainable to reduce our foreign footprint.

Three and a half years ago, we knew that there was a war in our future. We didn't imagine what the situation would be today, but we knew there was a war some time in our future. We just didn't know when, where or against whom. The relative predictability that I guess we may say we got used to during the years of the Cold War, that relative predictability had given way during the 1990s to a continuing chaos of unpredictability. Voices inside and outside the Army suggested a need for change, and some of those voices were right here.

TRANSFORMATION

Because of that fundamental nature of change, it was more than just modernizing a platform or two. It asked for the Army to take a fundamental, comprehensive look at itself and make some decisions. We didn't call it modernization. We decided to call it Transformation because it was so broad reaching and would reach for a long period of time. With the unwavering support of the Administration and this Congress, we are transforming today rapidly to be more capable of dominating any future crises.

To mitigate the risk that is inherent in any comprehensive change, no matter the institution, we structured Army Transformation along three broad and mutually supporting vectors. There is a near-term, a mid-term and a distant far-term vector.

On the near-term axis, we preserve the readiness of today's legacy fighting force to fix the long-standing operational_gap between the light and the heavy components of today's Legacy Force.

We created a requirement for an interim capability which has come to be called the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams. We are fielding six of them. We have described the requirement for six. We have put aside the funds to do that. That is on the mid-term axis. And it is on the third and final axis that we are readying the Army for the long term. We are developing future concepts and technologies that will provide consistent capabilities of overmatch through the middle of the century.

Our Future Combat System Milestone B Defense Acquisition Board decision. This first acquisition decision comes up in May of this year, and we intend that that will be a successful event, and we intend to begin fielding the Future Combat System in 2008.

Our Secretary White has noted balancing these requirements over time dictates difficult but prudent choices. Recognizing the constraints that come with finite resources, the Army has had to make and we believe we have made prudent calls on how to bal

ance those risks. We have terminated and restructured programs to help fund Transformation to the degree we can from our own internal resources, carefully weighing the operation of the demands of today's missions while preparing for the future.

Your support, which has been vital, will continue to be vital as we explain to you why we are doing the things we are and to gain your understanding and support as we go forward.

FISCAL YEAR 2004 BUDGET REQUEST

The Army's fiscal year 2004 budget strikes the essential balance to maintain readiness throughout the Program Objective Memorandum, POM, period and beyond. We are confident that we have done that well.

We are already seeing dividends from our own investments in future readiness. Monies that we have invested in the last three years are generating technologies that are coming on-line early today: Superior body armor for dismounted soldiers today, robots in caves and antitank warheads on unmanned aerial vehicles today, unprecedented blue force tracking capabilities today.

Then, most recently, during the last joint exercise, the largest joint exercise in our history, something called Millennium Challenge 2002. With the help of the United States Air Force, the Army air-delivered a Stryker platoon onto a dirt strip in a place called Fort Irwin, California. Just three years after the Army described its requirement for an Interim Force, we are demonstrating increased strategic_operational and tactical versatility that Stryker Brigade Combat Teams will provide to combatant commanders.

This summer the first Stryker Brigade Combat Team will join us on the war on terrorism. So it is not just about capabilities we intend to field in 2000 and beyond. It is also about enabling soldiers fighting this war on terrorism and preparing for any future mission we may give to them. It is about reducing the operational risk borne by our soldiers today and in the future.

PERSONNEL

Now, having said all of this, Mr. Chairman, people remain the engine behind all of our magnificent moments as an Army. That has been true throughout the 200-plus year history of this Army. It is true today. It will continue to be true in the future.

Their well-being is inextricably linked to our readiness. Thanks to your help on things like pay, health care, retirement benefits, housing and other well-being programs, we are doing better than ever at taking care of our people. Our soldiers, our civilians, our veterans, our retirees and their family members appreciate your support more than I can say. We are grateful for your unwavering, bipartisan leadership and for your unyielding devotion to our soldiers. With your continued strong support, we will win this war against global terrorism. We will meet our commitment to our friends and allies. We will remain ready to contend with the unpredictability. There are certainly unpredictable events in our future, and we will transform ourselves for those decisive victories on future battlefields. You keep us the most respected land force in the world.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to your questions.

« PreviousContinue »