1999 Fletcher Conference

Tuesday, November 2, 1999 12:15 to 1:45 p.m.
Day Two Luncheon Address:

Setting Defense Priorities for a 21st Century Transformation

Dr. John H. Hamre

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Transcript

 

Hamre: Bernie [Dr. Bernard D. Rostker; Under Secretary, U.S. Army], thank you very much. As always, you're overly generous in your introduction, and I'm also a little embarrassed to say I'm probably not going to give the speech you think I'm going to give, since you anticipated what I would say.

I find myself often in this situation, but it's one of those cases where I have a very, very nice speech that someone else wrote for me. And of course it's gone through careful review and editing, so it doesn't say anything. Well, I'm not trying to be cruel. I have very good speechwriters, and I hadn't had a chance really to sit down and say what I was interested in saying, so they've written a fine speech but it isn't really what [I want to say]. It would be rather mechanical, I think. So I'm going to depart rather dramatically from that, if I could.

I won't be long because I want to spend some time on questions. But I would like to pick up just briefly where Dr. Rostker brought us with this introduction, when you say that we are at a historic time, a time for real change.

I suppose every generation of leaders says that, but very few generations actually have the chance in life to make their own history. Most of us, after all, are forced to live out the forces that were set in some previous time; forces which we didn't have any control over.

All of us really grew up during the Cold War. None of us were participants in '46 and '47 and '48, in those times and those days that shaped the Cold War period. We inherited those forces and had to make sense out of them and be good stewards of the challenge and the directions that we were given at that time. And we are at an unprecedented period, I think. It's been almost 10 years to the day when the Wall really started to crumble catastrophically. I think it was on the 9th of November when it actually opened up in Berlin.

For the last 10 years, for other reasons, we really haven't stood back to say how we should shape our future. I think it's partly because we didn't know what that future was going to be. And in those wonderful days, '89 and '90 and '91, it looked like such a glowing future. We thought it would be so different than it has turned out. It's so much more challenging and complicated now. And certainly in those days, we didn't have the vision that we now have, and even now I would say we probably don't see all of the details of the new landscape terribly clearly. But we are in a position, I think, to start shaping our future.

We're one of those rare generations that is given a chance to shape his future and to put in place the forces that others will carry on. That's one of the reasons why I admire so much what General Shinseki and Secretary Caldera have done. And may I add on behalf of all the number two's in the world, a special thanks to you Bernie and Jack Keane, who I know are doing the real work. We have to give credit where credit's due because nobody will give us credit for what we do.

But this is a remarkably important time, and really the future health, and I think in many ways the vitality of the Army, really rests with the successful implementation of this new vision that's been outlined. This new vision may be only a month old in its public accounting, but there are so many details that are going to be unfolding over the next six months, and frankly, the details will be coming out for years to come. And it is so important that all of us realize that this is an historic opportunity for us, for all of us as Americans and friends of the Army and those who are in the Army, to make a new future. The future is ours to make, but also ours to lose if we don't step up to this opportunity.

Secretary Cohen is excited by what he has seen so far. Obviously we have many details in front of us. This couldn't be a worse time to launch such a new direction. There's not enough money, for one. There never has been, though.

I think it was in 1974 and '75 and '76 when the Army was really broken. At that time there were visionary people who said, "We're going to rebuild this outfit," and what did it give us? It gave us the M1 and it gave us the M2, it gave us the Patriots and the Apaches. It gave us the systems that fought so brilliantly in Desert Storm. It also gave us remarkable people. I had a very good friend who said to me, "You know all the good guys left in '74 and '75 and it took the rest of us to build the best Army in the world." I think that's really where we are right now.

These times aren't easy. These are going to be remarkably hard days ahead. Not just the next two months when we put a budget together that implements this vision, but over the next several years when there will be all kinds of pressures. It's going to be very difficult, but it's going to take people's conviction and courage to bring this forward. I think it's absolutely essential for the long term vitality of the Army and I really want to congratulate General Shinseki, you, Secretary Caldera, and all of the people that have been making this possible.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about today is very different. I looked over the agenda and lots of people are here talking about all the important issues. But there's one little issue that wasn't on the agenda and it's something I want to talk about here. That is the health and well being and direction of our industrial base right now.

It's been in the news lately. Unfortunately, some of it is sad news because we see the way that the stock market in recent weeks has pummeled our contractors. It's a very tough time right now. It's caused me to sit back and to think a good deal. I know the forces that come to play in this, but it's caused me to think a good deal about it.

