secretary of the army, colonel retired united states army, served in uniform on active duty,at served in the army national guard, served in the army reserve. 1 of the few people that miners served in all three componentssh of the army for the distinguished 21 year career. phd, vice president of one of the largest defense and aerospace companies thate we hae in our defense industrial base. professional staff member on the senate foreign relationsns committee and had a policy on the house armed services committee, national security advisor to one of the most distinguished senators, fred thompson, a very career and you brought extensive background to your role.e we are here today to discuss your book which is entitled the sacred oath, memoirs of the secretaryim of defense during an extraordinary time and i would like to say by if i'm correct when you graduated as a second lieutenant from west point, you raised your right hand and said i do solemnly swear that i will support and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic and bear true faith and allegiance to the same and i take this obligation freely without any mental reservationov or purpose of evasion and i will well and faithfully discharge the duties onon the office of which i amh about to enter, so help me god. you took an oath to the constitution. is this what you arere referring to when you o talk about the tie of the book the sacred oath? >> thank you for that kind introduction and for looking at mymy resume. tactually that is the second tf i took the oath. first with freshly cut hair and a new uniform in 1982 and i took that another dozen times or so after and that's what it came down to as i navigated my way throughout a career but in the 18 months or so i often had to go back to what is my oath and what guided me in the principles of the motto yes but i often had to go back to and ask what is the right thing to do in this situation. >> give me a little bit better explanation and more insight. you approached something that in the book you called a values-based decision-making. the value was it was tied to the duty, honor, country and there was the motto. tell us a little bit about that. >> for any cabinet secretary you have a lot of authority and responsibility with the department of defense, 2.8 million people in terms of service members and civilians responsible for operations around the globe. it is a hefty job so you have to have the certain things to guide you that begins with a national security strategy, with the president wants to accomplish but it comes back to your moral compass. i went back to those core values and what's important for the national security or for the institution of the defense department or even more so what'sut important to the institution that we call the profession of arms. those are important particularly when you consider the unique relationship the united states military has with the american people and how special it is that in our country as compared to many others, we understand the role of the military in the society and that they've got some civilian leadership. >> bute there were a number of times when there were decisions you didn't agree with and youhi were talking sometimes to the president and sometimes to senior people in the white house where you said as you said in theti book my oath is to the constitution, not to the individuals. to talk a little bit about that. >> i am probably not the first defense secretary where people propose ideas that you think are wrong or inappropriate. my job is to push back and if it is the president to offer up better ideas and solutions to try to meet his intent and get to a better place that's bestdo for the country consistent with what the president is trying to do, that becomes the role and i've always got to go back to what is my oath and my oath is to the constitution. it's not to a president or a party or a philosophy. it's to the constitution. and i think the reason why we have a senate confirmation process is that congress, the people's representatives want to know that that's what's guiding you and what you intend to adhere to and what i promised when i was confirmed in july of 2019. >> one off our colleagues a former professor at the national defense university wrote a book titled the nearly impossible job of secretary of defense. the book was written before your ten years so he covers a number of your predecessors but he talked about the job of running the largest most complex organization and i would argue in the world. you're talking about 1.3 million, 880,000, 750,000 civil service employees, 750,000 contractors, 5,000 locations worldwide and he said that it's really nearly impossible, and you talk about how you have some extraordinary circumstances beyond those your predecessors had to deal with and a global pandemic the likes of which we haven't seen to put in place. you were still dealing with the war i on the ground with thes troops were in harm's way in iraq and afghanistan and you have so many concerns about withdrawing troops from europe and syria. the nearly impossible times y would apply when you think about all the things you had to deal with them some of the challenges because you talked about the commander-in-chief in the book you said he was idiosyncratic, unpredictable and unprincipled, yet you are having to make decisions that deal with all of those issues with that person, your boss, no question about it. to tell us about that. >> guest: it's a demanding job and we had to rely on the people to deliver and i had a crew of civilian and military leaders but when you think about the scope of it you have to be a diplomat and statesman engaged in foreign policy and next you are responsible for the combatant commanders to give direction on how to function around the globe. you have to give guidance to the service secretaries and chiefs about how to prepare for the future and organize the forces and then responsible for schools and hospitals and