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this is just over an hour. >> good morning, everyone. i'm michael o'hanlon with the foreign policy program at brookings and were honored today to welcome the honorable atmosphere, chairman of house armed services committee who is now beginning of latest 13th term in congress representing the great state of washington and the area around puget sound and the broader seattle the city. chairman smith is as we all know an important voice in the united states on many matters both american foreign policy including not only defense but for assistance and trade today we will hear him speak a bit about national security strategy. this is an important year for the incoming biden administration to shape its own national security and perhaps national defense strategies, and the congress is role that historically been quite important in this process, as chairman smith knows well dumbest previous years of experience. we are delighted today to welcome him and his thoughts and how we should think about national security strategy. we all know that the top ministrations national defense strategy under jim mattis, another great washingtonian from out west, which built on some of the obama administration's latter thinking with that so-called third offset, there's been a fair amount of bipartisan support and yet undoubtedly there's going to be an opportunity and the need for new direction and if nothing else refinement of the previous maddest thinking as we come into a new decade and a new era in american foreign policy. mr. chairman thank you for joining us. we look forward to your comments and, of course, i will have some questions for my self and the audience for the rest of the hour but thank you for joining us and the floor is your. >> thank you very much. appreciate brookings give me this opportunity. it's an exciting year. we have a lot of challenges on the national security front, some with that for a while, some are relatively new but most interesting is this is probably the one of biggest transition from one president to the next. as you mentioned jim mattis drove the national security strategy but take that as we work our way through president trump's four years trump himself began to really dominate a number of aspects of that. his worldview is considerably different than joe biden's. they transitioning happening and this will impact what we do in the world, our partners view us and so the relationship that we have in the world are really important right now. much of the rest of the world is wondering where we go and i think there's a great opportunity. certainly we have a fairly known quantity in joe biden, 40 years of work on foreign policy and national security and we've seen some clear themes emerging. over-the-top we will be looking for peaceful process moving four. it's to build institutions and to help be part of creating a world that enables people to live in peace and prosper. our general approach to that is a belief in economic and political freedom and international institutions, partnerships, working together with people all around the world to deal with whatever challenges we face. there's going to be huge focus when president biden speaks about this he mentions partnerships and alliances very frequently and and i compley agree with him on how important those are as we go forward. there's a bunch of challenges, put them into categories, sort of overarching challenges and then the specific threats we worry about in the armed services committee. the biggest over arching challenge is the rise of hypocrisy and authoritarian governments. it has been a more explicit rejection of economic and political freedom and we've seen in some time as you have seen putin and xi jinping and erdogan and others take it much more authoritarian approach to this that is undermining. we have to rebuild that and deal with it. the second big issue is, i try not to put this, i can distinctly little bluntly and, frankly, it's supposed to academically so i will go ahead and say. we have to overcome the perception of her own incompetence. one of the things that is helped us since world war ii is even people who didn't like us or trust our intentions, they knew we were capable. i always remember from beirut to jerusalem and thomas friedman talked about 1983 when the civil war was raging and breaking made the decision to send in the marines picked the stock market in lebanon went up. everybody's confidence went up. this is lebanon a country that didn't, you wouldn't think of as welcoming american involvement but they thought if america is showing up then that's good. there was a confidence we knew what we were doing. a lot of things have undermined that, none more so than our terrible response to the pandemic and affect our u.s. capitol was stormed in january 6. we've got to rebuild our credibility if you're going to go after the world and say don't follow china, don't follow putin and side with us, we can get you to a better place. people have to have confidence that we can do that. towards that end what we do with the vaccine, how we handle the economic fallout from that, the economic rescue package, that's going to help us internationally as we go forward. that's the broad -- for those of you follow this, russia, china, iran, north korea and transnational terrorist threats. i think no national security study is complete if you don't add other nonmilitary threats, pandemic health obviously a threat to us. climate change. if the planet gets fried there's no peace, prosperity for anybody but i would also add extreme economic inequality which tends to lead to ungoverned spaces. if there is instability as we've seen in afghanistan and smalley and libya, that is a threat to us. we have to take that holistic approach. in that holistic approach the department of defense is part of it absolutely but there are a lot of other players that the whole of government approach i know you've heard much about places a greater emphasis on diplomacy, building those partnerships, noting those alliances. appleby crucial as well. as a go forward with this, china obviously is the big issue that is taking on everybody's focus. there's a lot of details there. we need to be careful about stumbling in to a cold war with china. i read as a look at our war planning and there's been talk about the office of net assessment in the war games exercises they been over the last six or seven years, and show that we struggle in a straight on confrontation with china. the wrong message to get out of that is oh, my gosh we've got to build a military that enables us to dominate china. i don't think that's possible or desirable and also think it runs the distinct risk of creating conflict where it doesn't need to be. what we need is we