technology risk is so low that we can deliver it very quickly. >> thank you. that's all for now. >> thank you. .. tear and to what exactly do you attribute this extraordinary process and do you have some thoughts you could share with us on how we could best help you address that situation? >> yes, sir. thank you.

i don't think it'll surprise anybody the answer is that it's our mobility systems that are suffering the most wear and tear because of the ways that they're used and the pace that they're used. so i asked my staff recently what are the top five items on wear and tear. that's our fixed wing, rotary wing aviation, it's our ground mobility fleet and the maritime platform. we're simply flying more hours, we're driving more miles. we're spending more time on the water. and this is just at a pace beyond what we had predicted when those systems were procured. so we are refurbishing them more often. and we've been resourced adequately to do that. my concern looking ahead is simply that we sustain the level

of resources that will permit us to keep this equipment going as we look forward to some forces drawing down in iraq especially we don't see that happening for special operation forces at all. so as we've come to depend on some special funding means to keep this going we'll have to find a way to work that into our baseline budget in order to sustain this equipment over time. but on that point as we're drawing down our conventional sources i know there are some challenges in terms of your staying there and the same numbers in terms of making sure that you continue to get the support equipment that you need 'cause a lot of that you get from the conventional forces in the field. how is that playing out? are you satisfied those concerns are being met or is there more to be done? >> i think it's playing out when he will recently we had service chief level talks with the commandant of the marine corps and the chief of staff of the army. they are in complete accord to what the challenges are and

seeking ways together to resolve those. i think there is a broad understanding that whether it's a small force in an area or a large force in an area, you still need somebody to control the air space, operate the air fields, provide the quick reaction force, provide the medical support, do all the rest of it that it takes. to look after the force that is forward. and so we are helping them help us by doing the detailed analysis of exactly what it is we think will have to be left behind by the forces to drawdown in order to sustain the activity that stays behind. so i think we're on a good track with that in our conversations with the services. >> all right. thanks. i apologize. >> can you tell us what the typical rotational cycles are of soft personnel particularly in centcom and how that may be affecting what you best feel like you can do with regard to keeping up with such a pace in terms of rotation of personnel.

i know that's been an issue that's coming up in the broader context with our military but i want specifically want to be concerned with the special operation forces? >> yes, sir. the service components have sort of evolved into different rotational paces depending on the nature of the force, the type of equipment they used, the nature of the operations that they're conducting so it ranges from about 90 days on the short end for some of our aviators who fly an awful lot of hours at night on night vision goggles who burn up their more allotted hires quickly and come back and need to reset. through about seven months for our special forces operational detachment a teams be the green berets who are at battalion level rotations at that pace and then it extends beyond that to one-year rotations for many of the people assigned at the higher headquarters in order to provide a campaign planning

continuity to the effort at the more senior levels. the rate now is sustainable. our predictions about how long we could sustain it were wrong. we didn't think that we could sustain it at this pace this long but the forces proving resilient beyond our -- beyond our estimates. i think personally that we are at a about maximum rate that we can sustain. but i think that we can sustain this rate. for some time longer. it has now become the new normal. it is the way we operate. people who are doing this have been doing it long enough to know that this is what it is they can expect to do. and our retention rate remains high and our recruiting remains healthy. so if the demand didn't

increase, we're probably pretty okay. but what we see is an increasing demand for special operation forces and so we've got a growth plan in place to accommodate that. >> thank you. good to have you here. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you. mr. ellsworth is recognized for five minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, i apologize for being late. i had some hoosiers in the office who didn't want to let me go. if this question has been discussed just let me know and i'll move on to something else. could you talk, admiral, a little bit about some of the interoperability between the agencies. if things are being done in the most efficient manner between the interagency cooperation, some of the challenges you might have faced, what's the best practice and, you know, what are our successes and what challenges are you facing in the meld there? >> yes, sir, we did address that at some level and what i said very quickly is it's better than it will ever been. it will get better. and we are now at the point where the structures that have evolved to provide the venues

for these kinds of interactions to occur. now it's a matter of the people getting the knowledge of each each other's organizations and traditions and, frankly, languages in order to talk to the efficiency of it. the terms are certainly in the right direction. we are way ahead where we thought we may have just a couple of years ago. >> great. if you would this is totally unrelated, an area of particular interest for me. discuss what you can about our attempts and our movement in the nonlethal field. where we are on that whether vehicle stops and personnel stops. i know that's not normally what would be discussed in the special ops and would be a valuable part in winning the hearts and mind if you wouldn't mind telling me where we are and what we need. >> we are all in favor of every applicable nonlethal technology. we understand as well as anybody, i think, that killing people is not the way to success