In many ways all of us in the Department are absolutely indispensably tied to the health and well being of our partners in the private sector that have to build these systems that we're going to use. And we're not talking about it at this conference, so I wanted just to say something about it if I could.

As I said, I unfortunately got to thinking about this in light of the pummeling that our companies have been taking in the stock market. I must confess, I am startled by that, and frankly very disappointed. I'm disappointed that the owners of these companies have taken such a short-term view about the importance of defense industry in America.

I must confess, I don't understand the stock market anyway. I can't figure out what real value means when it goes through that process. Companies that don't make a penny of profits have the stock market values absolutely soaring. And then you find companies that have maybe had a disappointing quarter but are producing some of the most astounding technology are just absolutely clobbered.

In part, I think this reflects somewhat the herd mentality that seems to guide so many fund managers who may not know the details but sense that all of a sudden this isn't good. So all of a sudden you get into a real trough, and we're seeing that now with almost all of these companies. I mean, Martha Stewart goes public and makes a billion bucks the first day and all she does is carve pumpkins. You know? We have to reexamine who's going to defend this country 10 years from now and 15 years from now. It's going to have to be these companies that we work with.

Now there are real consequences from this short sightedness in the stock market. I very much worry that the kind of pressure that this puts senior corporate managers under means that they will make some very serious decisions that will have a negative effect on their long term health so that they look good for the next quarter.

All of a sudden, if you cut back on research and development spending, that's going to have a very serious, long term implication for us, for our national security. But there's a lot of pressure to do that. Or when somebody pressures them to say, "You have to do more downsizing," how do we make sure that doesn't lead to a hemorrhage of scientific and managerial talent that we have to have right now? I must confess, I'm worried about it.

So I think we need to go back to some first principles and say what's important. We're trying to change the way that we work with our industry. We're trying to remove the rules and the regulations and the accounting restrictions, etc., that have created a hothouse defense industry, and we'd like to do as much, as commercial as possible, and as much commercial-like acquisition as possible.

But having said that, we are going to have defense companies. We're not going to be without defense companies. And we can't have a strong defense in the long run if we have wounded defense companies. So this has to be a priority for us at this time.

That means that we in the Department have to do something. We have to focus on our priorities and our first principles. This is one where I did write myself a few notes. So what are they?

First of all, we have to keep steady, stable defense budgets. We cannot have roller coaster defense budgeting, and we've had that here. This is the first year in, I think, 15 years where we haven't been on a downhill path on a defense budget. And we're counting on some increases in the future. I'm very nervous that we are closing out this year without a long-term agreement between the Administration and the Congress on budget resources for defense and non-defense spending. I think that's troubling, and it worries me that we pass a defense bill one week that increases the defense budget and then the next week we pass another appropriations bill that takes away, through across-the-board reductions, the same increase. This is a very hard thing for us to plan for now.

So we need to have stable, predictable, and, especially, investment budgets. We have tended for the last 10, 15 years, frankly, to accommodate the draw-down and put it on the backs of our acquisition communityboth inside the service and outside the service in the private sector. And we really have loaded an awful lot of the downsizing on them. That's caused this tremendous consolidation in the industrial base. And I don't think that's inappropriate. We certainly had excess capacity.

But there does come a point when you can't lose the design and engineering expertise and talent that we have invested in through our private sector. I think we're at that point. So we've got to hold onto the investment budgets that we've been programming.

Second, I think we have to emphasize stability in the acquisition process, and if ever there was a time when we needed to promote multi-year contracts, now is the time. I mean we had quite a battle here this year. Fortunately, I think we were able to get a lot of that back. But now's the time when we need to make sure that we have stable programs that program managers can count on.

Third, I think we have to be careful that we don't, in the budgetary pressures of the moment, adopt some acquisition practices which turn out to be very tough on industry with unintended consequences. Or worse yet, that we adopt acquisition policies which have inherently great risk in them, like the old days when we had these fixed price development contracts. Those were really a disaster. And we are still digging our way out from under some of that here even now. So we have to at least eliminate acquisition policies that try to put all of the risk on our partners in the private sector. This is a partnership. We have to manage it together.

