Transcripts For CSPAN3 Politics Public Policy Today 20150116

That said we really want to take a chunk of the i]budget, go over it and see whether we could do ataq things more effectively whether we could do emphasize some priorities better. I dont think you could do the owhole budget. You certainly couldnt do it every other year. ut you could set up a mechanism the budget say every three years or five years to see if the money could be spent better and the priorities were what congress reallyco wanted them to be. Bob . Can i just ask you a quick question . So is what alice describes on the domestic side, is the military really any different . Isnt there a certain amount of the air force, the navy, the marines, everybody has to get their share of the cuts . Broadly, the budget shares havent changed a lot. Thats a fair statement. Within those shares theyve changed a lot. Let me try to respond. First off i think its way too harsh that suggest that ovq all only 1 of Government Spending has any effect. I will offer just a couple examples. One obvious one, we havent been attacked since 9 11, folks. Some other countries have, quite recently, unfortunately. Thats a tribute i think to both our intelligence and to our military capability. We got in and more or less almost out of two wars you may not like the results of them, accordance with the will of the administration, the president and the congress. So we do do a number of things t ight and i think its unfortunate that we suggest otherwise. In terms of accountabilrty, we absolutely know where were spending the money down to a great deal of detail. You may not like the results that you see. Thats a fair point. Kg and there are priorities set. I mean ini will give you a current example. We have ua back much5zoore on Ground Forces over the last few years than we have any others. That waj a painful decision, i can assure you, within the department of defense, but it was one consciously made based on a strategy that we felt in the aftermath of iraq and afghanistan we could afford smaller Ground Forces and still cutting but not as much the naval and air force. So i think alice is right, we can do better, but it is not as if we are just taking this money and sort of randomly spending it wherever we want and its not the case that theres no effect. Its easy if you mischaracterize someone. Thats not what im saying. Let me give you some examples. If we resort to specifics, i hate to do that, but if we did, budget that i think even alice would agree are ridiculous like farm subsidies. Just to be fai to peter orszag, peter orszag wasnt saying only 1 of the federal government bought anything. What he said was talking about domestic programs, we dont its only 1 we know actually works, right . Thats correct. But you have to think about that. A little bit. For example, one thing w p do is air traffic contrjy i dont think we are investing enough in modernizing that system, but very few airplanes fall out of nhe sky. And another thing we do is interstate highways. We probably arent maintaining those as well as we should, but you can drive from here to new york. We know what were getting for that. So its not i think its sort of silly to say we dont know what were getting for government programs. Theres a diffq ence between knowing what youre getting and you usq the example of air Traffic Controllersn we have several air Traffic Controllers that are using cathode ray tu 1n probably the only ones remaining in the whole world in airports thats why i said it needs to be modernized. You need to spend more money on things like that and less on things like agriculture subsidies. Michael you want to defend agricultural subsidies . Bob gave us three scenarios for what could happen to defense im sort of interested in what odds you assign on those whats going to happen this year . Yep , i think bobs right. I guess just to s ell out one or two of the options before congress, ron and i have done a little writing on this too. It seems to me this overseas Contingency Operations fund that bob talkedym about and where there is some play in what you use it for, but 4i . Complete liberty to use and abuse that term. You could have Congress Actually modify the law to allow a little oeven broader definition so for example, with putin doing what hes doing in ukraine, should we be able to say that any activity in europe by the u. S. Military, even routine training is essentially something we can fund through the account because until we have a new president in two ye aak i doubt we are going to have a fundamental repeal of the budget control act so theres a very good chance we have to live with the caps and np r t hahp hc therefore, our overseas your main safety valve. Its already helping. You can find a way to let it help more. You can define anything thats going on in terms of operations in europe essentially, as a deterrence related cost. And you could even do some of that with the asia pacific given there has been a fair amount of turbulence. Bob im sure can think of all the complications in doing this more easily than i, and is probably thinking about how i have been in a think tank too long and not in the real world and i realize but there are ways to stretch the definition. For example,e1 thetp rier goes from the United Statesjf to the persian gulf today or the arabian sea, and it flies a few cf1 o sorties or even just 10 of its whole six month deployment near afghanistan, as i understand it, the entire deployment could be counted and funded out of the oko. I think thats reasonable because to get to the arabian sea, you had to actually do that long deployment and so its not a complete abuse. Its not its not deceitful but it is a broad and somewhat lenient definition of what a war cost is. You could find ways to expand that. That may be the most realistic thing. I think everyones learned that sequestration per se is sz painful and so ineffective that what bob said is hopefully true, that the idea of congress appropriating above the caps and thereby necessitying this formal process of sequester which is as youx board set of cuts, and then Service Chiefs in the d. Ou m world have to implement this its crazy. Its just nuts. I would hope that for all of our disagreements, we co 3 n recognize there are legitimate disagreements over pa defense there is no legitimate ole for a sequester as the mechanism to go to a lower funding. Bob can you just talk a little bit about whats it like to be in the pentagon and have to deal with these across the board spending cuts . How much of a waste of time is it . Technically interesting, i have to say to a comptroller but the pricefa was way too high. Several things wente1 wrong in 2013 sequester and as alice said, all government leaders including myself, thought we wouldnt do it and so we didnt slow spending in the earlyq part of fiscal year 13. We didnt, ther ase we used in the pentagon, want to sequester ourselves. Well, they did it. Suddenly we found ourselves with six months to go in the case of the department of defense, a 38 billion cut exacerbated for d. O. D. Because that was the year we underestimated some wartime requirements and incidentally, the oko is outside of the caps. It does get cut by the sequester. I never understood the logic of that but the lawyers insisted so we saw l a cut in oko we had underestimated the amount. It all came together and had particularly devastating fnects on the operating accounts. We saw services do things we never thought they would. I] the air force stopped flying at 12 squadrons. The army stopped sending units through its National Training center. The navy is saying we are not going to send a second strike group to the persian gulf even though the combat commander wanted it. othere wereebn significant effects. Overall it was exceedingly discouraging and of course followed hard on by the shutdown. It was a lousy year. You autttauq that even though theres no formal oco escape e hatch there is always some way, emergencies or whatever, but lets say that the epublicans hold the line, that they want to stick with the caps. That . What are the practical consequences . I think the things that i mentioned likeok we wontb. Have our air force will continuq to be among the worst in the world. I think we are rated Something Like 13th in terms of efficiency. Our infrastructure will continue to deteriorate. Theres a recent report that shows we are Something Like 17th in the world in the quality of our infrastructure. So those are very concrete impacts. A lot of people are very concerned about nih. Nih, look at the budget of nih. Its shocking. It goes up its astounding how much it went up. Somebt hjjtt told me the president has a certain level,qn thencw the house gets it and adds to that and the senate gets it and adds to that and they vote and come out with the Congress Report and its still higher. Now for the last five years, at least according to the baseline its actually been reduced. It looks like a mountain and now its coming back down. Not as much as the mountain you talked about before on defense but its coming back down. There will be many many practical consequences. I dont think republicans will i talked to two pq staffers who are involved in the budget process and they both said the same thing that there will be ways they will be able to get you know, a buck here and a buck there and they wont ave to they will be able to say they lived by the caps but they really didnt live by the level have the cap n well, im less prone to think they will find ways around it but i think rons got some of the right things. What do you do when you have immediate needs that have to come out of your budget, whether youre a family or an institution . You generally let the maintenance go. You dont put on the new roof if its not actually leaking. We have been doing that for a long time in the federal government. And im not just talking about roads and bridges. Im talking about National Parks and as we said air Traffic Control and a lot of prisons and aok lot of things that we think need to be there and should be maintained in a modern way but we havent quite be able to do it. Now, if you look at the projections for the next ten years it will get worse and worse. We will put off moreko of the routine maintenance. We will just not do those things and at some point it will catch up with us. What about how this affects federal employees . I know theres a caricature of federal employees that they dont work very hard and arefa overpaid and they have too high pensions and stuff, but is that really true in the past given the caps and the shutdowns and jr computers do a lot of things clerks used to do. Its partly because they do work very hard. So any defense guys have a domestic question . I will turn the tables. Well, i would like to add on to what alice said regarding federal employees. First i distinguish between the