child development centers and the health and welfare of not just the service members and civilians but i think up to 10 million other dependents that rely on the healthcare so you have all that then on top of that it's a demanding job regardless, but we do face this pandemic in 100 years we've got the war in afghanistan, conflict in syria, the aftermath of the exchange is in conflict with iran. then you put on top of that civil unrest, all the other things we face and it's demanding. quite frankly i am really proud of what my folks were able to do during these very challenging times of 2020 and how we navigated this to defend america abroad about support america at home like you said with covid and also 40,000 people army, doctors, nurses in cities around the united states with the hospitals and to deal with covid.l the service members god bless them particularly the national guard to risk their own lives and welfare. it was a monumental time. >> when the governments are a incapacitated with a large geographical area with covid there's only one aspect to do that and that's the department of defense. we do it with hurricanes and fires into the civil unrest andd covid because you were the secretary of the army you knew the head of the army command. when it came time to put the operation warp speed into affect and let's face it you had some scientific medical experts but myor understanding and i had the opportunity to work with him a little bit to help him get ready for his confirmation but also for his testimonies before the hill it was a dod operation and myt understanding is it really did go at warp speed because people predicted we never see a usable vaccine for years and years. talk about that and what wasef accomplished in the personnel from the department of defense that were integral to that of success. >> you are so right for the first of all let's talk about the outcomes. it was probably the greatest public-private partnership in u.s. history and probably in some ways on parallel with the program and there were a lot of skeptics that said you will never get a vaccine with sufficient efficacy it will take five to ten years and yet this combination we delivered less than 12 months or eight months to i vaccines with 90% plus efficacy and we wouldn't be f sitting here together without facemasks if it were not for that vaccine. but goingw back to where i began i got to know him as the head of the command at the time we were making sweeping changes and i stayed up in the future's command is a way to kind of break the opposition gridlock and so we could modernize from the reagan era. when it came time in the spring of 2022 set up warp speed and dot specific responsibilities but distribution, manufacturing, pulling that piece together it's apparent to me and at the general that he was the right guy and he was about ready to retire but came back and extended his active duty time and worked and delivered for the american people but we had our share of hiccups by the time i think president biden was inaugurated in january delivering over million doses. we like these spaghetti and meatballs and a glass of wine. a great accomplishment. i want to get into a series of questions on the role of the secretary of defense, the statute that governs the department is primarily found in title ten of the u.s. code and. that was updated in 1986. i was privileged to be the staft director when we pass what is now known to make sure we had total civilian control of the military.le we put in title ten that everything in the department of defense is subject to the authority under the direction and control of the secretary of defense. that was your understanding of your statutory authorities, correct? >> guest: i learned goldwatert nichols through my career in the army and was passed the year i graduated and h the sec. defense says all the authority. there's two people in the entire united states to deploy the troops abroad. it's the president of the united states and the secretary of defense. every couple of weeks i would sign the orders and they run from the president to the secretary defense to the combatant commanders. we have a series of geographic andlo functional and what a lotf people don't understand into general mark millie use to try to educate the colleagues is the chair man is a statutory advisor for the secretary defense and sd for the president and that is the role that he is responsible for and he did a great job and served the presidentnt well but that is his role it's not a command role or operational. understanding those, the role is critical then you've got the service chiefs and secretaries who are also in the chain of command but not operational mode. as you know though from title ten, training, equipping and organizing the force they then hand off to the combatant commanders to deploy and that io an important distinction. >> and as the secretary of the army, you are subject to then secretary jim matus but your army chief who was then subject to your authority so the point is they wanted to make sure wend had absolute control of the military so like you say there's only one person other than the commander-in-chief and by the way you have to go through the secretary of defense so there were a number of instances where there were times when there were suggestions made one that comes to mind in the book that frankly what concerned me as a student of this area you mentioned there were suggestions by the senior staff in the white house that we move 250,000 active duty military to the southern border to help p protect the border and that perhaps when people in the department of homeland security were involved into the u.s. northern command that is established by donald rumsfeld after 9/11 whose mission is to protect the united states of america and of the airspace and the sea space and northern command started planning for that operation based on a suggestion by a staffer at the white house with no authority to dodo so and q