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Excerpts : Pentagon Spokesman's Briefing, May 29, 2001 |
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(Source : US Department of Defense ; issued May 29, 2001)
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 Excerpts on ongoing defense review from transcript of May 29 press briefing by Acting Pentagon Spokesman Craig Quigley.
Q: Craig, it's been widely reported that the secretary's meeting with the Joint Chiefs -- has been meeting this week. Could you give us a sense of what's on the agenda? And can you also help us understand how these meetings fit in with this parallel sort of processes on the review, on the QDR and on the budget?
Quigley: Sure. Quite a few meetings set up all this week. Matter of fact, let me kind of use the opportunity to run through the schedule over the next several weeks here. I think that would be useful for all.
The secretary is meeting every day this week -- not yesterday, but Tuesday through Saturday of this week, with the service chiefs. On Saturday, we will add the unified commanders as well. And the principal focus this week is to determine the way ahead on the Quadrennial Defense Review, with the goal that in the next week or so, the secretary would be able to issue a so-called terms of reference" for the Quadrennial Defense Review.
And what that would do would be provide the chairman, the service chiefs, the unified CINCs guidelines as to his thinking as we enter the homestretch, if you will, of the Quadrennial Defense Review due in September.
Now, by the same time schedule, you also need to come to a point where you will be able to issue -- the secretary will be able to issue Defense Planning Guidance, which will then lead to budget guidance as you start the build of the '03 Program Objective Memorandum, or POM, which will ultimately lead to the president's budget in the first part of 2002.
So you see a progression here from the studies that the secretary had chartered for the first few weeks or few months of his tenure to get his thinking up to speed on relevant issues on the Defense Department, feeding into the discussions with the service chiefs and the CINCs, ending in Saturday of this week to, hopefully, come to consensus on the way ahead on the Quadrennial Defense Review, and by perhaps late summer, you'd have enough knowledge in hand from the efforts to finalize the Quadrennial Defense Review that you can put that into the Defense Planning Guidance, which feeds directly into the '03 budget bill.
So that -- you'd see those three streams of effort really coalescing into one by the July/August time frame, Tom, and that's the work plan, if you will, for the next couple of months or so.
Q: What are your public windows into that process going to be?
Quigley: Budget testimony on the Hill. I would expect the secretary or perhaps Dr. Zakheim or somebody to come down here and provide more clarity at the time the budget is released to the -- budget amendment is released to the Congress by the president and OMB.
Q: When is that going to be?
Quigley: Still don't know exactly. My best guess would be sometime next month, but that's still just a guess on my part. You would also have issues of the Quadrennial Defense Review. I have no idea what the terms of reference will end up looking like -- if it's classified, if it's unclassified; probably elements of both. We'll try to be as clear on that, to focus everyone's thinking as we proceed towards the Quadrennial Defense Review, as we can. Those come to the top of my list, I guess, Tom, but there probably will be more. Pam?
Q: A clarification. Is he meeting with all the chiefs every of those days, or is he meeting with them individually or in smaller groups?
Quigley: No, as a group, every day this week.
Q: For how long?
Quigley: Hour to an hour and a half, I believe, each day this week.
Q: Tank sessions all?
Quigley: I don't know if they're going to be in the tank. They may be in another conference room.
Q: Did you say that Chairman Shelton was leaving the country?
Quigley: He is, yeah. So General Myers will represent his views. Jim?
Q: On the '02 amendment, where does that fit into the process? And the supplemental?
Quigley: Well, time frame, as I indicated, my best guess would be sometime late next month, but that's still an approximation on my part. I mean, the short answer is whenever OMB and the president ultimately say it's ready to go to the Congress. But the findings of the studies, the deliberations that have been made, there is still no '02 budget figure, to the best of my knowledge. I heard Secretary Rumsfeld say that again just the other night, so it's still very much a work in progress.
Q: And the supplemental?
Quigley: The supplemental, again, we anticipate one, but the timing of that will be at the discretion of the president.
Q: I know it seems like we've been over this ground a few times, but I just wanted to be clear. As I was listening to your laying out the time table for the next couple of weeks, do I understand you correctly then that there will be no tangible result, or concrete recommendations that come out of the, what we've been calling the "Rumsfeld Review"?
Quigley: The studies may eventually, one or two or several of them, could be published as stand-alone documents, but they are, more than anything else, created to stimulate Secretary Rumsfeld's thinking and to blend into the budget build in the Quadrennial Defense Review -- and the nuclear posture review, on the strategic forces piece.
Q: So should we expect anytime during the next couple of months any sort of an announcement of any conclusions that were reached by this review?
Quigley: I'm not sure that it will come out, any of them will come out as a stand-alone entity, or would their one or two or five points, main points be simply folded into the efforts of the QDR and others? I'm not sure.