military and civilians. We give a great deal of credit as we should to the military Public Opinion polls show its the highest rated organization in terms of trust in the United States. The civilians on the other side tend to be linked to government as a whole and the public has a lot of distrust for government. So i think they do get a bad rap. I think if you step back, i supervised many of them, watched many others during my tenure in the pentagon. They do a lot of things right. Some of the overall things we havent been attacked are certainly partially of their doing. But more specifically 80 of the work force in the Financial Management community, department of defense is civilians. They manage through some of the toughest budget times in the sequester period and before and after, i might add and its still chaotic budgetarily. A large percentage of the logistics folks are civilians in the department of defense. They conducted an exit from afghanistan. Again, you may not like the results of the war but they got us out of there in a landlocked country where we had extreme problems logistically. I could go on with other examples. I think federal employees do a lot right and as managers, as a former manager one of my goals is to try to say that to them because they are we do see a degradation of morale and i think it is of concern in terms of recruiting new employees into the federal government. I think that the Public Perception among people who dont work for the government is that there are a lot of people who work hard and the incompetent people never get fired. That is true . That is a problem. I certainly wont sit here and say theres no improvements that should be made in the Civil Service. Two things need to happen. One, we need to be able to hire people more quickly. They worked that issue hard and made some progress its still not where it needs to be. And for a small number of poor performers, we do need to be able to fire them more quickly. It is just having managed a group of Civil Servants there comes a point and you know there are always a few underperformers, it is such it is so difficult to actually make changes or to actually fire them. Its just not worth the effort and the time it takes in management. So absolutely, we need to improve the Civil Service but we also need to tell the majority who do work hard and are getting things done that they are doing things right so they will stay with us and new people will come in. Michael do you have any domestic questions you want to pose . Yeah. Let me just mention two categories of spending. I would be curious if you folks have ways of thinking about whether the spending is high enough, too high, too low. Ron, you mentioned mental and nih Health Issues nih but im curious about science writ large, Energy Research other kinds of physical sciences research, whether we spend enough and how do we even set up a methodology to figure it out and secondly, Environmental Protection. That of course partly overlaps with Energy Issues with Global Warming kinds of considerations and trying to find alternative energy sources. But more generally speaking, how do you feel about the resources we have for Environmental Protection . I think they could be spent better but the effort to make sure that we dont have polluted air and polluted water and too many Greenhouse Gases going into the atmosphere seems to be really important. Now, people complain about the Environmental Protection agency. I dont think they are complaining much about the spending. They are complaining about regulations that could be simplified or about doing something in a more marketfriendly way. Personally i think we ought to have a carbon tax. It would be a lot more efficient and effective to control Carbon Emissions through raising the price by a tax than by putting the regulations on all of the coalfired plants. But we arent doing that and if were not doing it, then we have to regulate. I think the only thing to add to that that i think is important, you can count on there will be constant criticism and attempts to rein in the epa. I wouldnt be surprised if republicans might even try to cut their budget. But there will be a constant stream of criticism of the epa and overemphasis on environment and so forth. The republicans have been very bold about this in recent years and i dont see any sign of it stopping. Alice, isnt one of the perverse effects of the caps that theres this everpresent temptation to do tax credits and then they are accused of having a complicated tax code because doing the same thing through the tax code doesnt count against the spending caps . Absolutely. If you think something is a federal responsibility and we ought to be doing more of it now its very hard to say well there ought to be a Spending Program that does that. But sometimes you can accomplish the same thing by regulation and sometimes you can accomplish the same thing by adding one more provision to the tax code and we have been doing that for decades, and the result is that we have a tax code riddled with special provisions which are essentially Spending Programs. We decided we wanted to favor Home Ownership so we made more generous deductions for your mortgage interest which benefit you more if you have a larger mortgage and a higher income. So we have a Spending Program which goes differentially to richer people with bigger houses. What sense does that make . I dont think very much but it is part of the fallout of not having a Spending Program. To give an idea of the magnitude of this, estimates run as high as a trillion dollars in losses in the tax code for exactly these kind of provisions alice is talking about. If we really have tax reform, ryan says we will have tax reform, i think they will take a run on it. If they do, they will pass it in the house, i think. Senates another matter. But one of the big things is they will get rid of some of the loopholes and it will be fun to watch. It was in 86. It will be very lively. What odds you giving on tax reform in the next two years . 1 2 at least. Ask the defense guys a question. There must be something you wonder about the Defense Budget. Wonder in the sense i want ron to ask you a question. Yes. I have a question. Explain to me how i have seen numerous articles in fairly reliable places Like National journal and so forth, i have never been in the department of defense, about the cost overruns on program after program after program after program. I think its pretty much accepted that you see the original estimate of what it costs for a new weapons system for example, and before you know it it costs twice as much or even more than that. How does that constantly happen . Well im afraid its human nature. First off, you are roughly right. I used to say take the price early on in a weapons system and double it in real terms and ask yourself whether you still want the weapons system because theres at least a reasonable chance that will happen. There tends to be underestimates early in the process in order to get the Program Going. After all, budgets are always constrained. You want to get your Program Going and then unfortunately, what we tend to do with these programs when we finally get them nearer into production is reduce the rates to accommodate budget changes and that inevitably induces inefficiency. So overruns are a problem. They are a little lower than they have been and i think theyve gotten a fair amount of attention in this administration, but i wouldnt want to sit here and say this problem is solved. I think part of it is human nature. I think you see it in most Infrastructure Projects outside the department of defense as well. I have seen articles although i cant quote them but i remember some that mentioned infrastructure problems of similar complexity and unfortunately, many had overruns as well. Go ahead, alice. Isnt part of it this Representative Government that democracy, the root of all evil . How did i miss a chance to pick up the importance of military spending, both procurement and military bases as for jobs in so many congressional districts. And i have heard very conservative members of congress say government doesnt create jobs, it destroys them, and all that sort of thing. But it doesnt apply to the military base in my district. If we lost that, we would lose jobs. Is there any way around this . I dont know how other than a fundamental change. I remember seeing many years ago a map i think it was the b2 bomber subcontractors. There was a pin in virtually every congressional district. I remember that one. Companies are smart enough to be sure that this happens because they know the reality of it. I think to some extent Representative Democracy is inherently inefficient. That doesnt mean there arent things you carve out and ask government to do because they can only do it but you probably do want to minimize them because its not going to be as efficient as if youve got a truly competitive industry. Yet we ought to at least acknowledge that base Closure Commission turned out to be a very effective mechanism and we closed hundreds of bases. We did five rounds weve got a few more. Got a few more to go. But this is not a problem thaw cant deal with. We have dealt with it under the terms of democracy its been very impressive. We have done five rounds of base closure and the annual savings from those five rounds which are now all complete is 12 billion a year. So if we hadnt done them, starting in the 80s, we would be spending 12 billion more in perpetuity. Absolutely and we need another round. Is there a way to apply that to the procurement problem . You know, i dont see how easily to do that. Congress is part of the problem but i think a lot of this is in the executive branch, department of defense in the case of defense procurement. Several things happen. We dont tend to corral appetites as well as we should. Theres a realization by the creators of these systems that are going to be around for 20 or 30 years they want them to function well so they push the requirements to a level that is very expensive, and then the problems i just cited of human nature, keep the cost down low, get the programs started, tend to lead to overruns. Go back to what i said earlier, its a little crass and i certainly have never said it as a Government Official but i think you should look at a price of a weapon early in its life and say do i still want this if it is somewhat more expensive. And if the answer is no, you better worry. What i would add, i certainly agree with the difficulty here. But i think alice there is essentially a way in which theres a check on the system which is if the question is do i need to buy 22 b2 bombers and they are each costing me 1 billion, Congress Might just say no. With the f22 fighter which was originally going to be a lot less expensive and im not blaming lockheed martin. They made a beautiful