in either iraq, afghanistan, or anywhere else that we work. and that a nonlethal effect that can then give you time to sort out the situation, sort out the people would be a great advantage on the battlefield. special operations is in favor of any feasible appropriate technology. our position, though, is that those technologies have a much broader application than special operations forces so we are advocates of it. we are champions for it. and we are cheerleaders for it but we have very few programs initiated within the special operations budget itself. >> i've seen some of the things -- i'm embarrassed being in in congress and seeing the armed services and i'm watching the discovery challenge and seeing the new technology about the heat, i guess, projecting apparatus. i don't even know what to call

it. but it's very interesting -- is that on the edge of being used? >> my staff is telling me it's called the active denial system. >> that's a great name for that. [laughter] >> couldn't have named it better myself. is that in the prototype stage? >> i saw that demonstrated but it's been a couple of years ago and i don't know what's happened actually since then. >> thank you, admiral. chairman, i yield back. >> thank you. a couple more areas i want to ask back and we'll go back through the members as well. piracy that's been emerging as a threat and a challenge. i guess, congratulations is the word in the operation in rescue the maersk crew. it's a very impressive accomplishment and it's great. but all those years ago you were trained to do, you know, basically were set up so if

there was a hostage situation anywhere in the world you could respond very, very quickly. you've been doing a lot of other things in between but it was very impressive to see that training paid off and we knew what to do. now, going forward in terms of how we confront piracy. certainly it's a challenge in that part of the world off the coast of somalia and there's huge implications that we need to try and confront. at the same time, as we've mentioned in this hearing you have a wealth of other responsibilities that are also important in afghanistan and pakistan and a variety of other places and one of my concerns is that with the media attention on piracy coming up, you know, if we shift too much of our focus in that direction we distract from these other very important missions as well. i just wonder if you could comment how you see socom's role in combating piracy in that part of the world and any concerns you have about how it may distract from some of the other missions? >> yes, sir. we have obviously across the military there's robust capability to take on piracy in different ways.

and special operations contributes some of the capability to that as was evidenced here a couple months ago. how that force is used is a matter of policy. it's my responsibility to train the force to do what it is it's asked to do. we do keep some elements of our force on standby, on alert to respond to that kind of situation so that if they are infrequent, then i think we would consider it not to be much -- >> and that is all i need in the case. even with everything that's been going on in the last eight years, it's always been the case that you've had that standby force. >> yes, sir. >> i'm sorry. i didn't mean to interrupt if you have anything else. >> again, it's more of a policy issue, but the question is, is really are we -- are we going to prevent piracy or are we going to respond to piracy with a military force? today we'd been more in the

business of -- with my force of responding to those -- of providing those who respond to it and we're able to continue with that mission without impacting on our others. >> certainly. mr. miller? >> i'll pass. >> okay. i got more questions. but mr. mcintyre, do you have anything you want to add? >> do you feel like that the partnership with nato and their special operations capability is working well? >> sir, and we did address that briefly earlier but the nato special operations coordination center, the nscc headquarters is an open running operation, it's not fully manned and fully capable yet. but the relationships that have occurred within that organization have developed quite strong bonds among the nato special operation forces. i was able to attend their first annual conference last year, 28

countries i believe came to that conference and it was remarkable how similar the conversation were, the vision is across the special operations forces of nato, some of which feel they have more in common with the special operation forces of other nations than they do with other forces on their own because of the way they train and exercise. i think that there's an opportunity to take that to the next step. i'm just not certain what the next step is. and what i mentioned before is that we might explore a way to operationalize the nato south coordination center in some way and provide an independent director who's now a dual-headed officer. >> thank you. >> and following up on that, there's a trip that i took in january with some members on the way back from iraq we stopped and had a chance to visit the special operation forces in nato

in command and i can't tell you how impressed we were by the degree of coordination and without getting into too many detailed aspersions. we did not find other similar coordination in nato that we had met. that's a major, major challenge in afghanistan. how to get our partner nations -- it would be far too ambition to say on the same page but at least in the same book when it comes to how we're going to confront afghanistan and pakistan. and nato is set up the way it's set up. it's an important alliance. it's very difficult to manage that many different countries coming from that many different perspectives so i certainly have a fair amount of respect that the difficulty the organization faces but we went through all that meeting on that with increasing frustration and we didn't have as much time as i would like is to visit the force and it was inspirational and we saw that it can work. you can, in fact, bring that many different nations together to coordinate in a way that is