I think we have to find and improve the way we do decision-making in the Department, so that we integrate acquisition decisions across Service lines, so that we don't have an acquisition decision in one Service or one agency undermine the industrial base that the other Services are counting on. Unfortunately, we're getting close to that. We're going to have to start to focus on that.

Now I alsoI have to be very careful how I say this. I think that the concentration, especially at the prime level here in our industrial base, has gone on about as far as it can go. We'll continue to look at proposals, but we're at a point now where invariably we're losing too much competitive opportunity with concentration. I think it's going to be a very tough test from this point on because we can't afford to slip by default into a sole producer world.

I think there are still opportunities at the second and third tier for realignments and consolidation. So that's not to say we're closing the window. But the test, that we still have competitive opportunities, is going to be very important to us.

If I could say something about international industrial alignments, there's been an awful lot of talk about that in the last couple of weeks and we've had a lot of discussions with our partners in other countries and counterpart industries of defense about this issue. There's a lot of speculation in light of the consolidations that have occurred in Europe that we now are ready for this next step, for some trans-Atlantic mega-deals between defense companies.

Again, I think we need to step back and talk about first principles. I think we have to look at this in the context of what it is going to take for us to be able to hold the NATO Alliance together so we can fight together.

Kosovo had some lessons in it beyond the obvious, and one was that the technological gap between us and our very good allies is widening. It's going to be hard for us to stay together as an alliance and fight together as an alliance with an even wider gap growing over time, technologically, on the battlefield. So alliance interoperability has become, I think, an enormous challenge for all of us.

I think there is an industrial dimension to that. To my mind, we're not going to be able to keep this alliance close together technologically unless we are able to find ways for greater collaboration between our industrial sectors.

I personally don't think that anybody is ready in the near-term for a mega-merger. I think there are two reasons for that. One, although I think we're getting close in certain areas, we don't yet have in place the security infrastructure that would let us understand and manage the security challenges, technology and industrial security challenges of a transnational corporation. We're very far along in some discussions with the United Kingdom, and I think those are very promising. We've indicated we're very open for comparable approaches with France and Germany and other countries because that will be essential if we would be able to agree to a transnational, trans-Atlantic industrial alignment.

I also don't think that our companies, or the companies in Europe, are ready right now. Consolidation involves a good deal of hard management, and some turmoil. We're seeing that in our companies here. And that is all in the future for these two big companies that are emerging in Europe. They haven't confronted any of it yet. This is probably not the time that it is going to be possible for anyone to launch into yet another round of even more complicated trans-Atlantic mergers.

Now I don't think this is a calendar-driven problem. I don't think there's a magic date. Rather it is a situation-driven issue. The next step really is going to have to depend on constructive conditions that emerge, both on the security levelthat's our responsibility as a governmentand then healthy companies that decide that it makes good business sense for them to link up. I think it is in the future and it really depends on these things coming to pass here.

We should use the time we have now to put in place that security infrastructure so that we can indeed see greater alignment of these companies. We should encourage collaborative projects where they make sense. I'm not talking about science fair projects that you do for political reasons. Those usually don't go anyplace. They aren't grounded in Service requirements. But I think they ought to be grounded in what makes good business sense and have genuine military merit. We ought to find a way to promote that.

Ultimately, if there are two fortresses that emergea fortress Europe and a fortress United States industriallywe're going to lose as an alliance. So in this new era that's unfolding, we'll have to find ways to drop the draw bridges and open the gate so that we have stronger commerce going on back and forth between these two communities which are so important to us for our national security.

I think we also need to take a hard look at what we're doing to ourselves. We've made it very hard for alliance interoperability, when it's so hard for U.S. companies to export their components and put them into systems overseas. I was startled during this conference to learn that DASA has put out a directive to their engineers to engineer American components out of their systems because they are having too much trouble getting licenses approved. That's a very bad development for us for interoperability.

All of the words we say at a NATO Summit get undercut if we have those sorts of impediments standing in the way. So we have an awful lot to do. And I think people are realizing that and are stepping up to the challenge. And while this is a very tough subject politically, I find very good people working on it with more energy than I've seen in a long time on the Hill. I applaud that. I think it's very good.

Okay, this was not at all what Bernie thought I was going to talk about but I think it's somewhat related. I don't know that we're going to have a strong defense in the future without having strong industrial underpinnings. You all are certainly depending on that. The globe isn't getting any smaller, and there sure aren't any smaller number of aggressors in the world.