need an entire approach that deters china and others from doing the things we don't want them to do. military strength is part of that, but alliances and partnerships and diplomacy and a whole lot of other things will play a crucial role in being able to deter china from taking a hegemonic approach to the region and in other parts of the world come to undermining all of those international institutions that we know are so important. we want to take that approach and all the while while we are doing this, donald trump spoke to something in the american people, and that is the notion that what do we do with the rest of the world? you see that on the right wing of the republican party and also see that within the democratic party. why do we have troops in europe, troops in asia, why do we still in afghanistan? there is a strong desire to come home and stop engaging in those activities. we have to make the case for why we are involved and i believe we have to be more selective about when we get involved and not rely on the military to the degree we have done. i want to give you a little bit of a preview of what we're looking at in the community and what our priorities are. the question is what role does the department of defense and u.s. military play in what i just talked about? a couple pieces of good news. our global presence gives us the ability to build relationships. something as simple as an aircraft carrier in making a port call in the philippines, or this is a connection with people, it brings economic activity to the region. we have done in some cases we have helped with earthquakes and tsunamis here the presence of the u.s. military has been able to build positive relationships in a lot of places. not that he were obviously. there are places that is positive in everything about the u.s. military is back to west talking about from beirut to jerusalem analogy, our military is incredibly capable, more capable than probably any other institution in the world, frankly. when we are dealing with countries that have security concerns and looking to say who can network with? i'm not talking about sin in the marines, i'm talking about training, equipping, teaching them how to use that equipment. we have a lot to offer in that regard because for better or for many cases worse there is no military in the world as battle tested as we are right now. but the big three things we do work on where we need to make the pentagon more effective, number one, we have wasted a spectacular amount of money on weapons systems that either haven't worked at all or who have not lived up to their promise. our acquisition and procurement process over the last 20 years can only be described as a complete disaster. from what's going on with the f-35 to the lcf to the fighting vehicle to hold future combat systems, i always like to mention future combat systems, i've always thought the reason we did future combat systems is the navy and air force could buy take things, big programs. they could get it so far down the road in a program that we are to waste a lot of money. you guys in the army didn't buy in that quantity so you did create future combat systems so you could at something is too big to fail. i wish that was just a joke but we've got to get better at that. we have too seriously scrub those programs like the f-35. we complained about the money we wasted, that's gone. we have to make sure is we don't waste any anymore. the future of the fence task force i set out, incredibly important taking a look at that question. also incredibly important and looking at the second, let me just say one thing about the procurement and acquisition process. we have got to get past the program of record, has process and focus on results. of all the big ticket items the that drives me crazy is the jitters radium. ten years, ten freaking years to build a radio. by the time it got done, didn't work that much better than stuff we could've gone down and bought at radioshack. slight exaggeration. that was process. we had a program of record. who do all the steps no, let's just to get what we need, by and make it work. we have got to change the culture to make it more outcome oriented instead of process oriented. within that is what you been hearing a lot about him and that is the idea of information warfare. there's a lot of different ways to describe this but the best way to describe this is it's not quantity its quality and the bill to make your systems work. i have a long speech about my frustration with the 355 35p navy which i will spare you for the moment except to say that the 500 ship navy, and up against him has a five ship navy, but they're able to shut down your information system simulator-or chips were, they win. that's what it comes down to. our command control information systems have got to become more durable, more resilient, and also more replaceable. we cannot have the single points of failure. we have to get to protect the systems, and ideally we have to be able to build a system so we can make our adversary systems more vulnerable. that really needs to be the focus. we talk about getting off a legacy system, that's what it's talking about. moving into that is using technology better. this ties the two together, our acquisition procurement problems tied into the fact that because it takes a long, because there's so much process involved, as you will know we're not getting the best technology that will be used to. it takes too long. software and stuff they're generating in silicon valley and elsewhere of the time to get done with it to your procurement cycle what we are buying was obsolete axmen to go. we've got to build a better relationship with cutting edge technology companies. i'm worried we don't have the same positive relationships with some of the newest companies that of developing these technologies, whether you're talking about ai, hypersonics, a bunch of technology that can be incredibly important. i want to focus on rebuilding their relationship. that's the purpose of the new subcommittee. really wanting to place greater emphasis on cyber information systems and emerging technologies and that's our e to build off of that. the last thing i will say is we have got personnel issues. this is not easy described in short but whether you are talking about sexual harassment problems, diversity, extremist problems, mental health problems, what happened down at fort hood the last year, , the number of soldiers who died really shined bright light on the fact that we are not taking care of our people. the report that sector mccarthy put up before he left on that is one of the most important things out there and a note secretary austin usually focus on how can we get this under control. how can we tell people we will protect the servicemembers? when