effective and i guess my plea would be that the forces over there try to spread that message more broadly among the other aspects of nato. it would be very, very critical. >> sir, if i could make -- >> please, go ahead. >> i didn't mean to attribute more countries to nato or more to this conference. what we're seeing actually is an extension of special operations cooperation beyond nato and those who participate in other operations where they may work with a nato soft country are now becoming part of this team so this first annual conference we came to last year was actually attended by some nonnato countries because they choose to develop those relationships. it's really encouraging to see this play out. >> and it's invaluable as the mantra of counterinsurgency by through and with. you want to work with the host nations and many of them are now participating in this and learning the necessary skills to implement that policy.

i want to ask a little bit about some of the contracting issues and it's something we've dealt with and what we've always tried to do on this committee is find ways to enable socom to have a slightly more nimble approach to acquisition. that, you know, the normal processes are difficult when you're operating at such speed and with so much technology that's rapidly changing. if you go through a normal 18-month acquisition process by the time you've acquired the product, it is out of date so we've tried to speed it up in a couple different areas. i'm curious how you think that is going in general and i also wanted to give you an opportunity to respond -- i know "the washington post" had written an article recently critical of some of that contracting that it hadn't followed the process in some instances. i have a very strong bias that, you know, drowning the d.o.d. in process is one of the things that is inhibiting our ability to move forward but that's not to say that we don't need it off, you know, some transparent process so that we make sure that it's all on the up and up and done in the best interest of the taxpayers. i want to give you an opportunity to comment on a couple of those issues and where

you see it headed. >> yes, sir. i certainly agree with you. i am encouraged by all that secretary of defense gates said about relooking at how acquisition is done department wide with an eye towards cost reduction and streamlining acquisition processes. within the special operations command as you said, we are intended by congress i believe to be more agile than the services can be with their large acquisition programs using our mfp11 budget for the special operations peculiar acquisition procurement -- procurement actions that we take. i focused on this a couple of years ago and investigating our own house i realized that many of the barnacles that have grown on our process were barnacles that we let grow. as i termed it within my own headquarters, i thought that we were operating comfortably sort

of in the middle of our authorizations and certainly not pushing the edge of it. so we've got several initiatives within our own headquarters to provide more agility internally along the way. we have sought and been granted relief from participation in some of the service-wide joint acquisition processes which had been applied probably improperly to special operations programs so vice chairman of the joint chiefs who runs some of this processes has relieved us of those where the acquisition project -- program is a special operations peculiar program. we do operate under all the same laws and policies and reporting requirements. we've got a ways to go in terms of continuing to scrape the barnacles off but i think we're making progress in that regard.

and we will certainly continue to report to you how that is going. but i'm encouraged by what we've seen here just in the last few months. with respect to the dod-ig report that was not an acquisition contracting issue. that was a contract that we led with a single provider of many services to the special operations community. modify equipment. they maintain equipment. they repair equipment and refurbish it. they store equipment for us. they do build sort of small one-off items for us and design and build those. it's a -- it's a comprehensive set of activities that they -- that they perform for us. and the dod-ig report highlighte

three findings two of which we concurred mostly with and have taken several internal actions to resolve working with ig and i think to their satisfaction. the third one actually had to do with a potential antideficiency act violation which it was our responsibility to conduct a preliminary review of. we did that. our preliminary review identified that the -- that the finding had some merit. there was -- there is the potential of an a.d.a. violation so this week my comptroller has initiated a formal investigation into that finding which is our responsibility to do. we have nine months to report the results of that investigation. we have about -- we have 90 days to respond formally to the -- to the release of the final ig report.

>> can i have one more question while i'm looking at my colleagues, anything else? just in focusing for a moment, as long as we have you here, i would be interested on your take on afghanistan and pakistan on the various situations there. in particular, two areas. in both, and this is something general mccrystal highlighted in his comments yesterday and the day before yesterday of in of the senate, you know, talking about, you know, the balance between confronting the enemy and being able to track down the terrorists that threaten us and at the same time protecting against civilian casualties and taking a more classic counterinsurgency approach. and i agree with general mccrystal that we need the afghan people on our side and right now the two greatest threats of them being on our side are number one the civilian casualty issue. both real and in some cases, i think, generated by taliban propaganda but we need to get better at countering that propaganda, getting our own message out but also it is a