as the secretary f defense and the joint chiefs didn't know about it. tell me about that situation. that should worry us that one of our command would be acting on that direction that didn't come from the secretary of defense. >> i recount the story well and stephen miller speaks up and says we need to send a quarter million to deal with caravans coming up from central america and i think he's joking and i turn around, he presses again and i say i don't have a quarter million troops to deal with that of nonsense. dhs can handle it. he suggested they were working on it. i come back and a day or so later pull him aside and check on it make sure nothing else is going onur and to our surprise there was planning happening, layers below the commander. and a dod likes to lean into things. i don't know exactly how it flowed but that was my assumption and i shut it down immediately because i thought it was completely foolhardy. we had a problem on the border. we need border security and to know who is coming across and what they are bringing. the solution was the quarter didn't have to begin with and giving dhs and officers the materials and resources they need to do it sout i shut that down immediately. if anybody has a problem, come see me and i will deal with it because nobody was going anywhere unless i signed a deployment order and i knew i wasn't about to send a quarter million to the border. >> we had a few thousand like president biden has today but it's another outlandish idea. >> of course you mentioned active duty military, the guardian reserved in a variety of things from medical toin basically operating medical stations in handing out supplies and things of that nature. there's a number of times there were requirements for the military to be a participant and one thing people should understand for example. if they can't declare but the guard actually, the national guard can exercise law enforcement, so talk about some of the civil unrest situations and how you saw the role of thef active military compared to that of the national guard. >> i was fortunate based on my s experience i served on the guard and reserve and i had a good understanding of not just the rules and responsibilities but the training and equipping of what they could do. i was in the dc guard for example and you are right particularly with civil unrest there is a goal for the national guard to support law enforcement. that's the important thing i try to keep reinforcing alongsideiv the attorney general that law enforcement should feel with civil unrest and if they need support then it's the role of the governors to make the determination and in the capital of course the president through the chain of command but we should always be last in terms of consideration and then because of the authorities they have and after the walk we made that is a mistake for me and i know the general feels the same way. that night i directed a memo. dealing with civil unrest i believehe that americans should have the right to exercise their first amendment rights of assembly and protest and petition andhe unfortunately the were people in the crowd of doingen violent things and denyg that peaceful rise. i want to make sure people understood we had the right to safeguardd americans rights to government of the rgsame time we are in a politicl organization and need to stay away from being caught up in the politics of those moments and look at the threat to weave as you go through day by day to keep in mind the wake of the tragic murder of george floyd hundreds of cities were civil unrest was happening and you have to give people room to express themselves peacefully about what they see as injustice. >> and you created theed right balance even though they wanted you to go a little bit further with a couple of anecdotes about people making suggestions. did you feel like in the areas you got pushed on you were able to implement the correct balance between law enforcement and the rolear of the military the law enforcement lead and we would argue internally that it could be local law enforcement and state and federal and then in all these instances the guard performed its mission ofed protecting federal buildings and federal activities and one of the mistaken reporting coming out ofso that subsequent today s the guard used violence and shot rubber bullets. none of that happened. the guard performed its mission in terms of protecting those institutions and activities. i was very proud of them. on any one day during that summer you had guardsmen out in the streets protecting federal facilities into the right to protest and another group in hospitals taking care of those fellow americans dealing with covid and other guardsmen deployed in hotspots and wildfires in california or flooding in the midwest. it was a tremendous time for thw national guard. >> you know from your own ' service since 9/11, we have had over 1 million members of the national guard and reserve mobilized overseas or at home and they get demobilized and they are a bargain because you don't have to put in place all the infrastructure that you have to have for active-duty troops 365 days the years of the guard and reserve you make the point they are operational now from the peak of the cold war and you see them on the front lines every single day and i know the american people appreciate that and the leadership. 