jet, its the best jet in the world and im glad we have 189 of them. We were supposed to have 750. Two things happened. The cold war ended so we didnt need as many but also the price kept going up and so the congress and the pentagon decided we better curtail this program. So what we do instead is we keep the f15s flying longer so there usually is an implicit backup plan which is use the existing system longer refurbish it remanufacture it, and frankly, i think theres room within todays pentagon budget to do a little more of that but i would say this is the one point we havent really touched on, just to sort of wrap up as we move towards wrapping up this initial part of the event, even if you look for a lot of sort of reasonable reforms in how the pentagon does business you do that additional round of base closures, you get the Health Care Premium changes that bob and others were promoting you make a few other efficiencies which they are trying to accomplish. Even if you do all of this you are probably going to essentially pay for the needed increase in your budget because you are too optimistic about how much various things would cost. In other words, you need to do all this just to tread water. You need to do the base closures and the military compensation reforms just to sort of tread water and make the administrations plan selfconsistent. Now if we sequester in addition, or we cut further beyond where the administrations going even if you do the base closures which theres no sign congress will do, and it takes five years to get the savings anyway even if you do the compensation reforms, you are not going to begin to be able to pay for sequester with those kinds of efficiencies. So you are going to have to cut the army down even further. You are going to have to cut the navy at a time when chinas navy is growing. So these are the kinds of specific issues that we probably should get into with our friends here. I understand the terms here, youre not really talking about the process of across the board spending cuts. Youre talking about living with the level of spending that would exist if they either avoid the sequester by appropriating that much money, or being stuck i think the caps are too low regardless of how you get there. I think the same thing is really true in the domestic side. There are things that appear on peoples lists of things that could be done better. For example, we have an awful lot of job Training Programs and they dont work especially well. I would be heartily in favor of serious look at those programs and consolidation of them and improvement of them. So that they are actually better at training people for real jobs. That said, its not going to save much money, you ought to be doing all those kinds of things but even if you do the same thing is true. This amount for the whole set of discretionary domestic programs is quite small and getting smaller in relation to the needs of a growing economy. We are going to turn to the audience here unless somebody wants to make another point. All right. Raise your hand. Wait for a mic. Tell us who you are and try and keep your question short. Behind the the gentlemanueq behind you. Thank you, Dan Morgan Russell at the university of southern california. Dr. Ohanlon you touched on this a little in your first answer but now that we have put these caps on defense spending and cant necessarily guarantee world stability, has this encouraged any of our nato members to begin picking up the slack and if it has not, what level of defense spending, reduced defense spending, will encourage them to spend a little bit more on World Defense and stability . Big question. Let me give short answers in the spirit of davids admonition. Short answer to your first question is no. Allies are spending less as a rule except in the middle east. At least in east asia they are sort of holding the line but most of them dont really spend enough, in my judgment, and certainly nato continues to go through the floor. Natos spending among our allies in europe is very mediocre even against the standards the alliance collectively established. So they are down to about 1. 5 of gdp on average. We are still over 3 . We are headed towards 2. 6 , 2. 8 for us. Cold war average for them was 3 to 4 but they are way below even their own current standards. Secondly, your second question very good question but i dont see evidence that there is a correlation partly based on my first answer. So if we cut more, i dont think the answer is necessarily that at some point the allies get serious about providing for their own defense. I think the answer could be they become vulnerable to attack or they wind up overcompensating and engaging in a regional arms race. One of the nice things about a strong american linchpin is that it tends to keep sort of a lid on some of the regional tensions, for example, japan korea, china, which three countries that dont necessarily get along all that well if you leave them to their own devices. So i actually prefer a system in which theres a fairly strong american linchpin and im not sure i see evidence to think if we simply cut, it will get a happier outcome from the allies doing more. You think putin will lead to higher defense spending in europe . Their economies are in much worse shape than ours. The gentleman in the front. Thank you. I wanted to ask actually provoke you to think about disruptive events that might change the calculus for good or evil. Call them wild cards, ticking time bombs. For example, nobody i think predicted oil at 50 a barrel. I dont think anybody thought the swiss were going to take caps off the franc. In the case of the Defense Department, there may be hundreds of thousands of soldiers who come back with traumatic brain injuries which have not been detected but will be, which will put huge pressure on the budget. Youve got a Replacement Program for the ohio class for the bomber and sometimes for the whole nuclear industry. What sort of disruptive events do you think could really change the calculus that you worry about or could worry about both domestically and internationally . In defense . Go, please. Okay. Interest rates. Interest rates are amazingly low and yet they are going to increase 262 in the next ten if the Interest Rates went up it would be that would really be a difficult event to contend with and i dont see another way except cutting spending and we would have to raise revenue im sure. I will take a couple. This is probably more mikes line. Weve got an unstable ruler in north korea. I dont think anybody can know what he is going to do. We have several tens of thousands of u. S. Troops not very far away. I think that could definitely be a disruptive act. Iran, i mean has certainly got to continue to be worrisome. Events in afghanistan could be disruptive if things go poorly there. So i can think of a number of Foreign Policy issues that would involve the department of defense heavily and probably change the willingness to spend on the department of defense on the part of both the president and the congress. I will just add one which is i know you thought about this yourself, all out competition with china. Something that i know alice fears. We had a panel here several years ago where she and bob kagen and i were talking about this, what an arms race with china might look like. But right now, its not an arms race, its an arms competition. We are spending 3 of gdp, 600 billion a year they are spending 2 of their gdp, 150 billion a year. You know these numbers. But they are on a strong fast upward trajectory and bg its not really clear how we are going to react as the curves start to converge. Are we going to try very hard to keep our Defense Budget level well above theirs and by how much and how is this going to play into president ial politics. Right now i dont think d any likelihood of a big disruption just based on political debate5h and strategic debate in brookings events and president ial campaigns but if you actually had an exchange of gunfire, perhaps provoked by or not provoked by but catalyzed by some of our allies with iraq and china in an unfortunate way and we see an American Ship sunk, maybe the chinese werent even shooting at us, they were shooting at the taiwan navy and missed, who knows, but Something Like that even if it doesnt produce allout war could produce an allout arms race. That would be a disruptive event. Seems to me another possibility, so we have a very big debt to gdp ratio. We borrowed a lot of money during the recession because we had a huge recession. Its not clear to me we could do that again and im not so confident that we wont have that threat again, whether from outside the United States or inside our own financial nothing positive from the panel . Well, you mentioned something, oil prices [ inaudible ]. You really caught us. Look economic side, we could have seen the worst of the last of the problems. We could be on the cusp of an increase in productivity and faster growth that would spin off more revenues and allow us to grow reduce the debt to gdp ratio much faster than we anticipate if we got lucky and had a good stream of growth. I dont put a high probability on that but i wouldnt count it out. Keeping the caps on will help that at a tremendous cost. Help the numerator not the denominator. He was looking for good news. Well, im not sure what good news hes looking for. Faster gdp growth. I think it would be good, i think it would be good news if we had more domestic spending of the right kind and what would trigger that. Possibly some kind of disaster that we dont want like another bridge falling down or ano w air traffic disaster or something competitive. We did react to sputnik for those of you old enough to remember sputnik. The russians put the satellite up there and then we decided we better spend more for science. Question over here . Gentleman in the front row . Hi. Scott mosione from inside the pentagon. The Defense Department has been working on the Long Range Research and development plan, industrys kind of indicated they have been a little reluctant because the aperture is so large on it and the funding isnt that large. I was wondering what you saw for the future of that program, the funding of the program and maybe its success. What is it anyways . Bomber . No. Youre talking about Defense Innovation initiative . Yes. So it was a Program Announced several months ago by secretary hagel looking for initiatives that could be Game Changers from an r d standpoint. A new stealth, for example, was certainly a game changer precision guided munitions are things that have changed warfare. You know, i think it is still in gestation and at least thats my sense. Im not deeply and im certainly not deeply involved in it, but the process of going through thinking about where we should invest r d for the futures is a healthy one even if nothing dramatic