Thank you Mr. Chairman. National missile defense is among the most important issues facing the Congress and the American people.

As Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn said recently at the Naval War College, "whatever money we spend on National Missile Defense against a ballistic missile threat to this nation is a high opportunity cost and we should do it very, very carefully."

Today's hearing is an effort by this Committee to study this issue very, very carefully. I commend the Chairman for his dedication to ensuring that Congress does its job before committing great amounts of scarce funds to an expanded program. We heard testimony this week from the service chiefs and secretaries that they need more money in FY '03 and beyond to provide for basic procurement and operations. We cannot afford to do everything. Basic decisions must be made concerning what is a reasonable financial commitment to make, to deter, or prevent a realistic threat.

The Pentagon's acquisition chief, Edward Aldridge, Jr., has said that "we are not sure we know what the answer is [for providing missile defense]." We need to know more accurately the response to that question before proceeding with a crash program involving billions of dollars.

If our approach is, as some have suggested, "test through failure," that sounds like we will try anything, go anywhere, spend no matter what, until we find something that works some of the time. That sounds like a prescription for waste: a waste of time and a waste of money.

Rather than trying everything at once, it may make more sense to build slowly, test by test, a defense system that works against the most likely threats. Make it simple, effective and efficient. What we have now is a little of this, a some of that, and a lot of money.

Let us also remember that we are designing a system to meet future as well as present threats. The system may not be fully deployed until the year 2010 or 2020. We need to consider whether the major threats we face ten or twenty or even thirty years down the road will be delivered in a way that a missile defense program protects us or will our missile defense system be the defensive equivalent of France's Maginot line – something our adversaries will be able easily to evade. This is a much more difficult question and one which argues for more caution in our current approach to setting priorities for defense spending.

I thank the Chairman once again for his leadership in this area. I look forward to this morning's discussion.