the best ways is you, i called the california explained, we heard about sexual assault stuff that he had a constituent who he nominated for a kit which academy what of the academies who sexually assaulted when she got there. we are telling our young people that yes we'll put them in harm's way, okay? it's part of the purpose of being in the military that they should not be in harm's way amongst their own. if we don't fix that we will have a devil of a time building the force we need to adequately protect this country. i'm not lot going on in thef course but that's the topline overview of how i am thinking about the broader national security challenges and what the armed service committee hopes to be able to do this year. >> mr. chairman, thank you and let me try to now delve into a couple of the issues more deeply before also leaving in some audience questions. let me start with acquisition reform where you ended or just before he spoke about personnel issues. i wonder if you have in mind at the rate of the case from what's our number one problem with acquisition reform? you were on the committee when chairman thornberry and chairman mccain worked on the acquisition reform bill and that was part of the pentagon. i wonder if you want to offer an assessment of that, and to the extent reaching out to silicon valley needs to be more of her priority, what's been the impediment, the number one impediment vista remains? is if the intellectual property, the government demands whenever it by something in mass, or has that problem been alleviated but there's a cultural differences for the paperwork requirements? do you have a sense of what really needs to happen to press that to the next level? >> three big things if i can remember my train of thought. number one, silicon valley. there's a lot of talk about how it's become more of a libertarian left leaning sort of thing and i don't want to work with the military because the military drops bombs on people. and maybe i think the bigger issue is its of bureaucracy. the tech guys, not just in silicon valley, speak of its pacific northwest with amazon, microsoft and elsewhere, that on the wendy said silicon valley i know that. they don't want to -- they want an innovative thinking not okay, looking for to work with you. here's the stack of paperwork come fill that out and get back to us. it's the clog of the whole system that has pushed the most innovative people away. i think with some opportunities can stay source is a great opportunity. they love space and it gives them an opportunity. we have got to work to streamline that stuff. second, process over results. we are so obsessed with -- and oddly i think part of silicon valley likes to brag about the fact that they tolerate failure. in the pentagon it odd. we set up a system that is probably designed to say we won't tolerate failure. if you fill up the form incorrectly, if you do this wrong then you will be punished. but we reward people for process not for results. with failure we wind up tolerating his failure on a massive freak in scale, think f-35 instead of understanding that yeah, if you give that mid-level procurement person greater freedom to sort of go look at a problem and say i know this is what we've been doing it i think if we did it this way we get to a better place. you give them the freedom, they will screw up from time to time. they will make a mistake. but more often than not because of the way the human mind works, they will come up with a better solution. the pentagon procurement process is resistant to better solutions. this is the way we do it. we will check all these boxes so if anything goes wrong, we can say hey, not my fault. here's cfr -- csrs -- code 99 this is a must do this, this, this and this before i did that. i did it all. i did what it said so were good, right? that thinking is really what is crushing us in terms of giving g to better procurement and better acquisition. we have to change of those cultural things and apologized a forget of the top of my head what my third point was based on your question but i think those are the two biggest things we need to change -- sorry, i do remember what the third one was. the third one was to get members of congress and the armed service committee and congress to realize is that the job to pump as much money into the districts. this is something i respect my colleagues some bookkeeping to it. you guys worked there. every member of congress, i will get into it. i've been too i think it johnstown, pennsylvania, i forget the name of it, the town that jack murtha built on your tax dollars. that was fine, okay, but was it an assessment of progress? one of my first votes in congress was not to build more be to be bombers. halfway to my district that i said this as a makes sense. i'm not going to vote for this just because it's going to pump money into my district. many of these programs are kept alive because -- it is politics. it something you can bring home to your district. we have got to get past that. we just don't have the money to waste. >> i want to get into resource questions in the second but first i want to go to where you began on china, and ask a specific question about avoiding that cold war and also the risk of a hot war with china that you talked about. specifically, war plans which i can't see because i don't have a security clearance. you can't talk about because we're an open forum and yet we all know that war plans are important and i believe previous secretaries of defense have been saying we have to spend more time looking at them, inking about them. i wrote the book because i was worried that war plans might lead us to a rapid escalation against china or for a meaningless kind of issue like the uninhabited islands. if somebody decides to push their prerogatives and china tries to assert itself and we feel locked in. there's also the question of taiwan which is not insignificant but it is geographically in a place the opposite net assessment has underscored. with hard time winning a fight against china and yet we don't want to give free range to china. do you have any suggestions for how we create different options, or if you don't want to talk about them specifically, how do we make sure that the indo-pacific command is thinking about different options and researching and investigating different options so war plans is out to like the world war i plan, sort of all in from the get-go and could be a little bit more credible and on escalatory? >> a simple way to put it is, that's what i said focus on deterrence not dominance. you want to be able to make it clear to china that if they were to do something, you want to stop them from doing it in the first place because the cost is so great that they wouldn't even contemplate it. that's not about