Looks like Kerry is getting the treatment for supporting that money

SEN. KERRY: Do you think that that misjudgment about what it can or can't do -- and I say misjudgment in broad terms -- has complicated choices that you may face and the president may face today as a result of the stretching pretty thin of our military forces, numbers of divisions, active duty, equipment? I mean, the commanders over there tell me that in, you know, a matter of months you put on several years of wear and tear on equipment. There's going to be a huge equipment deficit at the back end of this that America has yet to really see the bill for. I gather one year there is worth seven years on an aircraft.

MS. RICE: Well, we've been at war, and we have -- we've had to use our forces and use them hard. I think that Secretary Rumsfeld is giving a lot of attention to how to deal with the obligations that we have and the structure of our forces. We believe we can continue to meet obligations that we have globally with the forces that we have, but there's no doubt as to the matter of how one transitions from war to peace and that intermediate stage that we need new skills and new organizations in order to be able to do that. The military fights and wins the war.

There's a period of time, I think appropriately, where the military is really the dominant force on the ground. But as you move to civilian reconstruction, you need people who understand legal reform and understand how to build a civil justice system and a police system, how to trade a -- change a currency, and that's what we're going to try to build.

SEN. KERRY: Well, I know that Senator Lugar has long been concerned about this; a lot of us on the committee have. But I must say to you that I am deeply concerned -- I mean, I recommended that we add another 40,000 troops. I gather there's going to be an addition of some 30,000 without formally creating new divisions.

But I think we are way behind the curve in terms of this civilian side combined public diplomacy component. And I don't think the budget begins to match what it needs to. And when you look at the other side of the costs I just described -- the back-end military equipment, et cetera -- the American taxpayer, to pursue this properly, has a -- you know, it goes back to what Senator Biden was saying earlier about kind of telling the American people what's expected of them.

I don't personally think it's all on the table sufficiently when you combine the needs of the counterproliferation efforts with various challenges of the human condition, with various challenges of the narcotics and other environmental and other kinds of efforts that are all sort of growing rather than receding. I hope that -- and then you added to what Senator Sarbanes has been saying about our overall fiscal challenge here.

We have some very, very tough choices ahead of us. I hope the administration and you will really put them to the Congress and to the American people, because the outcome is obviously gigantic. But we've got to be on the right track.