1 thing in that area and i'm going to read from my paper because of some of the concerns you had established no unnecessary force, no strategic receipts, no politicization and no misuse of the military. you address that with the guard. how were you able to deal with the concerns you didn't agree with the plan to remove troops on germany. what were you prepared to do if there was a case where there was a redline that was crossed and you were not able to support it? >> one of the things i wrestled with a lot of you go back to the book sacred oath to the constitution, but the constitution article two establishes the commander president and chief and you are bound to abide his orders. sepresident trump rarely issued orders but for the germany case. but sequentially you are rightob in terms of the assistance we are obligated under the law because congress appropriated, it would be me at times or john bolton and mike pompeo to push and release. it eventually happened and we learned why a later he was holding it w up but that wasn'ta case where my duty was to go back to him and push and press. in other cases with nato or whereo i've got the written ordr toto withdraw troops from germay my game plan we were talking about the combatant commander tom walters. i gave a series of principles to reassure our allies and take care of our troops and he came back with a pretty good concept that at the end of the day met the direct order to withdraw troops and at the same time allowed me to take those trips that we withdrew and either consolidate them in other countries will eventually push them forward closely to russia with the principles that i defined is reassured allies and i thought it was a very clever idea put forth by the combatant commander. you we bring it to the president and he knew exactly what we were doing and it matched what he wanted so again i didn't like its origin but what we came up with at the end of the day was a workable solution to meet the president's intent but in a way that made a strategic sense and bolstered our presence in europe and a detour to the russians and look where we are today. frankly i wish they followed the plan because we would have more troops in romania, poland. >> well are expanding our troopp to reassure the nato allies but put them on the spot even when you and i were working on the hill together our bosses were saying our nato allies are not carrying their fair share so that was legitimate to bear. you were a big supporter of nato and i think we see today nato is more important than ever. would that be your assessment? >> i served as the army officer in the 1990s and, yes, i went to brussels and before i was confirmed i think the president put my name forth. i said publicly i believed in nato but this is where president trump was right. they need to live up to their obligations. only six or seven countries were living up to the 2% of gdp commitment. i think unfortunately ukrainians are paying the price for everybody not being on guard or worrying enough about russia and we will see more of them meet their commitments. >> let's talk about russia because one of the things that you did early on as the secretary of the army and then the secretary of defense we had a new national defense strategy. if there hadn't been one and a number of years as you know from your service in the policies from other jobs it's a fundamental planning document for the decision-making process that's being reviewed by the congressional commission and the planning program which is how the department puts its decision into monetary factors guided by a bunch of documents one of which is the national defense strategy that should flow from the overall national security strategy and when they took over and come out with a national defense strategy that was revolved around what you call great power competition, near competitors, china, russia to a limited extent and russia was a centerpiece and china was a centerpiece. russia basically is doing some of the thingsai to reduce the strategy that was going to happen if we didn't detour them then i'm going to go to china. but let's talk about what you did at a secretary defense to try to implement that strategy and i'd like to get your sense of what you feel it is today. >> i thought it was a solid strategy and i think this is another accomplishment of the administration. 1 of the things it did is consolidate a u.s. government t view that china is a strategic adversary and i thought that was important in all the years i worked on china issues but with that said as the secretary of the army as it wasn't being implemented and as i came in as the secretary w of defense but i told others and my chain of command i m would make implementation of the national defense strategy my top priority so within a couple of months of taking office in july 2019 i had at the senior leaders conference i brought everybody in leaning heavily on the civilian side toe implementation objectives which we would implement. through the renewed concepts we need to operate all of our war plans because when you are leaving a large organization like the dod and 2.8 million people i can't get out and tell everybody what i want them to do so you do it through documents and you supplement it by visiting people and explaining it and emphasizing and urging and checking on it. to check with the entire team assembled on how we are doing in terms of implementation and where we need to make tweaks et rocetera i think we made a lot f progress. >> host: anything is supposed to flow from the requirements of the war fighting commands and the secretary of the army says you will organize, train and equip. you.. talked about the contingey plans. did the war fighting central command, european command, pacific did they make the adjustments in the contingency plans to take into account the threat t in russia and the mbs before you left? >> we began reviewing all of those plans to make sure the requirements of the combatantt commanders met the supply and if they didn't why aren't the services adapting and surfaces adapting and acquisitions adapting to that and why weren't we budgeting for those resources or people or organizations they needed and that is the meat and potatoes is making sure that you have a sound war plan with the intent of the commander-in-chief and that you've budgeted and resourced it and of course part ofns my job was second guessing and understanding what they were doing to make sure the policy as we were trying to achieve and that became a weekly function for me to go through that in detail nothe just