So it's going to take a smaller and more capable Army to cope with the security challenges that we have. We're not going to fix that problem without technology. Technology gives you the knowledge so that every round you shoot is effective; the efficiencies so that we can get the kind of firepower without taking a mountain of stuff to support a deployed unitall things that General Shinseki is pushing. I think it's exactly the right direction. It really does depend on these strong partners of ours.

Let me stop with that. And, Dr. Pfaltzgraff, I guess you are going to moderate any questions and I will stay till, say, in a half hour.

Pfaltzgraff: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Hamre. This is an area that we had talked around during the conference. And I don't know what your planned remarks were, the speechwriter's remarks for you, but this is a very important contribution to what we're doing at this conference. So I thank you in advance. We'll thank you later, but thank you for doing this. So we also have here, I might add, quite a large number of people who signed up at least from defense industries. So this is an opportunity for them to take part more formally in this discussion.

So who would like to open the question and answer period with Dr. Hamre? Yes, please. And again, wait for the microphone.

Baumgartner: Yes, sir, hi. Neil Baumgartner, Defense Daily. The question is

Hamre: Hello.

Baumgartner: Thank you. With the mergers between Aerostazio, Matra, and DASSA, if that's not fortress Europe, I guess the question is "what is?" You know, with all the companies they bring with them, what's left for opportunities? You know, again, if this isn't fortress Europe, what would be?

Hamre: At the get together we had last week, we had the senior CEOs from DASSA and Aerostazio, Matra, other companies from Europe, and I said this looks an awful lot to us like fortress Europe. The one difference is, is that they know that that's a dead end and they said so. They know that in the long run they have got to find ways to work with us and not to become a fortress if they're going to be healthy in the long run.

So it has the outside appearances of fortress Europe. And by the way, every time I talk about this, I always say I'm not self-righteous about fortress Europe because there's no fortress that's more impenetrable than fortress America when it comes to industrial competition. It is virtually impossible for anybody from outside to come over here and compete here if you're not here. I mean you don't get to sell things in the United States if you're not in the United States.

You know, and it isn't because people outside aren't any good or we don't trust them or they don't have good technology, it's just that it is so hard to get any acquisition program going over here and you have to be so close to your customer and there are so many hurdles to get through, both inside our building and on the Hill, that you've just got to have a very deep knowledge and presence across the board of the department. And that's just very hard for outsiders to do. So I'm not being self-righteous, but this has all the potential of being a fortress Europe except that the CEOs who are going to be heading these organizations know that they can't let it become that way.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay, our next question is from over here.

Hawken: Sir, Tim Hawken from the U.S. Army. I want to thank you for your thoughtful remarks today. It's a topic that I share your interest in. My question is a follow on to the last. To what extent can the European Security Defense Identity (ESDI), or initiatives like ESDI, act as a mechanism, a facilitator to drop the gates that you speak of? What can we do in these partnerships to begin to do partnerships in the industrial base?

Hamre: We're very supportive of ESDI. Frankly, efforts that would help to strengthen the European side of the NATO organization, of the NATO alliance, we think those are constructive steps. But we've always said that if all they are is a set of meetings to go to and a new secretariat and a new secretary general and that, if that's all that ESDI is going to be, and, frankly, you know, they're stumbling over all these kinds of organizational issues, then it will not be productive. I mean, you've got to put capability on the ground.

What really is so badly missing right now is real capability. You know, and this is what the secretary launched when he went over a year ago called the Defense Capability Initiative. Which is you've got to start buying sustainability. You've got to start buying command and control. You've got to start buying airlift and logistics support. You've got to start buying what it takes to be effective on the ground if we're going to have genuine expeditionary capability. If all it's going to be is another set of, you know, protocols and meetings and talking societies, then it's not really solving the problem.

So we will continue to try to be supportive, but you don't need another organization that all it's going to do is to compete with NATO as the security alliance for Europe. And to that extent, we will be helpful in any way we can. But we've got to make it real.

Now as it relates to the industrial base, you know, you can't have an industrial base if you don't buy anything. That's what it really comes down toso all the words and all the plans and all that don't buy you an industrial base. You've got to buy something. And so what you really have to look at are what are these defense budgets like. And I share what George Robertson said recently when he was here. He was up in Canada, he's been around. And he said, you know, you guys have got to start focusing on your defense budgets. And now I know what they've said in return to me is, well, we need to do the consolidation because we've got to eliminate the inefficiencies that come with having too much redundant excess capacities so we get more output. I agree with that, you know. We had a slightly different view about how it would be better for that to proceed, but they didn't go that way. Okay, I understand that.