being -- they know -- i'm sorry, they don't know. they would suspect if we felt we had to go to an all-out war they would think the cost would be too great to us. but if we quick strike that would impose a cost of fungi and not drag us into a war, that's about alliances and partnerships. if china knew they did this we would have japan, south korea, the philippines, thailand, india, the weather on our side and we would impose the costs on china that would not be worth that action, that deters them from doing in the first place. the other things we need to be aware of when you were trying to de-escalate this conflict is, number one, warplanes do have to be made. you have to be prepared and i see this stuff going back and forth. we have discovered the china has a plan to nuke the west coast of california. it's like yeah, and so do we, okay? that's why you munication between the two sites is so important. we are doing this for deterrence. it doesn't mean we're planning on doing it. it means we are to be ready in case you do something and that's why dialogue is so important. the efforts that nixon and reagan made to make sure we were talking to soviets quite possibly saved the planet so the wasn't that misunderstanding. the final point i would make, i was watching fox news yesterday. i'm a democrat buddy get a little tired these days of watching the democratic news talked about how afraid we all should be about every right-wing militia group in the world. i am deeply concerned that we shut down congress yesterday because of some nut job on the internet. we cannot jump every time they say boo, but i digress. i will leave that to the side to say that come so i was watching fox. we always talk about china to talk about how biden's china plant issues like everybody else's china is planned that is doomed to fail because seems to think we can work with china when have to understand how evil and terrible and awful china is. they're trying to steal intellectual property, trying to become the hegemonic pages and spread cryptocracy and everything else. yeah, what would you do? is he saying that china is so bad, let's go? okay. i don't disagree with that at all. i went to make 100% clear on this call to everyone i don't and president biden's doesn't have any illusions about how bad china is but you have to work with them as a major factor in the world. if we get too far down the road of china is terrible, we cannot tolerate this, we can accept them stealing intellectual property, we can't accept this. if you can't accepted that means you're going to a conflict. talk about how bad the art and what they're doing and you can also talk about the fact that destroying the entire globe because of it is the wrong choice. that's what i emphasize deterrence, containment. containment has become a dirty word for some reason just like compromise has become a dirty word. if the alternative is and all that was a cool everybody come to embrace containment and deterrence. be clear eyed about china but understand there are alternatives to dealing with that threat to all out conflict. >> that leads naturally to the question of how much we should spend on on the fence and whr priorities should be. i just welcome your overall sense of where we stand. let me frame it briefly which is of course as you well know if you would associate with the national national defense strategy in 2018 said we needed 5% annual real growth indefinitely into the future in order to sustain that strategy. perhaps to try to reclaim a dominance over china that you don't think is realistic but i will let you speak to that. we know democrats like michele flournoy also thought three to 5% annual real growth was a right prescription. that was was in the pre-covid area and to eric even before the last budget submission of president trump who did not envision three to 5% real growth growth and, of course, you and the committee and democrats support of republicans in giving that growth for a couple of years but now we envision a plateau whether it's the last trump budget anything else that i've seen, people tended to think in terms of a flat line, 0% real growth. senator warren at her confirmation hearing for deputy secretary of defense suggested we should cut the defense budget and some democrats would prefer that. i wonder if you could give your general sense of what the right philosophy should be going in on the site of the defense budget for the next two years? >> right off the top let me have emphasized the fact that the main things were going to talk about, substantively, this is about the least important question that we could talk about, okay? politically is a different matter but substantively, you know, this is what tries the insane. how you spend money is what matters. spending all this time, three to 5% on what? how the hell can you tell me that for five years and now we both have to have three to 5% increase? how about we spend the next four or five years to get how to get more out of the money we're spending so that we wind up with greater resources? this is what, i'm going to give a speech in a couple of weeks that focuses directly on this topic, but the one big thing that frustrates me about this is when it comes to come up with national security policy there is a a desire to focus on easy quantifiable thanks. how do you know have the right defense policy? we're spending a lot of money. i campaign analogy always goes into this but my very first campaign i had a plan to raise like 175,000, state senate, it's a long story. there's no way in hell i was ever going to raise that money but i was young and ignorant. it turned out it was obvious that i was not going to get the money side of the great out. i learned i didn't need that money. i figured out how to do a more efficiently, how to target my audience and you all of that. the quotes i can keep you on this are, , number one, the gentleman, we are out of money. now we have to think, quote, and gosh, what was the second thing? but that's the point. the point is obsession with numbers with, like the thought that entered my head when i was worried about i didn't get the money, does a money really matter? do i show up on election day is a look at my more money than my opponent so i win, right? no. that's not the way it works. how you spend the money matters. get into this epic fight over 74760 or 720. it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. how are you going to spend that money. that's the of the court i was going to give you, i was once told they have not yet come across entity that can't be cut by 10% and get better at what it does. this is a major problem in the pentagon. for too long if you want to know whether or not you are tough on defense, we measured it by one thing, how much money you spinney. missile