with them bute recognized the national defense strategy said it was a great competition on the global scale so when you think about a fight with russia or china it just came to be in the indo pacific. you have to think about latin america or the middle east or maybe somewhere on the europeant continent or at least to drawl resources from those places to do so so it was important to have all of the other combatant commanders in the room particularly likehe the northern command to defend the united states or the transportation command which is functional thaa would provide the aircraft into tankers that would keep the fight going so you've got to have all those people in the room to understand the plan or at least with the combatant commander was requesting. >> host: as a staffer decades ago you got people focused on y china and talked about the worry about china and you served on the o china commission. i remember in 1938 graduate with lee patton's army in europe if we were worried about the cold were serving on the staff he would say don't forget about china. i would say what are you talking about? his roommate was a chinese-american and he learned a lot and said that china wants to get after us and if it takes a thousand years they will take over the united states and frankly with jim mattis you said it's the pacing threat and if you look at the china they are on the march militarily, economically. they have more t diplomatic poss around the world than the united states and the thing to me that is most as scary as they are on the march technologically in many areas they are ahead of us and some of them are military areas and some we are still ahead. and of course theyng are threatening taiwan to talk about what more needs -- it's clear we haven't done all we need to do on china and unlike russia they are an economic threat, they are not a political threat. they are a military threat so talk about china. >> a. >> guest: you hit all the key points. i've been studying them since at least 1995 when i was an army war plan or working the indo pacific. i was responsible for that portfolio. they are the greatest threat we face because of these things.la the political, long-term planning, they've told us, they've written about it they want to have a modern military by 2049 they want to dominate at least --la >> pretty modern military today. >> we can talk about that when it comes to the navy. they are on the march and have a diplomatic hat spreading money around the world to kind of confined them to the belt and road initiative and you talk about the economy unlike the soviet union. i grew up in the cold war as you did as well. china possesses the largest in the room $16 trillion. the russians never had that. and also as you say the chinese have a lotnd of great technology and continue to grow that. unfortunately a lot of times it's on our backs they steal the intellectual property and plans into the fbi talked about i iothink every 12 hours they open up an espionage case against thc government so we need to be very concerned. i don't think we are in the position yet to fully deal with them but i do give the trump administration i think all collectively we did a good job forming a consensus that china was the strategic adversary and getting many of our allies in europe and asia on board with about a concept and we need to keep pushing in that direction. >> there is bipartisan support on capitol hill they recognized this and want to do something about it. what more do we need to be doing now so we don't get ourselves in a situation we got into with ukraine? >> i think we need to beef up other parts of the government, the state department for diplomatic efforts around the globe particularly in the indo pacific. recently we learned thenk t ttin islands is assigning some kind of deal. that's terrible. we need to overturn that about beef up state department and go into parts of latin america and elsewhere where american diplomacyp through aid and assistance can help. in terms of dod we need to smodernize the military and mae these big shifts in terms of how do you fight in the indo pacific and that's going to require more defense spending. i know a lot of people don't want to hear that. we are making this transition from what i call the reagan cold war military at least for the army that was built up to this new type of military. that's why the u.s. navy is w trying to make this transition. it's hard without more money. so there's all these things and we need to bring them aboard asf well. they can't beri focused on our n front yard. they need to focus on what's happening with china. china managed where they try to seek control of the united nations bodies and drive whether it's intellectual property, the who, the un itself. we need to be conscious of thisi and come up with a national game plan to deal with it. >> let me talk about spending more money because one of your efforts was quite notable and one of the reasons you need reform as you know in my second book i point out how we are spending more in the dollars takingn inflation out of them te peak of the build up that was quite significant and you aree part of that yet we have 1 billion less active-duty end of the army is smaller, the navy 50% smaller, 50% less fighting unit, we are not getting the bang for the buck and we've got to increase and covered inflation.at we've got to cover the modernization but if we don't get more bang for the buck we are not going to get the kind of capabilities you are talking about and you started the army night court. the secretary had three priorities which was the lethality and increase our partnership and reform the military. you added a fourth when i'm going to talk about in a minute to take care of our troops and families but let's talk about reform so in the night court you said we are going to squeeze the budget and we've got to get money for modernization then you brought it to the secretary of defense and one of the things styou