So this is not a bad thing that they want to have consolidation if it really does lead to more efficient output. But they frankly need to look again. This isn't a surrogate for having solid defense budgets.

Pfaltzgraff: Okay, next question. Yes, over here, please.

Whalen: Dick Whalen, Raytheon Systems, Strategic Planning. I about fell out of my chair when I heard the mention of the industrial partners in terms of our strategic responsiveness for the 21st century and my congratulations to you, Secretary. You have always been a strong advocate of our end of the bargain. My question is, when we try to sell, when we try to come forward with questions about acquisition policy, is there a possibility that at some high level in SecDef a defense advocacy department or organization could be installed where companies with issues of this nature could go directly to people at that level and put them on the table? So I'm sort of asking can we have an advocate? A real advocate?

Hamre: Well, I'm sorry I disappointed you. No, Dennis Picard used to call about every two weeks, I mean, so I . . . Of course we do have a central place and a strong place and that's the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Technology. I mean, this is, by our protocol, the third ranking position or the fourth, sort of fourth, in the department. And of course in each of the Services, there's an assistant secretary. So there are places to go.

And I think that, you know, part of it is that we just have to realize that we have a long term strategic responsibility, you know, for your health as long as our health going into the next century. I think we've had the luxury of taking that a bit for granted because we had so much excess capacity that we could live off of that in the short term as things were getting smaller. But I think we're now at the stage where we have to very seriously, you know, look at the long-term viability of our companies.

You know, and here again, I do not want to change the way we do funding for corporate America. The stock market is a marvelous thing. And one of the great advantages that the United States has over our competitors in Europe is that we have a rich and sophisticated venture capital system here in this country that the Europeans don't have. And I don't want to undermine that at all. But we're at a time now where there's nobody in the world is as good as we are at money management, you know, in this country.

But there are times when the current system seems to punish the stable, high tech companies that don't register 20 and 30 percent growth forecasts every year. You know, 6 percent or 5 percent isn't enough sometimes in this stock market. And that's part of what we're seeing. I mean, when there are, you know, forecasts of growth for companies that have never made a profit that have incredible capitalization, you know, at the stock market, and yet companies with this astounding talent and expertise, you know, don't. But it's largely because, you know, the finance world doesn't see the sort of growth potential in defense companies that they see in, say, in communications, telecommunications companies.

And we're going to have to take a look at that. You know, how do we deal with that? We, DoD, we're going to have to come to grips with that because this is a long-term issue. You know, if I said something now, I'd get in trouble because I don't know what I'm talking about, but I do think we've got to study this over the next couple of months. So I gave you a long roundabout answer to say I think it has to be the responsibility of the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary. Obviously, the day-to-day responsibility will be the Under Secretary Acquisition Technology, Jacques Gansler.

Pfaltzgraff: Next question? We have time for one or two more. Please.

Audience Member: Secretary, sir, there's been a lot of discussion of a figure kicked around, about $60 billion investment for modernization. We just heard recently that it's closer perhaps to $90 [billion]. Would you share your thoughts on wants versus needs and what do you think the actual appropriations will be in the future?

Hamre: I think how I reconcile those two numbers is the $60 billion target that we have is for procurement. And if you add the research and development, which, given research and development together would constitute investment, it would be $90 billion. We're going to make $60 billion as a target. And that was General Shali[kashvili] several years kind of put a marker down and said we needed to get there. We're going to get there. I'm not sure that that at that level still represents the pace of recapitalization that we're going to need in the long run.

Now part of that depends on what it is that we're going to buy and, you know, there's a very different picture that's emerging. This is why it's so hard for the Army right now to pull the budget together because we insist on such granularity and such detail in putting budgets together and we're at an important shift in thinking. And, all of a sudden, to be able to say we've got to have a brand new concept and we've got to have the kind of fidelity we have that normally put budgets together, it's a very tough thing to do.

And one of the things I will say every time I have a chance to Congress is please don't judge this important initiative if you find some little hiccups along the road, you know, in the budget that we send you. We'll undoubtedly have some of it wrong. But the direction is absolutely right.