very, very real concern and, of course, the other issue is the efficacy of the afghan government, which the people of afghanistan do not believe in. i think certainly the best approach there is to try to go local as much as possible. the afghan people far more trust their tribes and the local provincial government other than what the government winds up and not to say that the national government will be better as well but balancing afghanistan in going forward, how do you see the best approach in striking that balance? and the second question, you know, with regard to pakistan. this issue affects pakistan as well. in fact, david kilcullen testified before the committee a while back saying the strikes -- the drone strikes in the fatah are actually fairly well thought of in the fatah because the people who live there have been, you know, dealing with these violence psychopaths who have

been running their communities. it's in pakistan itself and in afghanistan where the civilian population sees this as a threat to their sovereignty and, therefore, is less likely to be supportive of us. but also specifically pakistan needs to learn counterinsurgency. and i won't go through the litany of challenges there. you know them well. but we need to be able to help them while at the same time we have a limited role to play. i mean, their sovereignty is very important. it's incredibly important to getting support for their government that we not have too heavy of a hand there. i guess my two questions at the end are, what can we do to better help pakistan get to the counterinsurgency level that they need to get at? 'cause as successful as they've been in swat and other regions recently, it's been a pretty heavy-handed conventional approach that's created 2 to 3 million refugees even as it's driven the taliban. that's number one and number two

how do you see us striking the balance in afghanistan between fighting the people we need to fight and stopping the number of civilian casualties? >> sir, i think you said it better than i could and i support what general mccrystal said in his confirmation hearing a couple days ago. if i could go to pakistan first. >> please. >> i think that we can't -- we can't help pakistan more than they want to be helped. and one of the filters on sort of their willingness to be helped is how -- is how the pakistan military is perceived within pakistan. it is the strongest element of pakistan historically. it is the element of government upon which the people depend and i think that we have to be very careful in recognizing that we can't take actions that would cause the pakistan military to appear to the pakistani people to be an extension of ours. we can only help them in a way

that truly helps them and they are much more expert in that than we are. so i think the best thing we can do is develop the relationships that will erode whatever atmosphere of distrust exists. help the pakistani people understand that our interests there are theirs and that our commitment is a long-term commitment for the good of pakistan and the stability of the region. but it will require us to work very carefully and very wisely with the pakistan government, with the pakistan military and the frontier corps. regarding afghanistan, i would highlight that afghanistan is a uniquely complex environment. counterinsurgency in afghanistan is very different than it has been anywhere else.

where we have operated. it is really a village by village valley by valley counterinsurgency. one of the things that i'm finding myself saying more often is that presence without value is perceived as occupation and in afghanistan in particular, occupation is resisted -- it's simply their culture to resist outsiders. they pride themselves -- they pride themselves on a long history of resisting outside influence. much of afghanistan has not felt the presence -- the impact of a central government in kabul ever. and as you said, the -- i think a large part of our goal there is to encourage the people who are now deciding where their allegiance will be, it's urging -- it's causing them to

decide to place their bet with a legitimate government. at whatever level that is. whether it's legitimate tribal, local, regional or federal government. it will come down to ultimately where they place their bet. and i think in absence of solid metrics it will be our sense of where the people are beginning to place their bets that will lead us to understand whether or not our efforts are successful in the hinterlands of afghanistan. that will require a careful approach. it will require a small as footprint as we can get away with in the places we go with the capability and the security considerations as part of that. it will -- it will require i believe a shift towards -- more

of a shift towards true local regional knowledge, however that is obtained. we are -- we have to get beyond generalizations in afghanistan into true deep knowledge of tribal relationships, family histories, the nuances of the terrain and weather and how that affects how business is done, money is made, how their world operates. if we are to be predictable in our affects, i think an awful large part of what we've got to develop is an ability to be -- i said that wrong. i don't mean predictable in our affects, i mean, accurate in our predictions of our affects. we have got to have a better sense of the impact of our behavior as we put our plans together to work in the remote regions of afghanistan.

i think this is a long-term commitment for us in order to build that depth of knowledge and then allow it to have the impact in the places where that needs to occur. this will not be people deciding overnight where their allegiance is. it's going to have to be convincing them over a long period of time that they are better off placing their bet with the local regional governments than with the illegitimate power players in the region. >> as so frequently happens in asking that question i thought of one more. shifting to africa. we recently did a codel in parts africa and got a brief on aqim and mali, algeria and we know there is activity o