took on and i will be quie honest we never did it in the congress. i wish we had very few if any of the predecessors to get on and that isk the overhead and the department of defense if you look at what we call the defense why do spending people argue about these numbers the dod will admit it's between 17 to 20% but if you add what is the classified spending on the big defense agency it is closer to 30% so almost a third of the budget is spent on the defense why does spending not on the tip of the spear. we started with one defense agency the national security agency and now have 28. these agencies are large defense agencies with worldwide communications, worldwide grocery chains, worldwide a independent school system, defense missile agency. you l start to take that on because you say some of these things are big businesses yet they are not run like a business and the military support organizations and you try to bring reform to the defense agencies but left before you could get really what you wanted to get done. but talk about how we need to reform what we are doing and don't get me wrong. i'm making it a longer question because as you said in the beginning of the book you gave credit to the men and women active-duty guard and reserve, defense contractors, research development that come to work in the pentagon every day to do the very best job they can for the war fighter and for the taxpayers likely congressional staff yet the former secretary defense told me the process meets good people every day and in the dod we still have a lot of proliferation of the processes which you tried to reform. talk about the reform efforts particularly as it relates toe these massive defense agencies. >> i came in as the secretary of the army and lead to 2018 and within six months route a vision statement of where i wanted to take the army and the general fully supported me on that and i knew making that transition in terms of reorganizing and at the new personnel system, new equipment to deal with the china and russia thatey we saw a head that i would need more money and is much as i was going to go back to congress i felt at the end of the day because president trump was good at giving us extra money i knew at the end of the daily had to do a lot of our own internal work to get rid of the fact if we could and make some hard choices and so that's where night court began as we introduced our six modernization parties for the army which is everything from long-range precision fires i knew that it would take billions of dollars andud when the team presented mt the budget i didn't see it inut there and i had to say time out to the process. i called them back and asked that i want all of them ranked order one to 500 and by the way the 34 subprograms that were building the army modernization had to come first and what thatp ended up doing his people came n through a series of meetings the chain of command and i spent over 50 hours reviewing program after program cutting and trimming and reducing end at the end of the day we freed up over 40 some billion dollars and had 186 programs because my view was i can only control what i can control and i will do my ownat work in the department to deal withto that and we were able to find that much to reinvest in the army and i was at the futures command lost long ago and they told me they would deliver on those programs with an initial rollout production et cetera so it's a great achievement and i contribute that to the team at the time but to your next point you talk about we are building this budget for the army cutting into it and going hard and prioritizing and making these choices at one point i get a bill and they say you have to chip in two to $3 billion to pay for this or that and it got me angry andsw i was complaining wy and this and that so when i become secretary defense i have the budget and i find out what's going on and of the overhead consumes over $110 billion a year and it's a couple dozen agencies and what they were doing is just they had all the programs and activities and they would levy the bills on the services and they were not subject to any supervision orco oversight or checking to see if it was consistent so i clamped down on that and one of thevi things we did is we put a civilian in charge of the four of the state to manage the administrative and budgetary sob they couldn't have these budget demands and we cut it back and i thought that was kind of a big accomplishment. we needed more work to do on that but i think these should be subject to that then you have ta deal with all the other growth but that is the hard work of the department and as much i can say on one hand we need to grow the defense budget is a big supporter of the annual growth we also still have a duty to the american people to be good stewards of every dollar which means even when we are getting the additional cash we still have to go back in and get ready rid of the fat et cetera and ndthat is the hard work of the department and frankly it's not going to get done unless the secretary defense gets involved. that's why i put a lot of personal time towards that. the deputy secretary defense and ii think in the two month period in august and september found five, six, $7 billion we could immediately cut and put back into war fighting. some people said that wasn't enough but for me it was a good start. >> these are important organizations but the point is we need to get more bang for the buck just like you get more bang for the buck out of the army and is the secretary of the army you had them by the term we understand as military folks. secretary defense it's a little harder to get control of some of these organizations. 