Robert Gates: Nothing 'awkward' at DoD

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Robert Gates: Nothing 'awkward' at DoD

by Mark Silva

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the holdover from the Bush administration now proposing significant spending cuts and realignment of priorities at the Pentagon of the Obama administration, says he has carried out plenty of "nonpartisan'' assignments and really doesn't "find it awkward.''

Gates also says that, despite recent violent episodes in Iraqwhere President Barack Obama dropped in for a surprise visit todaythe security situation has grown stable enough to support the administration's confidence that the drawdown of U.S. troops underway can be carried out.

Gates, in an interview airing this evening on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, tells PBS's Judy Woodruff that recent bombings in Iraq are a sign of "al Qaeda trying sort of as a last gasp to try and reverse the progress that's been made ... These car-bomb attacks generally are the signature kind of thing that al Qaeda in Iraq does.''

And with his recommended cuts in Defense contracting programs, Gates says, he is not attempting to eliminate the F-22, for instance, but rather to take what the Pentagon has and move on with other aircraft. This will remain controversial in Congress, if only for the jobs involved.

"What we're trying to do is not reduce emphasis on conventional warfare, but be more selective about the weapons systems that we fund to fight that kind of a fight,'' Gates says.

Here, courtesy of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, is a transcript of the Gates interview:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Secretary Robert Gates, thank you very much for talking with us.

SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: My pleasure.

MS. WOODRUFF: As we sit here at the Pentagon in Washington, President Obama is right now in Iraq talking to the troops, meeting with Iraqi leaders. What is his message to the Iraqis?

SEC. GATES: I think, first of all, his message to our troops is one of appreciation and gratitude for their dedication and their service. I think his message to the Iraqis is, almost certainly, keep on doing what you're doing; keep on resolving problems politically; keep on working at reconciliation; get ready for your elections. We are going to keep our side of the bargain in terms of the agreement, in terms of draw-downs of troops and you have to step up to your responsibilities now, too.

MS. WOODRUFF: You've obviously been in Iraq many a time. What would you hope the president would take away from this visit?

SEC. GATES: Well, I hope that he will be successful in encouraging the Iraqi leadership to continue working together. And I hope that he willin fact, I am confident that he will come home impressed by the caliber of our men and women in uniform out there.

MS. WOODRUFF: The violence has been escalating recently. In fact, there was a car bomb today, I guess, in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. The U.S.'s pledge to get most of the troops out19 months, most of them will be out by next year. But if this violence were to step up considerably, is there a contingency plan?

SEC. GATES: I think the president always has the authority to, as commander-in-chief, to change his plans. But I think the view of our commanders is that, while there are some of these spectacular attacks, overall, the level of violence continues to be quite low compared with, particularly, 2007 and the first part of 2008, in fact, at levels not seen since 2003.

I think what we're seeing is al Qaeda trying sort of as a last gasp to try and reverse the progress that's been made through these attacks. But these car-bomb attacks generally are the signature kind of thing that al Qaeda in Iraq does.

MS. WOODRUFF: Are they reversing the progress?

SEC. GATES: I don't think so, no. And, in fact, I think it's been quite impressive how people, how resilient people have been in Baghdad, in Iraq in general.

MS. WOODRUFF: President Obama has used part of this overseas trip not only to emphasize he's different from his predecessor, but to reach out to the Muslim world, especially with that speech in Turkey. As somebody who's observed U.S. national security up close for three decades, do you think this is something that's going to pay dividends?

SEC. GATES: I think it will. I think thatI gave a speech last year in which I made the comment that, how can it be that the nation that discovered public relations is being out-communicated by a guy in a cave? The reality is, I think we probably have not done as well as we should have in terms of reaching out to Muslims and making clear that what we're concerned about are violent extremists. This isn't the war against Islam. And I think the president is communicating that message.

I think the challenge for the rest of the government is to figure out how we do that on a more comprehensive and continuing basis.

MS. WOODRUFF: Is that process underway?

SEC. GATES: Yes, it is.

MS. WOODRUFF: Anything you want to flesh out about it?

SEC. GATES: Well, I mean, it's basically under the auspices of the State Department. We do a fair amount in theater in Iraq and Afghanistan and our commanders have the capability to do some of the strategic communications, but, fundamentally, it's a State Department responsibility.

MS. WOODRUFF: Let's talk about the Robert Gates defense budget that you unveiled yesterday. Now, the United States is in the middle of two wars and a serious recession. Is this the right time to haul out a major, dramatic overhaul of not only defense spending, but military strategy?

