The ongoing military campaign against terrorism will have a long-lasting
effect on how Washington sets spending priorities for the Defense
Department and other agencies, officials said.
The growing demands for military intervention in various parts
of the world in recent years are leading to a proverbial budget
"train wreck," said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), chairman
of the procurement subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.
During a time of declining defense budgets, U.S. forces were sent
to 37 major deployments in eight years — none of them funded
in advance, Weldon said in a speech to an Institute of Foreign Policy
Analysis conference. "When we rob money from modernization
programs, when we take money from the readiness accounts ... just
to keep the troops operational, you begin to understand the train
wreck that I think we are in the midst of."
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a member of the Armed Services Committee,
stressed that Congress needs to set new spending priorities and
provide the resources needed for national security. Inhofe said
that current events prove that idealistic notions of world peace
are passé. "We’ve had administrations and currently
have members of Congress who honestly believe in their hearts [that]
if all nations stand in a circle and hold hands and unilaterally
disarm, that all the threats will go away.
"There is no longer a clear distinction between foreign and
domestic matters, between peace and war, between law enforcement
and national security," Inhofe said. "We must establish
a type of interagency structure that allows us to fight these groups
[terrorist cells] as one United States of America, not 13 separate
intelligence agencies, not four armed services, 14 departments in
50 states."
He suggested that it may be time for a National Security Act of
2002 to replace the one of 1947, which created the Central Intelligence
Agency and the National Security Council. Some of the interagency
framework built back then still works today, said Inhofe, but new
threats pose challenges "that our interagency structure does
not adequately deal with."
The U.S. intelligence community, he said, "does a reasonable
job, but still their budget is tied to the defense budget and so
they have suffered proportionally with the military."
Today, computers systems cannot talk to each other between agencies,
Inhofe said. Simple things such as the spelling of Arabic names
are different from agency to agency. "We have some of the best
technology in the world, but what good is it if the people who need
to get the information can’t get it?"
Weldon said that the United States should develop a capability
for a "national fusion center," bringing together all
32 classified agencies, from drug interdiction to the State and
Commerce departments, to the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Agency
and the NSA. "We can run that data through a massive high-speed
computer using cutting edge technology," said Weldon. "That
kind of model needs to be beyond the military and needs to involve
all of our intelligence capabilities."
A national test bed for groundbreaking technologies would be a
valuable asset, said Maj. Gen. John Parker, commander of the U.S.
Army’s Medical Research and Material Command at Fort Dietrick,
Md.
In his opinion, entrepreneurs could bring their technologies to
the test bed and have it evaluated against a certain set of criteria.
"I think we need to move rapidly in that particular direction
and it has to be well funded and it has to be well supported with
manpower," he said. "Just like the thousand drugs waiting
for clinical trials to cure cancer, I bet you there are 10,000 great
products out there that are waiting to be tested and the capital
investment is not there for the entrepreneur to get it tested."