Q: Just to go back for a minute to the '01 supplemental, at the time of the meeting with the Armed Services Committees last week -- meetings, I should say -- we were given to understand, and I thought Secretary Rumsfeld said, that the supplemental would go over this week. Is that now no longer the case now?
Quigley: I believe that is our best estimate. But it's still ultimately at the discretion of the president. But I would --
Q: So nothing's happened that would pull that back?
Quigley: -- estimate that it would be this week. No. I don't think so.
Q: Sources haves been talking -- about expressing fears about reductions in training, steaming hours, this kind -- flying hours, this kind of thing. The longer this goes on, surely the greater that concern becomes.
Quigley: Correct. Correct.
Q: And is the -- the secretary's cognizant of this, then.
Quigley: Absolutely. As is the president.
Q: And they're still crunching numbers? Is that the issue here?
Quigley: I can't tell you the reason for the timing, Chris. I'm not sure.
Q: Talking over these past couple months with the people who are responsible for building the QDR, they were saying that they were basically on hold waiting for some of these resolutions to come out of the so-called Rumsfeld review. Does that mean that they're behind the curve now? Are they going to have enough time to put the QDR together?
Quigley: Oh, absolutely yes. A lot of the -- each of the services and the joint staff had built, as you know, small organizations to get ready for the QDR. When the secretary initiated the studies to stimulate his thinking, it was understood that the results of those studies would feed into his thinking, which would then feed into the QDR.
That is what you're seeing being done this week in his meetings with the service chiefs every day this week and adding the unified CINCs on Saturday is to come up with terms of reference to finalize the focus of the QDR. So within a couple of weeks, I would estimate, you would have those terms of reference known so by the time it's mid-June, let's say, you've got the QDR teams and each of the services and the joint staff with pretty good clarity as to what the final product should be able to address, what questions it tries to either answer or pose, and feed directly into the '03 budget. Pam?
Q: Call me nit-picky, but when Bush took over the White House and asked Rumsfeld to do these reviews I think we were all under the impression that it was a big deal and it was going to lead to changes and it was going to be, you know, "help is on the way" and "this is the new Bush White House," and the Pentagon was -- they were going to clean up their act. And it seems like for the last month there's been a concerted effort to dissuade us of that notion that this is a big and that, instead, it's just, you know, preparatory homework and everything's going to go -- are we wrong? Am I wrong?
Quigley: I think there was a widespread perception that there would be much more near-term -- many more near-term announcements of dramatic change than what we're actually going to see. Instead of that --
Q: Was that an unfounded perception?
Quigley: I don't know as if anyone ever made a prediction as to what form their findings would finally be realized. What now seems to make the most sense is to fold them into the budget builds and the Quadrennial Defense Review, with the exception of you still see some that have come out, space being one of them; missile defense being a second, there may be more. I can't promise that there won't. But I would say that the majority of the effort would be folded into the Quadrennial Defense Review. Jim?
Q: Has the secretary concluded the strategy part of the review, or is that still ongoing? What's happening with that?
Quigley: I think Andy Marshall's work has served its purpose in the sense of stimulating the secretary's thought and getting reaction from service chiefs and unified commanders; inputs, resulting in many, many rewrites of the original drafts. And the whole purpose was to stimulate discussion and try to ascertain where should America's military be headed for the 21st century, the early part of the 21st century.
Q: Does he now know? Does he now know that? I mean, is his own thinking on that clear enough where he has a sense of what the strategy is going to be?
Quigley: No final version has yet been presented to the president.
Q: Is that paper still being revised, or is it done now -- the Andy Marshall paper?
Quigley: I don't know of any recent revisions in the last couple of weeks.
Q: Do you think it's possible that you could release that paper so that it can stimulate our thought processes as well? (Laughter.)
Quigley: Andy's paper is just a paper, and that does not presume that the secretary will --
Q: Yeah, but we're just readers. Q: Yeah, we just --
Quigley: Well, keep in mind the purpose of these were to stimulate the secretary's thinking and get him thinking and up to speed on these issues. They were internal studies; they were from the very beginning. And if he chooses to not accept every element of a given study's findings, that's his call. I don't think he's looking to create controversy by releasing a study that was designed to help him get up to speed, and all of a sudden he's on the defensive now because he didn't embrace every one of the findings in the studies. I don't think that is his intent.
Q: So at what point will you be able to point to a specific document that says this is the result of the secretary's stimulated thinking? In other words, this is -- this is what he has decided himself, this is his imprint on the way the military is going to be developed over the coming years.