SEC. GATES: Well, the reality is, this is nothing new. I've been talking about this for 18 months; it is the heart of the national defense strategy that was issued last fall in the Bush administration that I issued and it's really more about simply recognizing the enduring requirement for the capabilities to fight these irregular or hybrid conflicts than it is a major strategic shift. It's really, as I put it yesterday, fundamentally, the modernization programs of our traditional strategic and conventional weapons still account for about half of our budget. Dual-purpose capabilities that work in any war scenario count for about 40 percent.

And what I'm trying to put at the table are representatives of those who spend about 10 percent of the budget. Their work has been funded principally through supplementals over the last six or seven years. I want to get that capability into the base budgets so that it will continue and we don't forget, as we did after Vietnam, how to do what we're doing right now so successfully in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it's really not as much about cuts; I know that there's a lot of focus on cuts because of four or five major programs. But it's really a rebalancing: How do we sustain the capability not only to fight the wars we are in, but also, how we preserve the hedge to fight any future conflict.

MS. WOODRUFF: So, practically, when it comes to Afghanistan, how does this change what the U.S. is able to do over the next two to five years in Afghanistan?

SEC. GATES: Well, the wars themselves are still being funded principally in 2009 by a supplemental and in 2010 with an overseas contingency fund. But what we are putting into the budget, for example, $2 billion worth of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that are at the heart of our success in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

We're increasing our capacity for helicopters, which are in huge demand in Afghanistan. We are doing a lot to build up the special operations forces, more people, more special operations-oriented lift and mobility. So there are a number of aspects of this that are going into the base budget as long-term capabilities for the United States that obviously will pay dividends in Afghanistan as well.

MS. WOODRUFF: At the same time, the president clearly made an effort on this trip overseas to talk to our allies in Europe about giving the U.S. more help in Afghanistan. There's a lot of words of support but not much support in terms of people and materiel. How can the U.S. achieve the goals that your administration has set out for Afghanistan without that additional help?

SEC. GATES: Well, first of all, I think it's important and probably no one has been more outspoken than I have in terms of asking the Europeans to do more. The truth is the Europeans have fulfilled all the commitments they have made; it's just that the requirement goes beyond the commitments they've made. And, frankly, I was surprised, pleasantly, by the outcome in France of the NATO summit because I had not anticipated that they would provide additional combat troops, perhaps some small numbers for election security.

But not only did they commit several thousand more troops, but hundreds of police trainers; they committed to a lot of civilian experts. They committed resources to the Afghan trust fund, the NATO trust fund to sustain the Afghan military forces. So I think that they actually came through with a quite a lot compared, I guess, to my expectations based on the defense ministers' meeting in Krakow last month.

MS. WOODRUFF: Is that enough?

SEC. GATES: Well, it's never enough, but it is a significant contribution, I think.

MS. WOODRUFF: You are calling, as you said, for more money to fight the terrorists, the irregular warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq and less for so-called conventional warfare preparation, theoretically places like China and Russia. But some experts we're already hearing expressing concern about the conventional military buildup in China, considered the one nation that could eventually seriously challenge the United States. Is this a prudent time to reduce emphasis on conventional warfare?

SEC. GATES: I think what we're trying to do is not reduce emphasis on conventional warfare, but be more selective about the weapons systems that we fund to fight that kind of a fight. I'm not cutting the F-22; I'm not recommending the F-22; I'm simply recommending that the program set in 2005 was to build 183 of these aircrafts. I'm simply saying, let's finish that program and then let's focus on buying large numbers of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, which has 10- to 15-year newer technology, has some capabilities that the F-22 doesn't have.

The F-22 is a great airplane, all you have to do is ask the pilots who fly it, butand it will remain in the inventory, but there is no military requirement for more than 183 of them, 187 with those that are in the supplemental. So we're doing that, we're building additional ships, we're doing more in the way of theater and tactical ballistic-missile defense. We're converting more ships to have ballistic-missile defense that would help against China. So I think there's kind of a misunderstanding of exactly what it is we're trying to do here. We're trying to be more selective about systems that actually work and that can be delivered in a reasonable period of time than some of these exotic systems.

MS. WOODRUFF: But by ending production indown the road, of the F-22 Raptor, I'm already reading that shutting it down is going to mean the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Was that something that weighed on you as you made that decision?

