our witnesses are general james maddus, and admiral bill mccraven, commander of the u.s.cial operations command. thank you both for your dedicated and distinguished service to our nation. also, on behalf of the committee, please extend our heartfelt gratitude to the military men and women serving with you. many have served multiple deployments, often directly in harm's way. we thank them for their dedication and courage, and we thank their families, who's support is so essential. as reflected in the president's budget request of $88 billion for overseas contingency operations in fiscal year 2013, the conflict in afghanistan remains our military's foremost security challenge. the afghanistan mission is entering a critical phase of transition. the drawdown of the 33,000 u.s. surge force is scheduled to be completed by the end of this summer, and the remaining 68,000 u.s. troops in afghanistantie t quote, at a steady pace, thereafter, through 2014, according to president obama. u.s. and coalition forces have begun to move from the combat lead to an advise and assist role in

. >> it's my privilege to appear today alongside an admired leader and good friend, admiral bill mccraven. no two commands work more closely together than u.s. special operations command and central command. let me begin with what i see today in the region. the arab awakening is manifesting differently in each country. while we may hope for and certainly we firmly support all efforts for more democratic governments in the region, the awakening's origins are not necessarily a rush for democracy. rather, this awakening stems from a breakdown in the social contract between governments and their people. unjust or unresponsive regimes have fallen or are in the throws throes of falling as is the case in syria. however, the transition to a democratic government is never easy, as we see in egypt. further, it is not clear what the resulting governments will look like. challenges remain, beyond the promise of the arab awakening. iran and its surrogates continue to orchestrate violence worldwide, as evidenced by its plot to kill the saudi ambassador here in washington, d.c. iran presents the most si

is inside the administration there is' mer jent faction, which includes joe biden, but includes bill mccravengeneral who led the osama bin laden operation, believes we can sort of special forcesize -- that is not a great -- very good term, but we can move back to special forces more aggressively in this war s that right? >> admiral mckrachb, who designed the campaign who killed osama bin laden sees afghanistan as a residual presence that basically will become the job of special operations forces. that's going to have its own set of problems. reducing troops, from the perspective that war is a bad thing starks good thing, talking before about what hamid karzai is angry about, things like night raids, that's what special operations forces do. >> right. >> so the footprint will be smaller, a lot stealthier, a lot more lethal, the military likes it say the word kinetic, the euphemism for this. >> really orwellian. >> i don't dipsagree with that. >> wondering how long, how long or how quickly can we get out of there? >> we can be there -- >> sounds so complicated and so intricatesome there a way t