DoD News Briefing
Thursday, October 8, 1998 - 1:30 p.m.
Presenter: Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. John J. Hamre
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Q: As part of the DRI there were also some structural changes that were called for within the Office of the Secretary, the Assistant Secretary positions. Can you update us on that? I know specifically the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, the top scientist in the Pentagon, that seems to be kind of in flux. It's not really clear what that person's going to do. The Congress, evidently, has some problems with the plan that's been laid out. Talk about that specifically, but more generally...
A: Absolutely. First to the specifics.
This was one of my many mistakes in dealing with the Defense Reform Initiative. I really failed to think this through adequately at the time.
When we initially unfolded part of the recommendation which was to create the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, at the time we also said we wanted to do away with the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary for Nuclear, Chemical, Biological [Defense Procedures]. We don't build chemical or biological weapons. We haven't done that for years, but [we have] protection against them.
What I failed to do at the time--we only put I think literally two paragraphs in the white paper to explain this. Then that created a lot of confusion.
Our goal at the time was to take the Director of Defense Research and Engineering and to expand that position so it would be responsible not only for basic science and technology, but to expand it to also make it our primary focus for counterproliferation. Dr. Hans Mark is in that position. He absolutely believes this is the right thing to do. He is uniquely well--skilled to do that. But we didn't do it initially when we rolled it out, and then we created lots of confusion -- I created lots of confusion in the process.
So we sat with the Congress and tried to talk to them about that, and frankly, that was one of the things I couldn't get done this year was to convince them... They've agreed on everything else that we requested in terms of consolidating the agency, but we wanted to change the title of Director of Defense Research and Engineering to I think it was Director for Defense Technology and Counterproliferation. They chose not to do that in the authorization bill.
We'll go back and ask to do that next year. So Dr. Mark's portfolio will be enlarged, become larger.
At the same time they told us that we should continue to have this Assistant to the Secretary for Nuclear, Chemical, Biological Defenses, and our view is, again, this is part of my failing for not having adequately explained it, that once they see there is a higher level focus for counterproliferation concerns, I believe they're going to endorse our proposal in that area.
The other major structural, in terms of office alignment that we had proposed was, of course, we had initially recommended to do away with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. There it was always a close call. Our view was that it was the right thing to have an Assistant Secretary for Intelligence, and then to have the acquisition functions of C3I brought under A&T. What we bumped into was the dilemma we couldn't get anybody confirmed in the time period, so we decided we would back down from that, or step down from that. As you know, Art Money is our nominee. He's been acting as the senior civilian official in C3I. Art's done just a terrific job. One of those little hiccups. We'll get his nomination through next year.
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Press: Thank you.
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