dr. krepinevich? mr. krepinevich: i believe we don't have unlimited resources so it's never going to be possible to eliminate every threat to our security. to a certain extent, the amount we spend on defense is a function of how -- of our risk tolerance. the more we spend on defense, the more we can reduce, theoretically, the risk to our security. but we can -- can't eliminate because we don't have enough resources to do that. i think another factor you have to consider is what can our allies contribute? and oftentimes, it seems the more we do, the less they do. so how do we come up with strategies to encourage our allies to do more and be less free riders on the security provided by the american people? i think there's an element of social choice in this. we have chosen as a country, as a society, to have an all-volunteer force. that costs a lot of money. other militaries don't have all-volunteer forces and when we had a draft era force, our costs were correspondingly less. as a society we place a high va

dr. krepinevich, i think you made a really important point, time is an issue. senator inhofe has a chart that shows the time to put an aircraft in the field is 23 years. if that has been the case with radar and the manhattan project we'd be speaking another language today. we have to be able to field new technologies faster. cost is obviously a question but to talk about a new bomber that probably won't be built for 10 or 12 years may be not even then, we have to deal with this issue of time. mr. krepinevich: time is a resource as manpower is, or technology is, or defense dollars. senator king: are we overthinking new weapons systems in terms of making them so complex that it backs, time just wastes? mr. krepinevich: i think secretary gates had it almost right. he talked about performance characteristics. he said we want everything that's possible and a lot of things that aren't possible in a new system. he talked about costs and he said we treat costs as though cost is no object. and he talked about time and said time, again, everything is subordinate to perfo

dr. krepinevich's comments. i understand this committee is holding a theerning goldwater-nichols act, i think the 1986 or 1988 amendment to that act created special operations command, socom has unique operational authority that can pull things and experiment with them and by pass a will the of bureaucracy. investigating those authorities, how they've been used, how they could be replicated would be important. >> thank you very much. behalf of us all, thank you very much. >> we've had a lot great hearings on the subject of today. mr. inhofe: we had hearings with uniforms present, a lot of people responsible for the mess we're in right now and the other the outside exports -- experts and you fall in that category. we last week had five professors an that was really, really useful to see if the outside, we're hanging around here, we listen to each other, i like to listen to those who are outside. single out one individual, dakota wood, he certainly has spent time two decades in the marine corps and has been an out