WASHINGTON – In her first appearance as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Sen. Susan M. Collins, R-Maine, pressed the Defense Secretary-designate to re-evaluate any effort to reduce the size of the Navy.

Collins suggested that critics have indicated there is no need for a 300 ship naval fleet and a considerably smaller unit could handle U.S. defensive needs.

This issue is critical to the Maine economy, with the Bath Iron Works serving as one of the major shipbuilding facilities for the military.

“You’ve not yet had the opportunity to review specific deterrent programs,” she said, adding that it was clear that the DD-21, the Navy’s advanced war fighting ship, was “most at-risk for procurement budget cuts.”

She said she was seeking his commitment “to reverse direction and increase our shipbuilding budget.”

Rumsfeld only went so far as to say, “”I share your interest and concern in that we understand what we are doing. Each year we are building fewer ships. We’re damaging our national security.”

Both Collins and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine, who had been on the Armed Services panel until earlier this week when she won a seat on the Senate Finance Committee, have said they back Rumsfeld’s nomination.

In a meeting recently with Rumsfeld, Snowe, who had chaired the seapower subcommittee on Armed Services, said she found him “vitally attuned to the issues affecting our national security through his stellar service.” She said she would “strongly support” the nomination.

Collins, in her inaugural appearance on the new bipartisan Armed Services committee – which has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans for the first time in history – spoke after the dean of all Senate Democrats, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and she seemed like a veteran.

Besides the probe for ships, Collins detailed her trip to Kosovo and Bosnia over the Christmas holidays with Defense Secretary William Cohen, a former Maine Senator. She said the tour gave her a deeper appreciation of the dedication of the troops and indicated that there was a pressing need to find new ways to retain highly skilled men and women.

“In any organization that doesn’t use proscription or force to work there, you have to fashion some incentives to attract and retain the people you need to run that organization in an efficient and cost-effective way,” Rumsfeld replied. “It costs so much to bring people through the intake, to train them … we have to have high confidence we can attract and retain the people we need.”

During the trip, Collins pointed out, Cohen brought over some entertainment for the troops, including the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, an entertainment troupe more renowned for skimpy outfits than football cheers.

“I readily concede that the servicemen were far more interested in talking to them than to members of Congress,” Collins said.

Collins also probed Rumsfeld on his concern about more national security protections for commercial communications satellites that are increasingly coming into play to support military activities.

“It seems there needs to be a stronger effort to improve the safety of not just our military communication links, but our commercial ones as well,” Collins said.

“It is an area of interest to me,” Rumsfeld said, admitting he is “certainly not an expert.”