Now that is going to affect how much recapitalization the Army is going to need over time. But I personally don't think that at $60 billion is adequate for making up for the last 10 years, 12 years, and I think we're going to have to do better than that over time. Now our budgets right now show us getting up to $72, $73 billion in procurement here toward the out-years of the five-year plan. We'll get better than $60 [billion]. You know, the history has always been you had to trade away some of that, you know, to make up for holes in your operating accounts along the way.

So I don't know. I won't forecast what number we will get to. But we can't let the pressures, the short term pressures, you know, take our eye off the need that we've got to continue to march back up the curve on modernization.

Pfaltzgraff: We have time for one more question. Who would like to be the final question? Yes, right here, please.

Melcher: Sir, Colonel Melcher. Just to shift subjects for a moment. We recently completed a Kosovo quick-look in DoD to try and glean some of the lessons learned from that campaign. Do you think there should be an equivalent cabinet level review of that campaign to determine lessons learned across interagency and, at some point in the future, should there be a Kosovo relook at that level to see whether we're accomplishing our objectives and whether we ought to adjust the mix of our elements of national power?

Hamre: Well, I know that part of the after action report that came to the Secretary and the Secretary and the Chairman endorsed was that we take a look at how well we did interagency. There were a lot of things about that. Most of which worked, I think, fairly well. But there were some things that didn't go as well and that's part of an after action assessment. Obviously, you know, anything interagency is just a lot harder to do because, you know, it's competing with so many other things that have to happen on a day to day basis. But, yes, I think there are some we ought to. And my understanding is that we've started that already, but I'm afraid I don't know the details personally on where we are in that sort of a review.

It will never have, you know, the structure and discipline of a DoD after action, frankly. I mean, we're kind of compulsive about that sort of stuff. But I think that's why it's such a remarkable organization, too.

If I could use though as a jumping-off point to say one thing. I know that there have been some voices that have said that there was just undue political micro-management of the Kosovo air operation. And I think it's obvious that we certainly wouldn't have fought the Kosovo air operation the way we did had we been doing it alone. You know, we would have done it quite differently. But the reality is we weren't ever going to be able to fight that war alone. We couldn't have fought the Kosovo air operation if we couldn't have used the air bases in Italy. We couldn't have fought that operation if we had been denied access and over flight for Hungary.

Like it or not, NATO went to war, not the United States. And so much of what people now say and characterize as being we fought inefficiently is really misunderstanding the nature of this conflict. This was the first time NATO as an alliance had to go to war. And there are constraints that come with that. After all, if we had just fought the war ourselvesassuming we could have, which we couldn'thow would we then have had the Europeans invested in resourcing 85 percent of the forces on the ground for peace enforcement? No. I mean, they wouldn't have been committed to that if we'd done all the work and just did the air campaign.

So I think we have to be realistic. You know, the environment that we were in dictated a path that differed from how we would have done it had we done it just ourselves. But we didn't have that. I was going to say that we didn't have that luxury. I'm not sure that would have been a luxury because I'm not sure any American was prepared to fight that war just by ourselves. And I think the outcome would have producedwe wouldn't have been able to follow through on it. While airplanes alone won the war, they sure didn't win the peace. You've got to put guys with boots on the ground to do that. And we're still in the process of that.

And I think that's the other lesson of Kosovo which, if I may, is to say I celebrate the wonderful things that our air forces did. To include Task Force Hawk. Which I thought, given everything that it was asked to do, did a remarkable job. But it reinforced again in my mind that political reality is control on the ground. I mean, until we could actually send troops in and to make that peace happen, you know, end of the barrel, it wasn't going to happen just with airplanes.

And that's not to take a thing away from the courage or the bravery or the skill of the pilots that made it such a success. They did a wonderful job. But it reinforced again in our minds why it's so important to have the full spectrum of capability that a superpower has to have. Thanks for giving me a chance to give you a little lecture. You didn't ask for it, but I just wanted to . . . Yeah.

Pfaltzgraff: Dr. Hamre, may I ask our collective thanks to you for adding, as I said when we began the question period, a very important new dimension to the conference that we've had over the last two days. The defense industrial base is indispensable to what we are trying to do as we all know in this room. And you, both in the work that you do in the Department of Defense and in the discussion that we have had in this session at lunch, have added a great deal to our understanding. So many thanks for being with us. Thanks also for the questions and answers to the audience and your wonderful answers. We wish you the very best. Thanks again.

Hamre: Thank you very much.

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