defense always drove me crazy on the committee. republicans would argue we didn't care about missile defense, we didn't want to spend as much money as they did. jim cooper and others, you know, no, no, no, , what you are spending the money on it doesn't work, okay? which we just found out and they canceled the program about six months ago several billion dollars into the project. can we all get off of this epic fight over whether or not it's 3% 3% to 5% or 1% from whatever, and let's just spend the money effectively. she what we are at and that we can talk about how much we're going to spend. all of that leaves out the part of the people who want to cut the defense budget by 20% because they fundamentally want to change the role of the u.s. in the world with regard to dod. that's the substantive policy debate to have. i don't support that but it's a substantive -- all this obsession over is it 750 or 733. the dod and those of us who are charged with the oversight of it, we need to figure out how to actually spend the money intelligently instead of getting into fights over how much it is we're spending, and really get me started on 500 ship navy. >> i was about you, but maybe -- i'll give you a menu of topics that may be you can choose, you've alluded to most of them already but maybe if you want to dive in more deeply on one or two. .. what we're trying to accomplish and our goals are shifting in that way do we need an army of that size ? i don't know the answer to that question but it's the type of questions we need to ask if were going to try to figure out how to get the most out of your money and perhaps the reserve and active mix with an army, is that another area we should look at? >> i think the idea of -- this is another reason i don't want to get into a cold war with china. what made us successful inthe words we bought where we have been successful as in surge capacity . bob gates used this formulation when he say when you look at the record of the us predicting and being prepared for whatthe next war was going to be, our record is perfect . we've always been wrong. and the point of that story if i was tracking correctly bob gates mind was to show we needed to do more to be ready and i came up with the opposite conclusion. the opposite conclusion was that you could spin yourself into a friendly frenzy and you've wasted all this money over here and it would now be over there whati came up with was we need surge capacity . you can't spend all this letter, we need to be ready to ramp up and obviously the garden can play a recent role in. we've seen everything necessary for dealing with natural disasters so as we're holding in the broader national security strategy i think the guard and reserve will be a crucial part of it but i will come back to in a minute the f 35 and 500 ship navy i wanted to ask you building a question from the audience about nuclear force modernization and you hear the pentagon recently say under the biden team i believe already but certainly its predecessor that nuclear modernization is the number one priority and there's aging platforms and the need for safety etc. but there's at least six different components that nuclear modernization agenda and i wonder if you prioritize within them andthought that some were more essential than others because they include the replacement of our ballistic missile summary which is getting old . the placement of a new bomber called the b 21 which can be used for conventional missions and the icbm force. improvement of nuclear command and control getting to your point about the importance of not working for anything else to be possible and there's two last things, one of them is the long-range cruise missile, a little bit more expensive and finally the department of energy nuclear weapons capability to build your warheads and even though those historically have not been so much in washington state, washington is a big player so i wonder if you prioritizethem . >> i'm not trying to going to be able to recover everything you just said but i'll give you a few top line is on this. the first prioritizing is concerned, the top two priorities are command-and-control and the pitch that we have to make and all that other stuff you don't have any of that, we have a significant problem in terms of being able to make the nuclear pivot necessary to build any weapons so and being able to make sure we can control this at a certain point but aside from all those individual systems there's a larger issue that sort of builds off of my theme of how much is isn't so much important has capabilities, in nuclear modernization is important. the forces old and we must have a nuclear deterrent the purpose of our nuclear weapons systems are to stop nuclear war , that's the reason they exist in the technology exists, you can't unring the, is not going away. conjunction isn't wake up one day and say i don't want to. we have to have a deterrent so nobody thinks they can ever launch anynuclear weapon any size without paying an unacceptable cost . minding these is that i do think we 5000 nuclear weapons to accomplish that . and i read the editorial from jim and half and mike rogers, both of whom i have respect for . center in half and i are not that much alike and we started off perhaps but to belabor that, respect i have for him is growingenormously in working within the last two years . i don't agree with him and congressman rogers on this issue. because their argument is we basically goes like this. we have to defend ourselves against nuclear attack. it is important most important mission, but completely agree but the leap from that to therefore we have to spend $1.5 trillion on nuclear weapons. there's a big dump inthere and is that really necessary to have a deterrent and i come back to china . as we see slightly less than 200 nuclear weapons and we wait breathlessly told the next decade they will double that amount. i was a police eye major, i didn't go in i can figure out that the document will be slightly less than 400 nuclear weapons . we have 4000 nuclear weapons. do we really need to spend $1.5 trillion to have that many in that much. i don't believe that we do. we do have to spend the money to make sure that what we have is reliable, is has been replaced and is ready to go. but i would love to see us our conversation about how large of a deterrent force you need. then we can go through the laundry list and i don't know off the top of my head which piece of that i want to get rid of. my focus is more on the quantity of the weapons. i will say i believe the submarines are the most important piece of this without question . the ability to deliver from the submarines is the most survivable part of the triad. i wish you do a serious look at whether or not we can achieve the necessary