SEC. GATES: Well, we can't be oblivious to the impact that these decisions have on people, but the information that's available to us shows that the direct employment of the F-22 will go from about 32,000 inI'm sorry, from about 24,000 this year to about 11,000 in 2011. But Joint Strike Fighter will go from 38,000 people working this year to 82,000 people that work on that plane in direct support in 2011. So there are puts and takes. I think we've done a good job of taking care of the industrial base in the shipyards and the workers there in the decisions on the shipbuilding.

So we're not oblivious to the employment aspects, but to be perfectly honest, there isn't a single defense program anywhere, procurement program, that doesn't have an impact in somebody's hometown and somebody's state. And so if you're going to bring any discipline to the Defense Department budget, if you're going to try and make any selectivity, have any selectivity in terms of what you fund and don't fund, it will have an impact somewhere.

MS. WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of that, so many defense secretaries before you have tried to cut this or that or change this or that weapon system. Congress has essentially patted them on the head and said, fine, and then gone off and done exactly what they wanted to do. We were already hearing resistance from the Congress; what makes you think it's going to be different this time?

SEC. GATES: Well, for one thing, there's a big push in Congress for acquisition and procurement reform in the Department of Defense, and so I think we'll keep that upfront and say, you know, it's all well and good to talk about acquisition reform, but that means tough decisions have to be made. Like when programs are out of control, when they're six years late, when they're twice the cost that they were originally forecast, something has to be done. Something has to give. My hope is that because of the economic circumstances at home, because of the magnitude of the decisions that we're making and recommending, that in fact, the Congress will put aside parochial interest and do what's in the best interest of the country as a whole.

MS. WOODRUFF: Quick question on missile defense. You are not cutting the entire thing, but there are significant cuts. Already, though, we're hearing senators both sides of the aisle, members of Congress saying this is going to hurt national security, hurt homeland security. What do you say to them?

SEC. GATES: We have two threats: theater and tactical ballistic missiles and ballistic missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles from rogue states like North Korea. We are significantly increasing the missile defense capabilities to deal with the theater and tactical threat, from Iran or Hezbollah or others like that, in a number of different waysa lot of money being added to the budget.

We are not cutting the number of interceptors in Alaska, we are going to fundrobustly fund research and development to keep enhancing their capabilities, we are keeping alive the airborne-laser program, we are just not buying a second research platform. We're going to make do with one 747 to do this research. The procurement program was completely out of control, with 27 47s and so on and so forth. So I think we are doing a lot, we do very well with terminal defense, with THAD and the theater missile. We do very well at midcourse with the ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California.

Now, we're continuing to do research work on the boost phase, where they're just coming off the pad, and we have several programs, some of them classified, that are aimed at taking care of that. So I think we have really strongly supported missile defense, and I think that what we have taken out of the budget, frankly, were some experimental capabilities that were really not intended for the rogue-state missile threat but rather, a much larger threat. So I'm trying to conform our program to our policy. Our policy is to have a missile defense and it wasas it was in the Bush administration, our policy is to have a missile defense against rogue states, such as Iran and North Korea. That's what our program does.

MS. WOODRUFF: Two other quick things: So when it comes to Bob Gates versus the Congress on this, how do you stack each one up?

SEC. GATES: Well, first of all, I don't think it's me versus the Congress. I think there's going to be a lot of debate in Congress on these issues, and I think that there are a lot of people up there who are going to look very seriously and analytically at this, and my hope is thatand I will work with them. These things are always have to be worked out jointly, between the administration and the Congress, at the end of the day, and I'll work with them. But I think that we clearly need to move in a new direction. My guess is there's more support for doing that and for the kind of discipline I'm talking about than would appear from some of the press statements.

MS. WOODRUFF: And finally, we started out talking about President Obama. You are the only holdover in the cabinet from the Bush administration. You've workedis this now your eighth president?

SEC. GATES: Yes.

MS. WOODRUFF: You've worked forI think people are really curious to know, what is working for this president like compared to theall of his predecessors you've gotten to know?

SEC. GATES: Well, I try to not compare the ones that I'm working for currently with ones I've worked for in the past. Someday I'll

MS. WOODRUFF: Well then just, what's it like

SEC. GATES: Someday maybe I'll do that.

MS. WOODRUFF: Well then, as a standalone, what's it like working for President Obama?

SEC. GATES: I've been very impressed at how well the national-security team has come together. He's very thoughtful, he's very analytical and I find him willing to listen. And he said he would listen to the commanders, with respect to both Iraq and Afghanistan, he has. So it's a pleasure working for him.