Quigley: You're looking for clarity, and I can't offer it. I cannot offer it…..You have seen pieces of it come out, like space. Will there be more? Maybe. That's as clear as I can be. In a comprehensive way, the really complete answer to your question is the Quadrennial Defense Review. But there may be elements of the studies that are released before that time. I just don't know. I don't think the secretary has a complete understanding in his own mind of how he wants to fold all the parts together. It's starting to come together, but I don't think there's clarity there, either.
Q: Well, I thought the point was that before you get into the details of particular programs and approaches to reforming or changing the military, that you needed to have an overarching strategy. Is there going to be an overarching strategy presented, or is that a QDR thing, or --
Quigley: Again, the secretary has not made the final recommendations to the president yet. And you don't have an '02 amended budget yet. So --
Q: What -- I'm trying to figure out what -- when and in what form would we see that, and is it going to be --
Quigley: I can't answer your question. I don't know.
Q: For some time now the Pentagon has been revising plans, looking into the future, coming up with new programs. And there was some thought that maybe what was going to happen was all of these reviews, there'd be a major change to that. But there's also some thought now that really what we're going to end up seeing is kind of a fine tuning, a honing of what had already -- the planning that's already begun at the Pentagon for transformation in the future. Would that be incorrect, to say that really a lot of this is really going to fine tune and -- with the work the Pentagon had already come up with and the focus that they had?
Quigley: I can't make that prediction for you. I'm sorry.
Q: Craig, you said that there -- you acknowledged that there was a widespread perception a couple of months ago that perhaps what we'd be seeing would be recommendations for far more dramatic reform than what we're actually experiencing now. Is this a case where there was a more ambitious agenda, but then it had to be adjusted? And is the secretary sort of, in effect, behind schedule on where he thought he might be in terms of making some of these major decisions? Is that what --
Quigley: No. He just didn't know what he was going to find when he started down this road. He started a process to help him better understanding the issues, to help him better understand the issues that matter in the Defense Department. And how they were going to be rolled out, in what manner, in what time frame, he didn't have a clue in the early February timeframe when he started this effort. As time has passed and the studies have matured and his thinking has matured, I think he has a better understanding, but he was never -- he was never on much of a timetable, let alone be late or early for the timetable.
Q: Did the White House two, three weeks ago expect that by the end of May they would have a strategy to announce?
Quigley: I don't know what their expectations were. Dale?
Q: After the meetings on the Hill last week I believe Senator Levin told us that there had been an understanding reached that there would be a process created by which members of the Armed Services Committee would have input into what the secretary is doing before any decisions are made, but that the way that was going to be done had yet to be worked out. Can you tell us what that process is going to be like?
Quigley: I don't -- that has not been worked out, either. But he did, indeed, seek their input and sought their advice and thoughts in his sessions with both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees last week.
Q: Is that different from what he was doing before?
Quigley: Well, it was a more -- his approach in the early part was very much along the lines of, "I don't even know enough to ask the right questions. So what elements of this should I be concerned about? There's a lot of things that go on in the Department of Defense. I can't personally monitor them all. Help me sort out those big issues that deserve my attention, and separate them from those that don't."
He wanted a period of time to develop his own thinking and ultimately to share that work in progress with the Hill. That has certainly started in earnest last week, when he got the thinking to the point where "This is kind of where I am. I don't have answers to all the questions; I'm not even sure I have all the questions identified. But this is where my thinking is at the moment, and I seek your views."
Q: Craig, don't you think that after the campaign and the promises that were made about -- by the president about military reform, what we heard after the inauguration, what we heard from the secretary himself, that it was time that he share his thinking or this stage of his thinking with the American people where this process, where this review that's been under way now for three months, or more, is and where it may be going? Because, I mean, there has been a great deal of expectation raised about it, and now it seems to be that you're downplaying what to expect out of this process.
Quigley: Given the brief period of time -- I mean, you say three months, four months is a long time; I don't think so for the sort of issues that we're talking about here. People's patience is less by the year. You're expected to come up with most of the answers in a week or two at most, and beyond that and you're late. And, obviously, there's a problem, and there's this growing perception. I don't think we're behind any schedule. I don't think four months is a long period of time. And I don't think that this process has been anything but what Secretary Rumsfeld and the president had hoped to get out of it from the get-go.
Q: I don't mean to be suggesting any -- what you're saying. What I'm asking is whether or not at this point of the process that perhaps it's time for an update? I'm not suggesting that he's behind the curve, I'm not suggesting that he's late, that he's run into any problems. The question is out there. Where is the process? And what stage has it reached?
Quigley: Well, you've seen last week discussions with both of the oversight committees in the House and the Senate to share the current state of things with them and to seek their views. The president is expecting a further update from the secretary. Other than saying to you that we are moving towards that goal, I can't offer you a definitive time frame.
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