comes out of it. Im not sure you can legislate innovation or mandate innovation but i think it is healthy to require the department to think okay, am i spending in the right places, are there areas where i should be more innovative. And innovation to some extent is a state of mind so maybe the department of defense needs to look for ways to be more agile maybe assigning some of its people to startups, for example, to interact with them in ways that may produce new ideas. I think its a healthy process. I dont know where its headed but im glad were going down that road. The gentleman here in the middle, and then right where you are, then the guy right in front of you. John goring from city university. Gao did two reports studying the effect of sequestration and given alices concern about the slow eating away of the maintenance or seed corn of domestic agencies, what is the chance that brookings would adopt the methodology that gao used and create a sequestration monitoring project so that in addition to the many things you do, you provide every two or three years, regular reports on the state of the impacts of sequestration so rather than have ad hoc events like this one, there would be a permanent monitoring . I think thats a good idea, but i would amend it. I have been bugging dave because he runs this new you put him up to this, didnt you . To undertake some kind of a Discretionary Spending initiative. I would want it not just to monitor the effects of the caps, but also to undertake the bigger question of where should we be spending more and where should we be spending less and can we assemble some evidence about how programs are working or not working that would be guidance for the congress on just that question. The gentleman in the blue. Bob hines from here at brookings. You all agreed that sequestration is bad. The budget caps probably arent good, either. A Republican Congress probably isnt going to be raising taxes any time soon. Dave, you kind of threw out there a minute ago faster gdp growth. Where is the discussion though, regarding say effect on the fiscal policy, workym on the fiscal policy from the congress you know to perhaps free up the corporations to do more under capital spending, that rising tide, all boats float kind of a thing, and wouldnt that really get rid of a lot of this entire discussion . Corporations are sitting on a lot of money right now and they could borrow more at very low Interest Rates. They are not investing enough. Its not entirely clear what the government could do about that. Maybe youre suggesting Corporate Tax reform. I would be for that but i dont think theres much evidence that it would unleash a tidal wave of corporate investment. Phil . Over here . Hi, phil law from brookings. Im wondering at what point these caps become painful enough and the decisions difficult enough that mandatory spending thats not the subject of this event becomes more on the table more a focus of debate more maybe even a regular subject of budgeting for congress. I think that its going to happen regardless of the caps because with ryan being on ways and Means Committee and talking about tax reform, also hes been a consistent supporter of premium support which could really be a game changer and hes not going to give up on that. I wouldnt be surprised to see the house pass it again. What would happen if the Senate Passes it. There are some possibilities irrespective of the caps that republicans will actually do the right thing and go after entitlement spending. As long as we have president obama i doubt that anything very big will pass, but it will be interesting to see. But its very hard politically, even if you are a republican, to cut to either get tax reform t recommended and they didnt do anything about either tax reform or entitlements. I think the one thing that might have changed enough that there could be some action on entitlements is that the Republican House has worked very hard to educate its members about how important medicare is as a part of this problem and how premium support is a reasonable solution, and they have supported premium support for three or four years and havent suffered consequences in the electorate yet so im more optimistic than you are. But i think both entitlement reform and tax reform have to have bipartisan buyin. They have to have a lot of people around the country saying we understand this and its okay, and thats hard to achieve. I agree that its hard, but the other factor that makes me a little hopeful is now the looming 2016 president ial race. When i think about the individual players, first of all, everyones going to have to say how their plan will at least do as well for the deficit as the budget control act which is as we know, not very good over the median to longer term. So even though our deficits have been cut back to a manageable number at the moment its not going to stay that way based on baby boomers retiring and medical costs growing and all the things people in this room know well about. Alice can correct me but it looks like the projections are for trillion dollar deficits again not too long into the next decade. 2024, according to cbo. So that becomes the wouldbe second term of the next president and therefore, a president who presumably is going to be asked on the campaign trail to explain his or her vision for the country and presumably is going to want to explain the vision also in terms of American Power, military safety and Long Term National growth is going to have a hard time avoiding this question. And just to give two names, if Hillary Clinton runs as expected, she is a strong advocate of a Strong National defense. She is also not going to want to leave any gray area about her bona fides on that subject, trying to become a woman president from the Democratic Party and obamas former secretary of state. It will be incumbent on her to explain how the u. S. Military will do well under her watch and also, how the country will grow in terms of its education, infrastructure, science and so forth. These are things that amount to a president ial vision. And they require some degree of budget discipline. Now, anybody campaigning is going to have a temptation not to want to talk about cutting entitlements, i agree, but having said that there are ways to limit the growth, you know the cost of living formulas, you can phase it in gradually, anybody who is near retirement doesnt really have to meaningfully lose anything that they would have gotten otherwise. And for a republican running, republicans may have the tea party within their broader gop umbrella, but its still the party of Ronald Reagan when it comes to president ial races. And im going to believe that until im proven wrong. And any even rand paul rand paul is now becoming the guy who wants to build up american strength and just not intervene which is actually reagans legacy as well. Reagan didnt use the military a lot. But rand paul i think has recognized that you dont become the republican nominee by being the tea party guy. Paul senses he can win, this is my interpretation, obviously and you are probably a better expert on this than ui but any gop frontrunner or likely nominee is going to have to explain how American Power will improve on their watch because thats the legacy of the party of Ronald Reagan. So i see president ial politics as a hopeful indicator not for whats going to happen this year but for what could begin to happen certainly by 2017. Gentleman in the aisle there. Zach biggs a reporter with james. I was hoping we could parse the differences between the 2016 caps and the rest of the years under the budget control act because with 2016, the last year we have this flat spending for defense in particular before we start to see some of that increase that might be able to keep up with inflation. We heard the Horror Stories of what was going to happen as a result of the downturn. We are pretty much through the major part of that downturn. Now you could say that its going to be flat with inflation but whats different this year versus the subsequent years when there is an actual increase in the cap . Well i find it hard to get too excited about those out years because so much is likely to change, but youre right. I mean, even in 2016 under the caps for defense, theres about a 1 increase, probably not enough to keep pace with inflation, but there is an increase and then it gets up in the two range so it will be roughly flat. Im not sure whether if the gist of your question is sort of nothing has gone wrong so if were flat were okay, i would take issue with that. I think military readiness has been significantly damaged, especially in 2013 with the sharp sequestration cuts and the other problems i described earlier, and theres a gradual attempt to recover, but its not there yet. We have underfunded in the out years of the Defense Budget support activities. Military constructions an obvious one. It was quite well funded around the 2010 period. Its now clearly underfunded. Were not spending enough to maintain. You can do that for a number of years, but you will pay the price eventually. So there are problems that exist right now and when you add to those the threats at least i see as being pretty severe to u. S. National security, they lead me to believe that we do need to order to fully meet our National Security objectives. I will give one example. Just look at the u. S. Navy. So the n u. S. Navy right now which is probably the centerpiece service for dealing with chinas rise, has about 285 major ships as they define them. And thats in contrast to twice that many in the 1980s, and about 350 even in the 1990s. So in other words, its substantially less. Meanwhile, china has substantially increased its fleet. Im not saying we should be ready for an allout fight with china navally but i am suggesting that our ability to sustain presence and commitment and keep the region stable and help persuade china to rise in a generally reasonable and peaceful way, does depend on our being able to sustain capabilityfb the navy has tried and president obama i think with a very smart rebalanced policy has tried to say we are going to base a little higher fraction of the navy in the western Pacific Region so the historic average of 50 is now being increased to 60 by the end of this decade. Thats the trajectory that were on. And that makes good sense. Thats just a way Hillary Clinton was part of that, i think it was a very strong legacy of the first obama term and i think president obamas tried to sustain it now into0l his second term. This trip to beijing i think went well. Hes trying to keep this concept going. The problem is 60 of a smaller navy could still be less than 50 of the old navy, if youre not careful. And right now the navys ship building budget depends on increases in that budget top line, even if the ships come in on cost which they