MS. WOODRUFF: And as a Republican working for a Democratic president?

SEC. GATES: Well, you know, I've tried always to do this job and the jobs that I've had in government, at CIA and elsewhere, in a completely nonpartisan way. I continue to do that and I don't find it awkward.

MS. WOODRUFF: Secretary Robert Gates, we thank you very much for talking with us.

SEC. GATES: My pleasure.

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Defense cuts: F-22, Marine One and more

by Julian E. Barnes

The Pentagon unveiled perhaps the most sweeping changes in spending priorities in decades, as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates today outlined a long list of programs that he hopes to eliminate, and proposed new spending for programs that he hopes will improve the military's ability to fight irregular wars.

Gates outlined a huge reordering of spending priorities. Getting less money are programs primarily used to fight conventional foes, other nations that would potentially field technologically advanced weapons.

Programs across the military are cut back, including many big-budget programs that military analysts had predicted were on the chopping blockincluding the Army's next generation of armored vehicles, the Air Force's F-22 fighter plane and the Navy's next generation of destroyers and cruisers.

Gates also decided to terminate the new presidential helicopter (President Barack Obama has said he can make do with the old Marine One fleet, as pictured here) and the Air Force's combat search and rescue helicopter

As important as the cuts, Gates said, are the areas where he is putting additional money. Many of those initiatives fall into the category of intelligence gathering and surveillance.

Gates said he is recommending putting more money into armed unmanned aerial vehicles -- to boost U.S. capability by more than 127 percent.

He also is adding $500 million to deploy more helicopters, speeding the purchase of a new Navy ship designed to fight in coastal waters, and growing U.S. special operations forces by 2,800 troops, a 5 percent increase.

How important the changes recommended by Gates ultimately will be depends on if his proposal is accepted or rejected by Congress. Gates' recommendations will next go to the White House Office of Management and Budget and then be presented to Capitol Hill.

In a series of speeches since he took office in late 2006, Gates has criticized Pentagon spending, saying that the Defense Department suffers from "nextwar-itis," spending too much time worrying about unlikely threats.

Gates said 50 percent of the money in the budget should go to programs meant to counter conventional threats, about 10 percent to programs useful only in irregular war and 40 percent to programs that are useful to both.

"I am just trying to get the irregular warfare guys a seat at the table," Gates said.

The overall size of the budget, $534 billion, was announced earlier, but Gates had not outlined what weapons programs he intended to cut. The budget marks the end of a long run-up in defense spending that began in 2001.

Eliminating defense programs has proven difficult for previous defense secretaries-- Dick Cheney famously tried to kill the Marine Corps tilt-rotor V-22 only to see the aircraft resurrected.

And Gates likely will face his own challenges getting his budget through Congress, as members jockey to save home state programs.

Indeed, minutes after Gates finished his statement Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe condemned the proposal.

"I cannot believe what I heard today," Inhofe said in a statement. "President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war."

Gates said he knew his recommendations would be controversial, but said he did not take politics into account.

"My hope is that, as we have tried to do here in this building, that the members of Congress will rise above parochial interests and consider what is in the best interest of the nation as a whole," Gates said.

Gates said he is shifting money from areas where the U.S. had more capabilities than it needed to places where the military does not have enough resources.

Aides to Gates said that he felt that the U.S. was not adequately preparing itself for the real threats it might face

"He came here to fix the war, but in the process of trying to fix the wars he ran into institutional hurdles," one Defense official said. "He realized to fix the war he had to fix the institution."

The military spending cuts at the end of the Cold War were far larger than the cuts that Gates outlined Monday. While those cuts left the military smaller, they did not lead to dramatic changes in its priorities.

Although dramatic, Gates changes' are far less deep than those made by President Dwight Eisenhower, who cut dramatically from the Army as he built up the Air Force and U.S. strategic nuclear forces.

Gates' predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about transforming the military, making it into a lighter, more deployable force. But the realities of the war in Iraq put a halt to many of Rumsfeld's initiatives.

And while Rumsfeld succeeded in killing some programs--such as the Comanche helicopter--other systems like a new artillery cannon simply shifted to become parts of other weapons programs.

There were some surprises in the budget. Missile defense spending is reduced by $1.4 billion, but those cuts are not as deep as some expected.

Gates said he was reorienting the program to focus more on deployable theater missile defense systems. Cut back are the Airborne laser program and spending on the interceptor missiles stationed in Alaska.