1 of the things we do have the world's finest military and we want to keep it that way. we recruit and maintain the best people and their families and we will talk about that in a minute. we give constant training but we also from our industry give them the best technology so they are never in a fair fight. how important is the defense industrial base and the technologies as the secretary defense you prioritizednk i thik ten or 11 top priorities from hypersonic to artificial intelligence to quantum. how important is it to the country and economy to keep the focus on these cutting-edge technologies particularly when china now we know they are ahead of us on hypersonic's. some people would argue on a i and others would say not so much. the former vice chair says it's still an open book but it's very important. talk a little bit about the importance of the industrial base. >> before i do so i would also add what's important about the military personnel is how we empowerg the noncommissioned officers we see this play out on the battlefield in ukraine versus russia and how they are the strength of our military but yet i served many years in the defense industry gaining a good insight into what makes them o function and what incentivizes them and also in terms of how they operate so i was able to leverage that a good deal as i came back to be the secretary of the army and we would meet weekly with the industry. industry willov respond and innovate and i'm proud to sayn' it's 2022 into the army still hasn't changed its prioritization in terms of modernization and that's key in terms of signaling both to the industry but also to the army where you're going. now i will tell you working more in the venture capital i'm on a firm called a red cell doing a a lot of interesting work. i wish i knew more about that part of the ecosystem because that is where innovation happens and some of the companies and founders and innovators that i think i hear from are doing cutting-edge work and what i'm hoping i'm able to do now that i wish i had known then is how do you get those really small innovators and founders before the senior leadership so we can make those big bets just like a venture capital does long cutting edge technologies to allow us to leapfrog the chinese and if i could do that all over again i would be meeting with them at least quarterly to find out and make those big bets because the problem with acquisition it's so bureaucratic and the risk adverse if you have the secretary defense personally involved to make those big bets and to kind of get some of them wrong but knowing if you getif some right it will make a difference that's the key. >> that's so important and i think the congress ought to givo people some incentives to take risks. we need to get them to take the senior leaders to meet with some of these cutting-edge industries and not thinking it's giving them an advantage of someone else. when i talk to these cutting-edge commercial firms and everybody they get so frustrated as you know they tell you the same thing of dealing with a bureaucracy end of the leaders at the top if you look now they've worked in the army. the head of technology in the department of defense is very aggressive in thisk h d area any would follow the officer.th they want this technology in our government, they want it for the military but the bureaucracy is incumbent so you are spot on. >> that's why we put on the futures command but even today i sit on the board of small companies and they sit in this valley of death for 18 months and can survive -- can't survive even though they have cutting-edge technology. >> your. acquisition has been followed we've got to get backhi to halt production line so i think there's an incentive by the leaders both in your tenure into the current tenure to do this we just have to get around the bureaucracy. 1 of your top priorities -- in thelk about this book. >> this book isn't all about a donald trump. people want to portray it that way but this is about my tenure and the whole chapters that are barely mentioned at all is how do you innovate and inform. >> this is critical all of your predecessors have written books and these are all important because as we said the department of defense is a learningti organization, one of thevi few in the government thas isalways striving to do better o people this is a viable not just for the war colleges but people in industry to look at the things we need to fix and that's going to be my last question. i wrote the book for the audience but the next two are people in government and bod so people could learn these lessons. i refer many times i would go back and read the books and understand how they did things are lessons learned like you're saying. >> so you were a military family. when you were added spouse, child care, when the volunteer force was put into effectm in 1973ar from the draft, president nixon asked the former secretary to do a commission that he said we should both do a voluntary first we have to fix three things though, the requirement system and pay should be based on skills and performance. very few of those things have changed but we do have a i volunteer force. but in the 70s it almost went under and we didn't pay enough attention to the family. nowadays if you don't have childcare or programs for spouses to get an employment, you're going to lose the best and the brightest. tell us a little bit about why and what you did. >> when i entered active duty as an officer in 1986 at fort campbell, it seemed to me most folks were not married and had kids but over time that changedf and now what you have is folks are married often to military spouses and of course in today's society most espouses work so what i find it's this kind of old adage you recruit the soldier but retained the family. i saw too many places where we were talking the talk but not doing enough to deliver on that so i went after how do we fix the employment system for our spouses and go after recognizina certificates as we move from state to state because the spouses are having a hard time getting hired because they didn't have the proper credentials and we try to either work by ourselves and with my fellow former secretaries to bring that down and as i went after