Following is an excerpt of Rumsfeld's remarks:

April 18, 2002

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, ... there's been debate about increasing the defense manpower top line, and I wondered if you would comment on what you think about the military manpower in light of our new era of military operations.

Rumsfeld: Well, there has been some speculation about end strength in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines -- if that's what you meant -- people, human beings. And it's not surprising there's been a discussion about that given the fact that we've got some 70,000-plus Reserves -- Guard and Reserve on active duty, who have been pulled away from their jobs and their families and what it is they do normally. We also have another 25,000, plus or minus, active duty who had arrived at the end of their tours and were planning to go off and run a family farm or go to school or do whatever people do when they leave the service. So it's not surprising that that question comes up.

I am very reluctant to increase end strength, if I can avoid it. It is enormously expensive. It -- resources are always finite, and the question is, would we be better off increasing manpower or increasing capability and lethality? And to the extent I can use the pressure for increases in end strength to force the United States to stop using military people for non-military functions, I will be a lot happier. So I'm trying to pull in all of these detailees who are spread around the United States, and a lot of them in Washington, D.C., hundreds and hundreds, in fact, thousands of them who are doing things that have really not much to do with the things that they came into the service to do.

I'll give you one silly example. We've got a bunch of wonderful people in the Sinai. They went there in 20 -- 22 years ago. There's hundreds of them. Some three or four hundred of them are simply cooks and doing administrative things, which could be contracted out. We could have those folks doing military functions somewhere else in the world, A. B, the idea that we have to leave people in the Sinai for 22 years seems to me to be a reach. To the extent that there are roles that military ought to play of a peacekeeping nature, that's fine. But it ought to be temporary, and we ought to have a plan to have them stop doing it within some reasonable period of time, and the civil side fill in, whether it's police or Border Patrol or whatever is necessary.

We have been asked during the period since September 11th to put some folks into Border Patrol, into Customs, into INS. And the pressure to do it was real. And the need was a real need. And military people are organized, they're capable, and when the president says "let's go do that," we say "Fine." I said, "F ine." I'm not stupid. (Laughter.) But I also said, "By golly, I'm going to get a memorandum of understanding with the INS and Customs and the Department of Transportation so that these people are going to do it for 30, 60, 90, 180 days, whatever it is, and then they're going to stop doing it." And in the meantime the responsible agency that has the real responsibility for doing those things -- Customs, INS, Border -- they ought to get about it hiring civilians to do those jobs and train those people and get it done so we can get our folks back doing what they joined the armed services to do, which is not Border Patrol, INS and Customs.

So I'm -- rather than just caving in and rolling over and saying "Fine," let's raise end strength, I'm going to try to get us balanced back so we're not doing so many things around the world we don't need to be doing, or around the United States.

# # #