wont. Which means if you want to even grow the navy modestly, you are going to have to see us get out of this, you know, downturn that were in certainly avoid the sequestration mechanism and i think see modest reals,0z yjvj snuewth in the navy budget in the years to come. And i would say thats a reasonable standard by which to judge military efficacy. You can debate you know, the number of ships is not the beall and endall. It obviously depends which ships and what capability. Im not suggesting that numbers by themselves answer this question. But the logic of saying that we should at least be headed upward towards a somewhat larger navy at a time of such rapid chinese growth, i think is a fairly compelling logic but its at risk under the caps that are now, you know, potentially going to arrive. Right behind you. To your left. Next, behind you to your left. Jason tom from here at brookings. There is a Large Department that gets grouped into domestic spending and that is dhs and they seem to take care of similar to d. O. D. And they get funded appropriations when others sometimes do not. And going back to this system shock incident we have what is playing out in france and the ongoing discussion of what to do with dhs in february and might this be instructive as to how congress approaches the issue of domestic spending and security or is this a oneoff immigration issue. And i dont want to get into a debate about immigration. Thank you. I think it is a one off immigration issue because of the president s order. I doubt there could have been 234i problem about moving ahead with the dhs budget but for that. Dont you think it could be symptom of one of the few Things Congress can do is holding up the spending bills to have leverage with the president. If they cant override his veto in the senate, the temptation is enhanced. It special is a temptation. And here is an example. And they did pass them all. So they dont get a chance to do that with an appropriation bill for a while. Back there. Hi, my name is stiekki from japanese newspaper. I have a question about structure investment. I think u. S. Government, local and federal were spending about 2 3 gdp and now it is less than 1 and so my question is why the u. S. Government hasnt reduced investment or infrastructure, does that reflect republicans asking for a Smaller Government or does that reveal public spending in general . I think there are several examples. It has been going on longer than this congress. And if you look at spending on the highway fruft fund which people known is a problem for a long time and congress has done virtually nothing about it. Pain they will this maybe they will this year but it is nonbipartisan well it could be republicans fault in the sense that in order to do something serious about spending on infrastructure i think theyll have to be additional revenues of some kind and that republicans are clearly completely against. So you need to think of creative ways like Investment Bank of some kind, maybe a devoted change in a tax code that would produce revenues and a fund that could be used for investments and infrastructure Something Like that. So we are way lower, lower than the rest of the world. Weve been deck laning for well over a declining for well over a decade and we have problems inefficiencies and how long people lose in tax and time and the airports and what not. Well have to do something. But there will be a requirement on some kind of financing. Republicans are reluctant to increase the tax gas. Car is more efficient and oil is cheaper and so forth. So i think that is the most important holdup some creative way to finance more investment in our infrastructure. Well i think youre right that the financing question has been the wholeup. We decided to finance through a gas tax and that was a great idea for a long time but now americans are driving less and more fuelefficient cars. There are plenty of other ways to finance highways, including different kinds of taxes. Vehicle miles driven tax would make a lot more sense than a gas tax. But its been hard to get people together and i think it would have to be bipartisan around a new look at how we finance highways and bridges an other infrastructure. So it sounds like your answer is twofold. One is it is a symptom of how disappointing or dysfunctioning our political system is is that something as popular as infrastructure cant get done and secondly how to finance it has become part of thatyujvva i would say it is more than congress has not focused enough on ways to refinance it. I think that is the problem. They need to think of things i agree it probably has to be bipartisan but can be made to appear like it is not a tax increase increase. I think there are problems and there has to be something done sooner or later. Well i agree with you. And there has to be call it an Investment Bank or something that will have to bring in a whole lot of money to finance roads and bridges is somewhat of a fantasy. Do you think it was a mistake that the simulus bill didnt include this. I think there was a mistake, and there was some infrastructure on some investment, and yes, there should have been more, but it was a hard case to make. Ryan, dont you think there is a general skex six about government that have made it impossible for projects to get to run. I never thought highspeed rail would be more important other than just brown. That is true. But at some point reality will intrude and kog will have congress will have to do something and it will. Ron says at some point something will interfere, and mike says something good could come of the 2016 election and so to me that comes in wildeyed optimism. So thank our panel. Thank you for coming. If there is a paper cup under your seat or a piece of paper, pick it up and put it in the trash can. Wed appreciate it. Well be live shortly with coverage from the National Press club of a group of Foreign Policy analysts and military strategists for countering global jihadist ideologyist. That will come up. Marilyn taverner is stepping down at the end of next month. In an email to staff for medicare and medicaid she is leaving with sadness and mixed emotions, calling her one of one of the most accomplished and the decision to leave was dafrners. Andy slavette will take over. And president obamas visit with David Cameron visiting the u. S. , they will discuss the Global Economy and cyber security. They will hold a joint News Conference live on cspan. At 12 con 20 eastern. And well take your phone calls and social media comments via facebook and twitter. And the president will head to capitol hill for the annual state of the Union Address before a joint session of congress. Well have live coverage of the speak starting at 8 00 eastern as we hear from ray smock and get your input on expectations for the speech. Republicans have tapped joanie ernts and she is the first woman to represent iowa in congress. Again it starts at 8 00 eastern on cspan. And we are live at the center for Security Policy. Were live at the National Press club this afternoon as the center for Security Policy is hosting a group of former policy analysts and military strategists to counter global jihadist and ideology. This is live on cspan3. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for joining us for what i hope will be a very memorable as well as consequential conversation about the war were in and what were going to need to prevail in it. My name is Frank Gaffney i am the president for Security Policy which is sponsoring this event and is very, very proud to have sponsored the production of a new study, i guess is one way of describing it that isue prescription for waging and winning what weve come to call the war for the free world. We use that term because it seems best to describe what is at stake. Which is truly nothing less than our lives, our liberties and those of others who share our values. They are under assault by an enemy that we have for most of the part 14 years, for sure, and arguably going back to 1979 refused pretty much to name. Special to name in a certainly to name in a consistent and authoritative way and more to the point to understand what animates it and therefore what it will take to defeat it. And that is the purpose of this new product. We call it the secure freedom strategy. It has been put together by a Remarkable Group of people, a number of whom you are seeing and interacting with in the course of this program. It has been my pleasure to get to know and work with them over many years in most cases. And to see in them something that was really needed to help generate such a strategy such a Winning Program for this war for the free world. Because they bring to it unique and necessary skillsets. We think of it as kind of a tiger team, a term that has been made of course famous by the special forces over the years that has, as their concept of operations pulling together as needed. People with the relevanta55az sets to do a particular mission. In this case we wanted warriors people who had been at the pointy end of the spear particularly in some of the more unconventional and asymmetric ways because that is of course, part of the enemy threat we confront and it is part of what it will take us to mount to defeat it. We wanted people with extensive and varying expertise in National Security, policy and practice. Some of it having to do with the high order policy some of it having to do with technology some of it having to do with the law and the like. And then we also wanted people with specializations in particularly important skill sets Economic Warfare for example, influence and Information Operations counter idealogical programs because at the end of the day that is what this is about. We confront to put it simply a Global Jihad Movement. It has of course varying forms and organizational structures ranging from nation states to proeto nation proto nation states to groups to individuals. But all of them are doing one thing. They are waging jihad. And they wage it in different way s as well talk about in this program. Violent and not so much nonviolent as previolent. And theyve waged it at least back to 1979, when, with the help of the then Carter Administration the government of iran was overtaken by the jihadists. Underlying this jihad, animating it demanding it and making it particularly toxic, is the ideology that they call sherria. We make clear at several points in the strategy we are not talking about muslims who think of their practice of islam in a personal piotistic nonthreatening fashion when we discuss this term sherria. Instead we are using it as it has become to be known, practiced and imposed by not just radicals as we are endlessly told, not just extremists or fundamentalists but by the authorities of islam. Our purpose today is to help inform a debate that has to begin, as to how were going to