childcare i found the biggest problem in childcare wasn't necessarily spaces but it was the fact that there were often only three quarters filled because the hiring system wasn't up to the task so we went after tackling that and then there's a myriad of other things i describe in the end is kind of a chapter about just the nature of the military and its bureaucracy where we were telling families can't come into the commissary unless you are properly dressed right and as you noted, my wife and ii served 21 years and she was with me since i was a young lieutenant. multiple times from europe, back to europe in the united states. we dealt with childcare and all these things. she was an incredible help to me and would pick up these ideas as she met with spouses on the road and one of the complaints was why can't i wear fitness year into the commissaries into the bureaucratic resistance something as simple as that because my view was the sailor, the h air man, the soldier, the marine may have signed up at the spouses didn't. it's a family business but let's not make it unnecessarily difficult on what is the strength of the u.s. military at this point which is the families that support the service members. >> you got very frustrated in that priority and i could see where the acquisition system is frustrate you and where trying to fix this would fix frustrate you but this is such a no-brainer about the families. what made it so frustrating? >> i lived and my wife lived it's just -- what should be a service initiative to go out there and make life easier for our families allowing them to wear fitnessti gear had to bureaucratic resistance and i said okay if it's your responsibility than to fix it and i don't think it was coming from spain as much of the kind of ingrained culture. at the end i said i've had enough i'm just going to have to do what a secondary defense shouldn't have to do and tell the families yes you are allowed to wear fitness gear to the commissaries and stuff like that. it was a small thing but important. i wents in and i kept our families and lion as i dealt withur all these issues. >> civilian control of the military was so fundamental that you adhere to the constitution and maintain civilian control. 1 of the areas we've had is somewhat of a controversy. jim matus had to get a waiver because he hadn't been rehired longng enough. the tenure provision is back to the provision. i know you admire both of those individuals but frankly do you think we ought to have recently retired people service the department of defense? >> my hometown boyhood hero is george marshall who d was the secondary defense september 1950 called backed by truman to help after the military in korea and he didn't think that it made sensee for a former retired military officer to be a secondary defense but did it nonetheless. to answer k directly, no. it has nothing to do with circuitry and mattis ralston and everything to do with kind ofn getting a distinct difference between the military and civilian culture. theysn are different skill sets. it doesn't mean you can't be successful but having that separation makes a big difference and i would support reinstating that moratorium. we have enough people out there that could fill that role because the civilian control is critical and i have a whole chapter i outline some of the problems i saw that i didn't think the civilians were being used enough. i had to push civilians into the process as an example and other areas i got pushed back but nonetheless i had good civilian secretaries and leaders that were able to push through that to pull some of the control back and this is something they think the congress needs to relook. >> it's true from this book and from your entire history ando experience you did bear true faith and allegiance to the oath to support and defend the kconstitution against all enems foreign and domestic and i know i speak as a person and my family that knows you and the american public appreciates what you did, your service and that of your family. i think you have a lot of valuable lessons to convey to the congress and american people continue to work to support a strong national defense. c we admire and thank you and thank c-span for giving us this opportunity to spend this time allowing you to talk about things that are so important to the future of the country. >> thank you very much. i appreciate it after months of closed-door investigations the house january 6 committee is set to go public starting june 9th 2 in ns committee members question key witnesses about what transpired and why during the assault on the u.s. capitol. watch live coverage beginning thursday june 9th on c-span, c-span malcolm our free mobile app or any time online on c-span.org. your unfiltered view of government. 6 presidents recorded conversations in office. hear those conversations on c-span's new podcast presidential recordings. >> season one focuses on the presidency of london johnson. you will hear about the civil rights act, the 64 presidential campaign, the gulf of tonkin incident, the march in selma and the war in vietnam. not everyone knew they were being recorded. >> certainly johnson's secretary is new because they were tasked with transcribing many of those conversations in fact they were the ones who made sure the conversations were taped as johnson would signal to them through an open door between his office and theirs. >> you will also hear some blunt talk. >> i want a report of the number of people that's assigned to kennedy and me the day he died and if mine are not less i want them less quick. if i can't go to the bathroom i won't ever go. i will just stay right behind these black gates. >> presidential recordings on the c-span now mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. good evening, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the richard nixon library and museum. [applause] as my name and place on the grandson of richard nixon. [applause] and i want to