NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense
DoD News Briefing
Senior Defense Official
Friday, February 1, 2002
Background Briefing on the Fiscal 2003 DoD Budget Submission.


SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL : I'm your friendly senior defense official. I am accompanied by lots of other friendly senior defense officials who will correct me whenever I'm wrong. I have a surprise for you today. Unlike one of my other briefings, I have some real numbers. I knew you'd like that.

We don't know where we will be in a year's time. We know we will be continuing the war on terrorism, but how, at what pace, in what country, uncertain.

But we can start some planning today. I mean we have to because we are deeply concerned, as you heard in the President's speech, about the linkage between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and it is critically important that we have some planning capability, some sense of what we're doing.

Now in fact the war is costing us approximately 1.8 billion a month, so if you annualize that, that's something slightly in excess of $27 billion. You can see, therefore, that this 10 billion is roughly a third of the level of effort we're doing right now, so it's an exceedingly conservative estimate of continuing the war on terror beyond fiscal year '02.

Other elements, this is as you know in budget talk Function 051 is the defense budget. It is within a total budget category called Function 050 and that is broken down into two other major subcomponents. One is the defense-related portion of the Department of Energy, and mostly in what is called the NNSA [National Nuclear Security Adminstration], the new agency that is run by General Gordon, as well as some other elements that are related to national defense.

So that if you were on the budget committee, for example, and you looked at total national defense your number for this year is $396.1 billion.

Here again you have the how much we spent on the war on terror, and this is obviously the Afghan war. This is the original supplemental in '01. The anti-terrorism amendment which is that 20 billion extra, so all of that goes into the war on terror. You then have the 9.4 which as I said are the long-term related requirements. The long-term consequences of the war which even if the war stopped today you would still have to spend, and the new operational requirements which is that undefined portion. What we call our best working estimate for planning purposes of what we might need.

And as you can see when you agregate all of that whereas in fiscal year '00, we committed less than five billion dollars to beat the hell out of the terrorist. Now we're committing nearly 30. I think that's a good message to them.