counter this jihad as it is not only happening in the far reaches of the world but increasingly in our allied capitals as we saw last week and it was narrowly avoided in our own. Im pleased to present unfortunately it is a cecil v. Deville progruks. We have eight or nine contributors to this 16member tiger team with us. Ive asked each of them to make brief marks because we want to expose you to pieces of this comprehensive strategy in which they are particular and instructed. And because there are a lot of those pieces. Im hoping jerry boykin can join us. If he does, well fit him in where we can. But i would like to start with the map you see on the screen via sky harbor. David uroshell my, one of the litigators on the behalf of freedom. He is the cofounder and one of the driving forces behind a very important Public Interest law firm, the American Freedom law center. Im proud to say 3nn he is a general counsel for our center for policy and an extraordinary authority on sharia and what steps our country can take to counter this. David, if you can take a few minutes to describe the enemy threat doct rib and why it is important to doctrine and why it is so important to understand it in addressing it. Thank you, frank. And thank you all for being here. We begin with the amendment that we can only defeat the jihad if we understand their doctrine and their strategic goals f. We listen to them the jihadist whether they are speaking arrow bic, austy, ber due, russian chinese or english, that they are merely carrying out sharia or islamic law. We choose to orient on that threat to understand the enemys strategy and even the tactical methodology. And what is sharia . It is a sophisticating and institutional juris prudent and legal system that developed from the death of mohammed and increases today. It is practiced by empires tribes informal communities and families and individuals differently over the years and in varying degrees of adherence. From the earlier [ inaudible ], sharia is not different from other constitutional systems. It has a constitutional core fundamental principals set out in the koran. The koran is the text of islam and the sunna are handed down from the traditions driven down from the time of mohammed. And they were written down and graded in terms of authenticity and liability and to provide that some sunna traditions were sacred. Thus the sunshina operate as law and explaining scripture and modifying. And then there is the Juris Prudence of the author tative legal scholars that operate within recognized legal schools. At the end of the day you have a legalism, with a constitutionive rule the koran or sunna, none of which can be changed. However, lost in that constitutional over like any system you have hundred of years of interpretation by the elite and like my interpretative body, they must play by the rules they have set down. And one rule that exists in every legal system ever created is the rule of conservatism. And that is to say, no legal system could exist if it could be amended constantly and by fee at. If any person could come on and change constitutional Juris Prudence rules you would have anarchy, not a legal system. That is why every legal system [ inaudible ] radical changes or reform. David im afraid were having Quality Control problem with the skype at the moment. If you might suspend. Im afraid some of that was being garrbled. But the key piece you express is this is not something that is a product of some people hijacking a religion. This is central to and developed over a great period of time by, as i said the authorities of the face. Would you just make a concluding statement so we can see if we can capture that. Okay. So the fundamental difference though between a sharia system and any other legal system is that the adherence understand sharia to be fundamentally device and when you have a legal system fundamentally devine, it create creates two problems, one, men cannot change the defined word, and so the establishment of a global caliphate, jihad these cannot be modified by men. And the second problem is that it has a Recruitment Base not based on patriotism, but just zealotry and martyrdom. And the fact that a system cant be change if it is the devine word of god and, two, that its adhere ants are motivated by something other than a secular patriotism for their country creates two critical problems in dealing with the threat from sharia. David, thank you very much. This is important context. And just to emphasize again, we believe this is the fault line between muslims who are a problem and those who are not. There are many who will espouse sharia as this code david has described, the objectives and the purposes but may not be personally prepared to go engage in the jihad to impose it on others. But they may well be prepared to support in material or other fashions that effort. So weve focused on sharia, that ideology and the need to counter it as the center piece for this secure freedom strategy. Let me call next on my colleague clair lopez. Now a Senior Vice President with the center for Security Policy responsible for our research and analysis activities. She was instrumental as to having had a herd this many cats and im grateful to you for that. She brings to the tiger team and to the work more generally she does extraordinary deep knowledge in matters involving intelligence and the craft and the trade purposes and i was hoping she would share with us her insights into how various parts of this uma has it calls itself interact and are prepared to overlook differences they have in ideology and other considerations in furtherance of this agenda. Well, thank you, frank. Thanks to all of you being here today. Appreciate that youve come to join us as we roll out this new strategy. Ill take just a couple of minutes perhaps then to discuss why were calling this a Global Jihad Movement. As frank alluded to it, this is worldwide and has different aspects that define it as worldwide, as global. Number one, because of the way that david just described the sharia, the law of islam that united the ideology under a corpus of law, all muslims who hold themself to be faithful to the sharia, therefore are compelled, impelled to pursue jihad. They are obligated to do that every bit as christians and jews are obligated follow the ten commandments. Whether all do so or not is another question. So you have this unifying ideology that makes it global. And indeed as david also said those who are our enemies on the field of battle, every one of the groups that we name so openly, like al qaeda and theize lawmakeric state and when they make their videos and publish online magazines inspire in case of al qaeda and deb eek in the case of the Islamic State and they make clear what they do is in obedience to the sharia. They dont mince words on that. And neither do the imams, jim chowder is one that comes to mind that talks about this. But they are unified by this ideology. So it is a unified ideology that we face. Secondly, because muslims work at the world those faithful to sharia look at the world as having products, the dar al islam. That is where sharia is enforced. Dar el har b are the places where it is not. Therefore under the law, muslims who follow the jihad are obligated to try to conquer the part of the world not under islamic law and bring it forcibly or by stealth or guile under the unified law. And that means that enemy,s, we sometimes perceive as discrete and separate, the sunnis and the shiites, for example, on this issue rand at the rack row level can at the macro level can be unifyied unified. They do Work Together. And iran, a jihadist rate by its own constitution was instrumental in assisting al qaeda in at packs of 9 11. So was hezbollah, the iran shiite terrorist proxy. And so we see the shiites and the sunnis coming together even though they have differences that are particular within the sharia, they come together at the macro level when it is a question of opposing nonmuslims and working together to force them under the rub rick of islamic law. So that is the sunni shiite. And now groups as well as the lowest revel al qaeda works with hezbollah. Hezbollah is at least a tsait thatsity and kind of shiite and sunni and they Work Together because she share the same ideology of jihad. And i wanted to mention very quickly in terms of our per exception of the Global Jihad Movement. That while this alliance is sometimes formalized and sometimes looser or opportunistic, it is consistent and has been over centuries, 1300 plus years since we are told the death of mohammed occurred. So they may not in every case or battlefield be working together and in places we see like in syria and iraq they fight one another at a certain level. But at a macro level, they will Work Together against the west and all of those who believe in individual liberty and the things that we hold dear in this country. And finally, i want to mention there is a broughter alliance not just as terrorist organizations but it goes down to the individual jihad level too. There are many individuals unfortunately, in places like the United States included, but western countries australia, canada, western europe where individuals who may have not belonged to any military, ever trained with al qaeda or the Islamic State or perhaps they did receive some training of them but are not members of the organizes properly speaking and yet as antinolan in moore, oklahoma, a muslim concert converted to islam in prison that had never been in a battle or participated in a military but he saw himself as a member of the umma. The International Global community. He felt more allegiance to that than to a citizen and aleemgance to the United States and the constitution. And he attacked and killed two women at his Food Processing plant in oklahoma and behead one of them before he was killed. And so there are people apr the world that answer the call to jihad or sharia whether or not they are identified as a member of a group or organization. And we have those that arent affiliated withize lawmaker and we address these in the paper too who are perhaps within certain functional spheres. You may call them the financial spheres, the cyber world is something we pay attention, the cyber car aspect which is brand new. So there are functional members of this who alie themselves with the International Global jihad who might not even be muslim but some and many of them are. So the macro level and the jihad level and then this broughter global level. These are the threats we face and that we are addressing in the paper. And thank you very much. Thank you, clair. I neglected to mention she is a clandestine officer and served in the Central Intelligence agency and brings an excellent point. And whether these are selfradicalizing or lone wolves is what you have dispatched. These people have embraced this fundamental