aircraft carriers in the persian gulf. the u.s.s. truman would have left today from norfolk, virginia. defense secretary leon panetta blamed the cut back on is he quest ration saying if congress can t rewrite the law, things get worse. instead of being a first-rate power in the world, we turn into a second-rate power. that would be the result of sequester. you won t find this chairman arguing we need to do more with less. you ll find me arguing if that happens, we need to do less with less. russia will surpass u.s. defense spending in terms of overall percent of gdp in just two years. china is slated to overtake the u.s. in 2035. we ve seen double digit increase s in chinese defense spending for more than 15 years now, and that really should not only give pause to the united states but it really should be a source of concern for the countries in the region as well.
we have a graph that shows this. this is the options on the table. the green line is mitt romney s idea. this is base spending. it doesn t include wars or security. if you talk about security spending, you get a larger amount of money. barack obama s proposed leveling and the see quest ration. larry, you worked on this issue for a long time. what has changed? what has changed, i think the late senator mcgovern pointed out. we don t have a threat, yes, we have a threat with terrorism. you are not going to win it with a lot of nuclear weapons or huge armies and navies. when you tell people, even republicans if you control for inflation, take the base budget, you will go back to where you were in 2007. nobody was complaining then. the other thing was, even with it, i don t think we should do it automatically, but i think you can do it correctly.