Many of the terminated programs will be examined in the next Quadrennial Defense Review, and the Pentagon will begin looking at what kind of alternative programs should be developed.

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Obama condemns N.K. missile launch

by Christi Parsons

PRAGUE -- President Barack Obama, condemning North Korea's missile launch, today called for a strong international response to deter future advancement of its nuclear program.

"They, I think, have taken a provocative action,'' Obama said before heading into a scheduled meeting with the president of the European Union in Prague. "It creates instability in their region, around the world.''

The president also addressed the launch in a public forum, a planned speech on nuclear power before an audience of 20,000 in Prague, the one major public address of his weeklong tour across Europe.

"North Korea broke the rules, once again, by testing a rocket that could be used for long range missiles," Obama said in his speech. ""Words must mean something . . . The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons."

States harboring nuclear ambitions need to know that the path to world respect will not come through proliferation, but rather through talks based on "mutual interest and mutual respect,'' Obama told his audience.

This response to this weekend's missile launch came during an already scheduled address on nuclear arms. Calling for "a world without weapons," Obama committed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in American national security strategy as well as the size of his nation's nuclear arsenal.

Obama, who plans to travel to Moscow this summer, promised to negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia by the end of the year and pledged to bring into force the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He also said he would try to negotiate a new international treaty ending the production of the materials critical for nuclear weapons production.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs awakened the president with news of the North Korean missile launch before daylight in Prague, and Obama then spent the morning talking with military advisors.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice began reaching out to their counterparts, looking ahead to this afternoon's meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

White House officials would not speculate publicly about how quickly they would advise the Security Council to take action or on what action they would recommend.

The launch had been expected for weeks, after North Korean officials announced they would launch a rocket sometime around this weekend in order to put a satellite into orbit.

But the U.S. and governments in the region suspect the launch was a cover for testing a long-range missile for North Korea, which has nuclear weapons. Leaders in the U.S., South Korea and Japan had warned Pyongyang not to go forward with the rocket launch.

They believe that the test could be the first step toward putting a nuclear warhead on a missile with the ability to reach Alaska or a more distant target.

Because the notice from Pyongyang came in advance of the president's announced plans to speak on nuclear proliferation this morning, Obama policy advisors said they did not read the timing of the launch as a particular message.

But Obama said that he thinks it is a clear violation of the resolutions of the U.N. Security Counncil. North Korea, the president said, faces a decision much like Iran's, as the U.S. and allies attempt to stem nuclear weapons for both.

"If they want to take an appropriate path to rejoin the international community and break out of their isolation, that's available to them,'' Obama said of North Korea, in his remarks before meeting with the E.U. leader.

"That's not the path they're taking right now,'' he said, "And we intend to work with the international community to deliver a strong message.''

by

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President Barack Obama has taped a video greeting that will be shown Saturday during an opening session with the International Olympic Committee evaluation team visiting Chicago this weekend.

A White House official said the greeting is scheduled to be played about 9 a.m. Saturday and will then be posted to the Web site run by the Chicago 2016 committee.

Obama has also taped a video that will run at a closing night dinner Monday at the Art Institute, an event that will feature an appearance by Oprah Winfrey.

Soon after his election, Obama taped a different video that was shown Nov. 21 during the Chicago presentation at the annual meeting of the European Olympic Committees in Istanbul.

That video delivered a message dear to the ears of the IOC: The United States and Chicago would be honored to host the Games as a way to serve the Olympic movement and as an opportunity for the country, in Obama's words, "to reach out, welcome the world to our shores and strengthen our friendships across the globe."

In that appearance, Obama said nations must work together to meet their shared challenges. "By uniting the world in a peaceful celebration of human achievement, the Olympic Games reminds us that this is possible," he said.

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Hillary Clinton: Afghanistan action now

by Mark Silva

All the focus on President Barack Obama in his travels across Europeand on the sideshows of the Michelle Obama-Queen Elizabeth II touch and Michelle Obama-Carla Bruni 'fashion smackdown'has tended to overshadow the work of one hard-working erstwhile frontrunner for the White House and now secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton has been working on building a NATO consensus around the newly fashioned U.S. strategy for Afghanistan.

The review is finished, the secretary says, and now the action starts. She met this week with an Afghanistan donor's conference in the Hague.

"The NATO summit is not a pledging conference, but of course we will be talking about how our allies can match their resources to the needs identified in the strategic review," the secretary said.