sharia document and acting on the call to jihad. And next we have on skype and i hopefully with a better connection and i apologize, tommy waller. A army recon veteran now reservist. Very, very pleased to say he is a new addition to the Security Policies team as director of our state outreach efforts. Tommy has some insights as a man who has been not only at the pointy end of the spear but very recently confronting this problem weve been discussing. The last of clarity about the threat the enemy and dallas doctrine. Tommy waller. Glad to have you with us. Thank you, frank. Ladies and gentlemen, the first thing i have to tell you is im addressing you as tommy waller, an employee of the center for security, and not as major waller part of the marine corp. Why do i have to make that distinction . Well it saddens me to say if i were in currently an active duty status, i would have to refrain about speaking about factual information about ideology, sharia, that threatens our way of life because my words would be offensive. Ladies and gentlemen, i took an oath to the United States to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic, and when those who take an oath cannot be taught about the threat to our constitution, which is both foreign and domestic our nation is in grave peril. Now ive deplayed as an active duty marine to numerous theaters of operation. Ive faced the Global Jihad Movement on their turf. And yet i was never taught what animated those jihadists. Still to this day, if you attend a formal military school, youll find there is never mention of the ideology that animates our enemies. We speak in terms like violent extremist an imafts and we never stamp down or as clair says, the ideology. I received a school for a year long for officers at the fieldgrade level. And in 10months we covered Field Operations for less than an hour and our case study was the community insurgency and how we conducted propaganda operations against it in vietnam. I mean, it is mind boggling to me how our enemies maintain absolutely information dominance, but it makes sense if that is the curriculum we have in the military formal schools. Ive been, up until this point shocked and saddened and al qaeda bewildered about the absolute void in the factual analysis of our enemy on behalf of the National Security community and what we face today is tant amount to the military or the cold war from being prevented from studying communism or the ideology they face on a battlefield. So it is a sincere hope that my generation and those that follow it can recover the courage that our previous generation had to study the ideology of the enemy. And like i said ive been sad shocked and bewildered and i have to say the secure freedom strategy gives me home and i think it gives us a major course direction and on behalf of the men and women who have given the ultimate sacrifice in defense of that constitution my request is that we embrace this strategy. Because we owe it to the generations that went before us and those that will follow us. Tommy thank you. That was very moving. And deeply appreciated as is your service to the country in your uniform capacity and to the center. I want to turn speaking of some of the points that tommy has just made to one of the people that i think is truly a National Resource on questions of ideology Information Operations the influence activities of our enemies particularly in the domestic sphere and also overseas. Dr. Jame michael waller. At the informationxd center for Security Policy and deeply knowledgeable from a period going back to the reagan years about counter ideology warfare and how they are hostile toward us and how we can do a needed job of countering them. Mike waller do you want to come up to the mic. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. This is a fight that we are going to lose until we hit the ideology at its core. Just like we would not win the cold war against the receive the soviets left the ideology and that happened when yakko ved lost complete confidence in their ideology and proved to be our one of our most important allies in the cold war victory. We could not and would not if we had not on our side had a commitment to fight this on a strategic level because he needed to know his nation and government was being pushed from the outside and was going to loose unless they admired their advent which is [ inaudible ]. Which as perfect as they were, it ended up essentially doing with the moscowsponsored communist sub version going on. And here you do have idealology, like in the foreign areas and in the qatar and have a huge apparatus and causes us not to believe what we believe in ourselves and give moral support to the enemy. You have various bankers and members of royal families of other gulf states and so forth that continue to be the command and control of their un youll jihad worldwide. We dont way or attack it. We have a big military presence in qatar and they are our friends so we look at it that way. But other gulf states are seeing the organizations they funded or sympathized with, are realizing these jihad groups are threatening to them and their heads will role soon. And you had the current king of saudi arabia recently fired and the whole id hell logical idea of where this will go, we dont know. But we do see something happening within the heart of aspects of the Global Jihad Movement. You have a lot of hostility between saudi arabia and the uae against the family in qatar and whose side are we on. We are there as the military in charge of qatar. And you have the president of egypt that has done anything else and hes been arrested and imprisoned and the whole legion and hundreds and those that took advantage of the allegiance against mubarak, so what kind of encouragement is the United States giving people like this . Zero. Went to a university and told them at ali jar, knock it off. You are making the whole world fear and hate us muslims. Knock it off and start reversing it. Well see how it goes. But hes essentially marked his whole family for death with this. And we dont have the support here and we dont have the trained and motivated in the state or Intelligence Community or d. O. D. Is something we are elevated with. It is a highimpact army and it shouldnt belong in army cyber cyberon and many are motivated that way because they trained themselves in learning about the ideology. And mainly in the special operations area, but not at the National Strat eck level and certainly we dont have like the mayor of rodder dam who has been defensive about freedoms for efforts and people in secural or christian or protestant countries like the netherlands. We still have the people alive who designed the program against the soviet union who know how to do it and some folks against the operational level like in the nauts against world war ii. And there is a strong support base and there is a lot of alliances to make tactical or strategic in the muslim world weve simply been ignoring. I failed to mention that michael is a professor by training and he could have gone all day and very usefully so im sorry to keep it short. Can i just make one point on the basis of what he said . When the president of egypt wanted to disavow and suppress those who are creating in the world the image of islam as a jihadist enterprise seeking the destruction of everybody else, he did not go to seek out radicals in various groups that we hear so much about. He went to al asar university. Some call it the vatican of islam. Because the authorities of islam are those who embrace this sharia program and are promoting it and it is they who must be countered unless and until they heed his admonitions and hopefully change course. And we have another combat veteran for the staff for american senior policy and another senior fellow is jim hanson a technology sergeant in the Army Technical forces. He has many attributes that have been brought to bear on behalf of this policy. I wanted to speak to him about piece through trength, which was a hallmark of president reagan in the National Direct of 75 and also a centerpiece of what we are proposing as part of the security freedom strategy. Jim hen son. Hello everyone. As frank introduced me and as my background might i am a strong proponent of killing terrorists anyplace we can find them anywhere on the planet. No is a apologies made and i think were not doing a good enough job of it. Anyone who complies the black flag and has a ideology or a specific cause, enemies of all mankind. Having said that and done a happy dance every time a terrorist gets return to their kpoetent molecules, that is a tactic, not a strategy. That is not enough. They need to know were going to do it. And they need to know in no Uncertain Terms that if you decide your religion compels you to kill innocents and force them to submit and live under your law, we willco oppose you. And that is fundamental piece that we can bring to the puzzle. But it is just a piece. M e 9pa this table and the rest of the coauthors of this have brought what is absolutely necessary and that is a recognition that we cannot simply kill our way to victory. We need to counteroidias. It is a war for the free world and we need to stand up and say their ideology is wrong and ours is right. Freedom, liberty the fundamental principles that the United States was founded on the reason we are the exceptional nation. We need to stand up and say that, and unfortunately, as tommy mentioned and as we fought the cold war, and i did under reagan, we studied and learned how to oppose them and why our system was better than theirs. And the difference for reagan to tell gorbachov to tear down the wall and saying that the Islamic State is not islamic could not be more stark. The first thing you have to do in every 12step program, admit you have a problem. We have a problem. It is radical islam. They have declared war on us and until we do the same thing we need to fied their ideology and their foot soldiers. Until we do that, we accomplice nothing. Killing terrorists is a tactic and this is a strategy. We have the right minds nick war far innovations, cultural warfare. We need to give them a reason to believe that our way is better and then maybe the next generation wont put women in potato sacks oro press them and sell them into slavery because they can see they would rather live like us thap in the poverty and oppression that Islamic State has right now. So we have a plan. Pay attention. Next we have a man who can speak to a part of this strategy that i think is every bit as important as the ones weve discussed so far. It certainly proved to be in president reagans National Security of 75 and its execution, the Economic Warfare element. Kevin is a war analyst and< oyw market and why it can happen again. And game plan. How to protect yourself from the coming cyber economic attack. I