level of deterrence for less money. like china has. >> thank you, we now move on to the f 35 and you mentioned a couple of times your concern about the program. i wonder if you could lay out a little bit more your thinking about what specifically problematic about it today because it certainly has enormous growing pains and it's certainly a huge program but it seems to be doing better so i wondered if your main be is sort of how long it's taken to get to this point and how much expense for it and is it still too big of a program, are we thinking about short-range versus long-range strike . i wonder if you could elucidate more on that topic and just going forward with 35 how much moreshould we be investing in the program . >> i think the f 35 for me is the contract of the los angeles rams you carried off. is jerry goff completely useful football player? he's okay. i mean, he plays the position, he runs the offense and he does okay the amount of money they spent on him for what theygot out of the . they probably managed to abandon that strategy this year. if i could trade 35 or matthew stafford, take the cat in one year and say we're going to go forward from here , that would be awesome . only my analogy breaks downat that point . we don't have that option and so for what we have spent, in terms of what we've gotten back, it's just painful. it just hurts. and the problem is there's not an easy way out of it. what i would like us to do and this rings me back to my analogy, you've got so much money and you want to spend in certain places to get the value but when it comes to ire attack aircraft we have certain needs and i also point out something i haven't said yet. the obsessive focus with china is fine but we do a lot of other things that don't have anything to do with china. just because a weapons system not be effective against china doesn't mean it's not an important part of what we're doing. we are still dealing with transnational terrorist threats and trying to stop isis and al qaeda and keeping their networks under control . our presence , mere presence even if the weapons system would dominate china in different parts of the world, gives us credibility and as a deterrent againstiran is an encouragement for partners to join us . there's all manner of valuable things that brings to us. we look at fire attack aircraft and i have more intelligent answer to this question next week, i'm briefed on what are we trying to do here. but now we're talking about the f-15, i forget the initials that come after the new one . we have to fill some of these gaps and we've been talking about maybe looking at a next generation fighter. what does the f 35 divorce and is there a way to cut our loss. is there a way to not keep spending that much money for such a low capability because as you know the sustainment costs are burdensome and they keep saying they're going to bring them down or at a certain point they can't and it's just the thing about the f 35, it all comes down to don't put all your eggs in one basket. things your mother told you that are so straightforward and true. this is my ignorance, 31 years old and i went to st. louis and we were still dating on the thing and they showed me their model and the idea of redundancy and we have this one plane that would fit all three of these things and do all this stuff. 90 percent of our fighter attack aircraft in that one platform, was that such a smart idea once we get itthen what . we can't not have fighter attack aircraft. so the short answer as opposed to the long answer i gave you is i'm not sure that i flinch when you give me the seems to be working betternow . yeah. but i want to stop throwing money down that particular rabbit hole. there's lots fans listening i do understand that. but i love this argument but i know it doesn't work particularly well but if you want more you your per-unit cost would go down. that's awesome and i respect that from a business standpoint but ultimately it drives us into the ground to what i'm going to try to do is figure out how we get a mix of fighter attack aircraft that's the most cost-effective, bottom line. and i'm telling you right now big part of that is finding something that doesn't make us have to relyon the f 35 for the next 35 years . >> on the 500 ship navy, another concept you alluded to earlier in our hour, secretary mark esper unveiled a plan last fall for this concept and you know, >> this whole thing was just funny to me but go ahead. >> i talked with mark repeatedly and i know how that came to be but go ahead. >> but me say a word about even the 355 ship navy concept which some of us but was too big but that came about as iunderstand it and you might want to comment or disagree or embellish , that came about because the obama pentagon past the combatant commanders how many ships would you like to maintain your daily activities. given the way you like to do business whether that's optimal and efficient or not and they added the request, i'm being a little slit but is essentially my understanding. >> i'll be more flip than you are. >> esper essentially took that and added online admin system and he got to 500. that strikes me maybe there's some thinking that went into the emphasis on innovation and that maybe we need to rethink re-hundred 65 core that was there before but i'm just trying to provoke you. >> two crucial thoughts,first of all figuring out what your needs are asking the combatant commanders is like asking cookie monster how many cookies you should have in your store . there are limitations to it and i get that. i'm going to go slightly down the rabbit hole for returning to the central point here i have been to brief after brief and so many things are built into the way we do things within the dod and to spend more money, got to spend more money. that's what it's built on and the combatant commanders think every time i would see a member of congress tried to defend his or her program in his district, the combatant commanders were only able to field 50 percent of their requirements for the ed 4567. it's like, i thought about this for a while. is there ever a time we are giving the combatant commanders what they want? there's not again, peopleseem to not be able to look at this the other way around. be able to look to that and go all my god, combatant commanders are not getting what they need to protect us, we're all going to die . itmay be the case is that what we talked to them to expect they don't really actually need . so we can go back and think about what are the actual needs to meet our core national security gaps? it's the unfunded requirements thing. will send unfunded requirements to begin with. it's not a requirement if it's not funded. we decided it is not required. there is a finite amount of money in the