Those resources are not necessarily combat troops, she stressed, in a conference call with reporters covering the president's trip to Europe. "I think we're trying to focus on what we think will work, and what we believe will work is moving as quickly as it feasible to having security taken over by the Afghans themselves," she said.

White House National Security Advisor Jim Jones, joining Clinton on the call, stressed that the Obama administration has military, diplomatic and development components in its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

Jones, a retired Marine Corps General who served as NATO's supreme allied commander, senses a new feeling among alliance members that they must work together on Afghanistan.

""Having been at NATO and having been around since 2003 working on Afghanistan, I can tell you that there is a new spirit and there's a new feeling, and now wewe'll know shortly exactly what that transmits to in terms of offerings," Jones said.

"There's been "very little credibility for what's already been invested," Clinton told reporters en route to the Netherlands. "A lot of these aid programs don't work."

The new U.S. approach involves "looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent, and where it's going, and trying to track the outcome," she says.

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Census: Minorities count, but how?

by Mark Silva

The man set to take charge of the 2010 Census, a University of Michigan professor who has worked at the great national headcount before, has supported the idea of statistical sampling to offset actual undercounts of minorities.

This isn't the way the 2010 Census will work, according to the boss, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. Yet the reappearance of Robert M. Groves on the Census scene, the president's nominee to run the show, has raised a red flag among some Republicans.

Republicans already are worried that the White House will be running the Census show, a concern that emerged in the withdrawn nomination of Republican Sen. Judd Gregg as commerce secretarythough Gregg maintained that was not a big issue.

"This is an incredibly troubling selection that contradicts the administration's assurances that the census process would not be used to advance an ulterior political agenda," Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says of Groves' nomination. "Mr. Groves will have every opportunity to address these concerns during the confirmation process."

Groves, a former Census Bureau associate director of statistical design, served at the agency from 1990-92. He has devoted decades to research on ways to improve surveys.

As associate director, he had recommended that the 1990 Census be statistically adjusted to make up for an undercount of roughly 5 million people, many of them minorities in dense urban areas who tend to vote for Democratswhich would have an impact on the way new congressional districts are drawn and the political parties' balance of power.

The Census Bureau was overruled by Republican Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who called the proposed statistical adjustment "political tampering.''

The Supreme Court later ruled that statistical sampling cannot be used to apportion House seats, but said that adjustments could be made to the population count when redrawing congressional boundaries.

Commerce's Lock has made it clear that sampling will not be used for apportionment. He stated during his Senate confirmation hearing that there are no plans to use sampling for redistricting, while indicating that sampling could be used to measure Census accuracy or collect a wider range of demographic data.

Groves, 60, a professor at the University of Michigan, takes over at a critical time. Census officials acknowledge that tens of millions of residents in dense urban areas -- about 14 percent of the population -- are at high risk of being missed due to language problems and a deepening economic crisis that has displaced homeowners.

Hispanics, blacks and others are warning that a traditional Census will not be enough. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, praises Groves as a well-regarded academic, calling the question of statistical adjustment in 2010 a "non-issue" because there are no plans for it.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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McCain needles Obama on 'war on terror'

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Sen. John McCain couldn't resist directing a little sarcasm towards the Obama Administration today for putting to rest the term "war on terror," the phrase the Bush Administration used to describe the fight against terrorists it waged since 9/11.

McCain's comment came in an exchange he had with Gen. David Petraeus, commander of Central Command, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the Afghanistan War. McCain had asked Petraeus about a threat made Tuesday by the head of the Pakistan Taliban to attack Washington and the White House:

SEN. MCCAIN: He said that there would be -- he would orchestrate -- he would arrange an attack -- there would be an attack on Washington, D.C. How seriously do you take that threat? GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, I think any time there is any threat that could be against the homeland, I think you have to take it seriously. We are doing what is -- in the intelligence circle is called a "deep dive" to determine the possibility of that, if you will. There are some questions about capacity of that organization in terms of transnational activities. But I can assure you -- and I just talked to a senior member of the National Security council staff this morning about that. And obviously everyone is quite riveted on analyzing that and seeing what further we can find out about that.

SEN. MCCAIN: Well, we certainly wouldn't want to call it a global war on terror. I thank you, thank the witnesses.

Opponents Focus On Cost In Death Penalty Debate

In several states, economic concerns have become part of the argument against the death penalty. Opponents say capital punishment costs states considerably more than sentencing someone to life in prison.