commend both of them to you and im delighted to have kevin as a senior fellow for the policy and the founder of the new National Consultants institute. Kevin, welcome and thank you for your effort. Thank you frank. Im happy to be here. We are in the midst of a Global Economic war. Everything described so far at this conference is accurate and it goes beyond that. Our economy is under drektd assault and in five different ways. Gem economic disruption, currency, oil, cyber and market manipulation and all five of those areas have been named and targeted by radical jihadists. Jihad is involved in resurgence magazine published in october of this year or last year and describes specifically the intent to target western infrastructure and to target our oil industry and our economy. It is a direct assault. And 9 11 was nothing more than an economic attack. It killed 3000 people but they were selected because of the important to their economy. Currency. Al qaeda has called for revoking the dollar for currency and theyve made efforts, including in the 2005 time line given to hussein that outlined all of the things they wanted to do. One of them was to start the restraint and shortly after they wanted to hit the american dollar and do electronic attacks against our structure. So we are in the midst of a economic war from a currency standpoint. The oil stand point, if you pick up the papers from the Saudi Arabian oil industry that said we must break the United States oil making. Opec has conducted embargoes. He used this as a tool against the soviet union and it is being used against russia and iranhos and the shale community. Isis wants to capture and burn the oil fields. And this is beyond cyber graffiti like when centcom had the hacker and it shows the isis capabilities and they used it for recruiting and mayhem and forced us to think that we havent taken this as serious as we should. And if you think capturing the twitter account is meaningless. Just look back a year ago when they captured the a. P. Twitter feed and they sent out a tweet that the white house had been hit and the stock market lost 100 100 million in the matter of a minute. The fifth is market manipulation and that is an our yeah that i specialized. There are85 cyber, and sharia complaint finance which is trouble some because people are giving money to a sharia scholar and they have no idea how they are in vesting that money or what they are doing that money because it is a big black box. This is not me saying this. This is complaints about the international sharia community. There is 1. 6 trillion in sharia financed today. If they were to use that money to attack our markets which i believe was done in 2008 and the response that we had. We have to have a response. We realize it is a Global Economic war. We mobilized resources and created which includes repatriating task earnings from american corpses and simplifying the tax code and all of those things that would enhance the economic and develop ongoing accountability and we need to do meetings like this to the socialxd media to google and to the major banks, bottom line were in a Global Economic war and it is the components of a jihadist war against us and it is time we got into the war and recognized the economic side of it. Kevin, thanks so much. And i just want to say thanks for your efforts to identify to it. I think some of the recommends here that talk about countering the saudis ongoing explicit war against our Energy Sector are important as far as where what we need to do to assure our security, part and parcel of the secure freedom strategy. Next up we have fred flights. You may have seen him on bill oreilly last night and heard about t ni press conferences as a result of him being there. Fred is another of our very esteemed colleagues, another career intelligence professional with 20 years of service in the Central Intelligence agency as an analyst, worked for then undersecretary of state ambassador john bolton. And then served as a member of the professional staff of the House Intelligence Committee under former chairman pete hoekstra. Fred has been instrumental in the piece of this that is the intelligence part, very important aspect of president reagans strategy back in 1983. And very much a part of what we need to be doing to counter the Global Jihad Movement and sharia doctrine. This strategy we have here is based on nsdd 75 signed by president reagan in 1982, to help us to feed it a totalitarian threat, a threat from the soviet union. It was a strategy that engaged all elements of the United States government state department, pentagon. We had economic strategy. And we had intelligence. And i just want to talk briefly about the intelligence arm of this and why it is important. I was on the House Intelligence Committee for five years. And i remember a very strange briefing by the director of National Intelligence in 2010. When James Clapper, an open hearing and probably heard of this, James Clapper came to the hearing and said that the Muslim Brotherhood was not a serious threat to the United States and was mostly a social welfare organization. The members were stunned. The members were stunned in a bipartisan basis. Now, we need to engage all elements of the u. S. Intelligence community to fight the Global Jihad Movement. Now, this just doesnt mean better analysis and collection. Of course it does. It also means reversing the damage done to our government specifically to the Intelligence Community. We have an annual report issued by the Intelligence Community on worldwide thoughts, issued every february. Big, unclassified press conference, the director of National Intelligence, cia director, other officials come, big deal in front of several congressional committees. Read that report, try to find the term home grown terrorist. You wont find it. Because we now use the politically correct term, home grown radical extremist. Now, this type of perversion of terms is affecting the ability of the Intelligence Community to identify the threat and make recommendations an how to counter the threat. The Intelligence Community doesnt recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat if it wont be honest about home grown terrorism, we could go on whether there really is such a thing, whether theyre being directed by radical islam abroad, theyre not going to provide the information that the president needs to defeat this threat. We need objective analysis. Analysts to call it like they see it. Thats how i was trained to be an analyst when i joined the Central Intelligence agency under the directorship of william casey. And finally, we have to look at intelligence collection methods and how we can step them up to gather better intelligence and jihadist enemy. Leaks hurt us severely because when a key Intelligence System is leaked we may not be able to repair, we may be able to replace, but in many cases it may never be replaced. We have to assess the damage done by leaks, especially since this administration came into office. We also have to take a an honest look at the surveillance methods that were leaked by edward snowden. I know that these methods have saved lives and stopped terrorist attacks. And i think that there is much less interest in rolling back most of those programs because of what has happened in france and because of what has happened in iraq and syria over the last few months. But there is still a struggle to gain the confidence in the American People in these methods, but also maintain them so they can continue to keep us safe against the radical jihadist movement. We have a lot of work ahead of us. This program has a lot of recommendations on how we can fix the intelligence side of things and lets hope we make some progress. I am trying to establish whether general boykin will be ache to make it. If he cant, our last presenter will be a distinguished military officer of great renown. Former four Star Navy Admiral james ace lions. Admiral lineons has been the chairman of the committee for five or six years now, i think it is, and i never cease to be amazed at his industry his energy, his clarity of thought. And particularly how he understands in part on the basis of hard experience nature of this challenge we face today, and the kinds of things laid out with his help in this strategy that need to be undertaken to dress it. Ive asked him to sort of be the cleanup batter for this set of presentations. I appreciate everyones brevity and hopefully that will give you time for questions before we have to break. I did just want to say he has been there truly going toe to toe with these jihadists, way back from the beginning of this phase of the free world and i asked him to illuminate some of that as well. Admiral lions, thank you, sir, thank you for being here. Okay. Thank you. Well, first, i want to thank you all for being here today. I got to tell you, never in my lifetime did i believe i would be witness to this great country being taken down and withdrawn from our world leadership position by our own administration administration. The transformation of america has been in the full swing ever since 2008. President obamas no show in paris was an embarrassment for all americans. But it also was a signal to the islamic jihadis it is one of many signals he sent over the years, while hes in office. Now, theres no question we got a hell of a job ahead of us. With the Muslim Brotherhood penetration in every one of our National Security agencies, including all our intelligence agencies and as has been reported by sun, our lead Intelligence Agency headed by a muslim convert, this is not going to be an easy task. Now we had many opportunities over the years to change the course of history. And as frank had mentioned starting with jimmy carter when the iranians took over our embassy, we could have cut off islamic fundamental ismism, but we did not act. He rejected what could have been a very dramatic action with minimum involvement and it would have been dead. We had other opportunities such as the Marine Barracks bombing everybody wondered why we never responded. You know, i wont go into all those details, in the interest of brevity and frank is shaking his head hes getting ready to give me the hook but i have to tell you, we could have changed the course of history then. It became osama bin ladens rallying cry. So here we are today. Political correctness has neutralized all our military leadership leadership. You know, i dont know how many of you saw the article yesterday, any of you see it, he called for the entire firing of the entire executive branch of government, unheard of, including Valerie Jarrett because he left one person out. The one man who really determines the policy. Now, we have a new congress. They were elected to stop the transformation of america, not to see how they could work with the president. This is pure nonsense