world and we need to come together grips with that reality andalso come to grips with the reality like i said , if you tell somebody you have an infinite amount of money they will find an infinite amount of ways to spend. if you tell them this is your budget, make it work, i really have enormous confidence in the ingenuity of people. if you tell someone just like the gods of politics told me back in 1990 sorry kid, this is the amount of money you have, make it work . we will make it work instead of just imagining we can have everything. this is what we've got, make it work. on your 500, the obsession with the number is just to try to force people to spend money but what mark and i talked about and what he did was okay, i've got these crazy people who want me to come up with 500 ship navy so they can look like they're better on defense than the people we don't want a 500 ship navy but we can go ahead and flip these capabilities which is what you talked about which is on man's systems and if it happens to be because the shifts that we need to buy are smaller and less expensive that we can have more of themand more capability than okay, fine. i'm not hung up on a number one way or the other . but let's not get obsessed about the number of shifts you can buy 500. you can buy 5000 rubles and then you have a 5000 ship navy. wouldn't that be grand so what we need to get out of the shipbuilding plan is exactly what you said . what do we really need moving forward in terms of having a survival platform. having a run on the platform. all those things. i think they did some good work even though the people who are asking them to put that out were morbid in ways i don't find helpful, let's put it that way. >> i'll make a great plug not just for bookings but for the stinson center, they did a great study in which they examine all the crisis response activities of the united states and concluded a variant of what you said mister chairman that it's important for us to be able to respond but the way in which we respond and the acts that we don't always need a carrier or always need a certain capital value ability to be able to send a message to show presence, to maintain deterrence. it was very useful i thought for what that's worth but i wanted to ask you about north korea briefly because there were a couple of questions about it and i realize north korea brings together all sorts of issues, foreign policy and nuclear disarmament strategy and a few other things but i don't want to ask you for a complete strategy towards north korea unless you want to provide that there were questions that eluded issues like large exercises, whether we need to resume those with south korea or not. the probability of war which of course seemed pretty real about three years ago in regards to north korea. are we all calm her aboutthat today ? is there anything we need to do to make sure we don't have another crisis that could risk war withnorth korea and anything you might have on the nuclear negotiation strategy so please don't feel obliged . >> i spoke with general abrams a couple of days ago. and look, in a nutshell we need to contain north korea. thatwe need to do. we can go ahead and beat our chests and talk about unacceptable it is that he has nuclear weapons but he does. what we have to do is make sure the conflict doesn't break out . as far as and a big part of the way we do that is to make sure that we have adequate deterrence. at the south korean military is capable enough and we are capable enough and we make it unequivocally clear to kim jong that if he, we may not like him and were going to keep looking for ways to get you to stop building it and we understand past a certain point we are limited in our ability to stop you building but understand if even for a second you think you're going to be able to use it you're done. you will cease to exist and your regime will cease to exist. if you attack south korea, if you even think about using any of those weapons so i think it's deterrence and contentment. if we want to talk along the way i don't see a harm in talking but i think we need to really understand when north korea's concern deterrence and containment are key and the third piece which is good news, things are called on the front now. you don't have as many of the forced stop and different efforts have been made to try to have the south and north talking to each other, finding ways to not have the flareups they used to have. i think if you do those three things that gives us the best chance of making sure that nothing blows up over there and we can all hope for the day when north korea changes but i don't see much in the way of forcing the moment . >> i hope there's just to last questions and one of them has to do with the facing and posture for the us military. there's been discussion secretary often has alluded to the possibility of a posture review and reducing our footprint and not just on iraq and afghanistan where down to low numbers more generally throughout the region and i know you understand well but a lot of people don't have a sense of the numbers and they been classified in recent years. but in bahrain and kuwait, the ssri and saudi arabia we got a lot of access and i wondered if you have any guidance at the pentagon about how to think as a global posture review towards the middle east, are there places you would look for efficiency or cuts? >> i think so on the mideast, is probably one of the best places we can look to make reductions and then there's the whole afghanistan question which is what more difficult but i think our presence in europe and our presence in asia as a definite bank for the one of the other priorities is continuing to support the european defense initiative and the asia indo pacific defense initiative as well. we're not going to have the numbers that we had in the latter part of the 20th century, but when we look at the middleeast we need to find a way to do less . i think there are important alliances. i think what's going onwith abram records , with alternatives, there's a lot of positive things happening trying to figure out how to contain iran will continue to be a priority but as we've seen the place where our troops are most vulnerable right now , is their presence at the middle east and i think i would love to do a posture review and figure out how we can accomplish our goals with lesser numbers and i'm not saying in africa which is in the middle east i understand it, same thing. i don't think i wouldn't want to say we've got to get out of africa because i think ultimately smaller numbers of our troops in different places can really accomplish our goals containing some of the transnational terrorist threats, building our capacity and also finally making sure china doesn't sneak in there and start buildingproblematic alliances . i was in tunisia year ago right before the pandemic and that's china's flirting with tunisia for obvious reasons, sitting right there on the mediterranean and they're going to start building bases for the next 30 years and would be cool if china database on the mediterranean so we want to make sure we maintain positive relationships with those countries for a number of reasons but i think we cando it with a smaller footprint . >> you mentioned afghanistan and i don't know if you want to get into that today but the fact that where down to now 2500 us troops are so in afghanistan mean that we're not a sustainable level that allows us to do the things you were alluding to and therefore the biden administration does need to be cutting back further for which you like to see us leave by may as something from laughter that the town and would require. >> that's a difficult question. i think the structure we have there doesn't enable us to do the operations we want to do and even the talent and has at the moment for the last several months now attacking us, they're attacking the afghans brutally . we're better protected there. we're not going to be out by may 1 . i think that's highly unlikely under any circumstance. i'll tell you i think it would be enormously important for us foreign policy and for the confidence of the people here locally in our country if we could get out of afghanistan. i think there's considerable concern and legitimate concern with the degree to which the us has relied on its military to impose or in policy on the world. has generated a fair amount of conflict. certainly iraq war, being the biggest disaster in all this in terms of the decision going with the military and try to fix a problem. we need to find a way to have our presence be more strategic and less large because the us military presence back to my last comment does create a certain amount of conflict. people don't like the idea of the us military being there and is there a scenario that i can see this year forus getting to the point where getting out of afghanistan next ? it's going to be tough to do in the next months but i think we whenyou think about that it's the same answer in the middle east . that presence creates greater conflict. we need to start relying on other tools in the toolbox, diplomacy, alliance, development contain the threats we face and understand that the us military being present in a place where they may get involved in direct fighting is very much a double edged sword with our national security objectives. >> thank you for this hour, it's been tremendous. the task force you set up with jim banks sharing was with one of the younger members and had some fresh ideas and we had the privilege of helping them release brookings, you talked about artificial intelligence and a lot of people are talking about artificial intelligence and how to prioritize that and there's a question from the audience about how do we make sure as we pursue this new cutting edge technology, this big umbrella term artificial intelligence that we don't wind up creating new white elephant procurement programs that essentially repeat the same old mistakes under a new banner or a newname attached . that's a big thing to throw at you for the final question but i wonder if you had any thoughts about how you prioritize ai. >> we haveanother task force being informed right now that is leading up on the supply chain . one of the big thoughts as i understand it in terms of how i run thecommittee, i want to empower the members of the committee. i don't want us . on the top row running because we got a ton of talent in this committee. a lot of smart people with a lot of great backgrounds and that's the philosophy isto be in as inclusive as possible . seth moulton had the idea will work for the task force, i was the one who let him do it. i want to empower those hopes to do that. second, i think the crucial thing about ai is getting back to that interior adversaries, editorial your adversaries now is really about information systems and command-and-control. how can you process information, how can you interfere with your adversaries ability to process information? ai will be crucial without, also having interfering with their ability to communicate with those systems to make themwork and how can you make sure yours are protected ? ai can be a big part of it and lastly, my future combat systems line. neverunderestimate the ability of a defense contractor and people at dod to come up with ideas that seem to end in the same box . just give me more money. so we need to be careful on these programs. and that's, i think you can sort of test things initially before you go puking money all over them. make sure it works, do the small projects, but that i'll tell you last thought . all that is going to work a lot better if you have people thinking in terms of results instead of process and volume. i really want to build into people's brains. i wanted to physically pain anyone in the defense world every time they spent about. i want them to think god,what did i do wrong to require me to spend this ? and that requires a major culture shift. we set up a competition, who can accomplish this task with the least amount of money? that's got to become part of our philosophy and it gets into everything. at dod for so long goes back with david stockman and how he lost to weinberger. if weinbergercame in with the charts , you can have david stockman's military if you want. he was a puny soldier, you'll have these big tall six-foot and isn't that better? you've got to get past that and we got to view money is a precious, precious resource. part of that is to save money but part of it is having a product that works at the end of the day . to whether it's ai or figuring out what to do with the f 35 , whether it's on demand, whatever it is. just make sure it works and it costs the least amount of money possible. >> it's been a privilege. you covered a lot. i'm sure others have as well. thankyou for being with us today that wishes going forward . >> i appreciate all your work and the opportunity . >> transportation secretary pete buttigieg, doctor anthony fauci are speakers at the congressional city conference. what live this afternoon at 1 pm eastern on c-span2, online at c-span.org or listen with the three c-span radio channel. >> tonight on the communicators, antitrust advocate sally hubbard talks about the efficacy of antitrust laws and efficiently reform. >> we have these antitrust statutes that were passed, the sherman act was passed back in 1890. great neck in1914 . the sherman act is illegal to monopolize. the creighton act says any act that may lessen competition or create a monopoly is illegal .

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