Representative smith is washington states 9th District Representative and serves as Ranking Member on the u. S. House Armed Services committee. He graduated from Fordham University with a bachelor degree in Political Science and jd from the university of Washington School of law. During his last year in law school, representative smith ran and won an election for washingtons 33rd district, becoming the youngest state senator in the country at the time. Representative smith is now the 11th in his 11th term in congress. Representative smith has previously chaired the subcommittee on air and land forces and the subcommittee on terrorism, unconventional threats and capabilities. He has previously served on the House Foreign Affairs committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence. After he makes his keynote remarks today i will join him on stage for a little back and forth and well open it up to the audience before we move to a break for our first panel. Please join me in welcoming representative smith. [ applause ]. Thank you very much. It is a great honor be here and i appreciate working with cics, and they have been enormous help to me, and so it is good to have someone around you to ask questions and learn. It is a little bit unsettling, and this is the first time in a long time that i have been before a group of people that we have a budget deal. And normally that is what dominates my thoughts is that we dont know how much money we will have and the only caveat is that we will have the money for two years. Eventually, you do get a debt and a deficit so high that youre put in a very, very bad place. That is going to happen. I cant say when exactly, but when that happens, all aspects of government and the military will not be excluded will have to figure out how do we live with a lot less money than we thought that we were going to have, and that is one of the most important conversations that we should be having, and that the pentagon and the government level is how to make the most of the twoyear gift that we have been given, and not think that it is simply something to keep happening. It is economically impossible for it to keep happening and distinctly possible to go to other way in a massive way. So we will see how it plays out. As far as Security Cooperation goes with other countries it is something that i have worked on for a long time and started when i was the chair of the Terrorism Committee and so i got the travel the world for three years and see where the special Operation Command was. Well, not everywhere, but a lot of the places. As admiral olson used to say, whenever i met with him, he would start out the meeting saying today we woke up in 87 countriors 75, whatever it was. It was a pretty good blueprint for where our military presence was throughout the world. Understanding where socom was. And what is the are reason for Security Systems . Well putting aside for the moment the really intense conflict zones, that ill get to in a second. What we are really trying to accomplish, actually socom has a great euphemism for it. Preparation for the environment. I liked that, and what they meant is basically that we want to make friends in different parts of the world whether it is south africa or Southeast Asia so if things go horribly wrong we are better prepared to deal with it, on one hand. On the other hand we hope that our relationships will be able to stop things from going horribly wrong, and that is part of the mission of the state department and the entire Foreign Policy to maintain stability in as many places as we can. That is the tiniest little bit complicated right now, and all of you are knowledgeable and you can look around the globe and certainly, you have afghanistan and somalia that are problems burk a dozen other countries as well in some state of instability combined with the presence of terrorist organizations that threaten the west. So we are trying to figure out how can we in those countries and the countries around them to bring a more security environment and the key to all of this is a whole of government approach. Now, what we had and we attempted to reform is the 2014 nda situations is with the result of iraq and afg, everything bursting on us, things emerging, we made it up as we went along. We knew that we had the to spread money around in different places to keep the peace and keep the stability, and that is what this is. You are trying to to make friends and figure out if you are working in the philippine, and what do they immediate in the philippines to cooperate with you. I harken back to a story that a are retired socom officer told me living in libya in 1980s and he said that single best thing that he had was a dentist. Everybody wanted a dentist and as long as he could provide the dentists, they would tell him everything that he needed to know and they would help him which is an overstatement, but in essence, that is what were trying to do. And so in some of the other zone, you are operating in an insecure environment, and what complicates that is as you are trying to pass out the money, and the Security Assistance is not just about training people how the to defend themselves, training other countries. The programs spread across a range of things. You had d. O. D. Dollars going to build schools and drill wells and provide health care, and do a whole bunch of other things. And thats all sort of under that umbrella of well, i guess you would call it if you were from new jersey Walking Around money. What you need to sort of, you know, keep the peace in a neighborhood. It got very, very confusing in terms of who was controlling what. So we attempted in 2017 to say, we will consolidate all of this money, at least at the d. O. D. , under one person at the undersecretary of policy. So that we can keep coordination of that money within d. O. D. But for all of this to work, it has to be about a lot more than d. O. D. , because depending on the country, you may need different things. Certainly, youre always going to need security to do anything, but you also need the rule of law. So the Justice Department could potentially be very involved in figuring out how to put in place a basic system of law that people can rely on. Health care is enormously important as i mentioned, and special Operations Command runs what they call the med caps and show up in the village to say we will be here all day with a bunch of doctors to help you out. So, you know, you have that. A and agriculture and i dont know anything about agriculture because i grew up in the suburbs, but it is very, very important in a lot of these parts of the world and countries in the world. So how do you bring all of that gap together and have a whole Government Cooperative approach . I think that getting the d. O. D. Money coordinated is important, but what is going to be more important is getting some of the money out of d. O. D. And into the hands of the people who build schools and drill wells and provide health care and set up the rule of law, and to set it up so that there is a cooperative experience within the country. I did a trip through africa in 2009, i believe it was, in which we visited a number of countries to get an idea, how are we doing . We went to morocco, rwanda, and egypt, and so it varied from country, to country how well the government worked and a lot of it is dependent upon the ambassador. Because if the model is working correctly, the ambassador is in charge of the country, and that is something we also went to yemen on that trip. And i talk about my trip to africa and say and we went to yemen. And people say yemen is not in africa. Well, yes, but we jumped across the sea and hopped back. But in yemen, the ambassador had a large military presence there, and he wanted to be in charge of it, because it is his country and he wasnt so he did not know how to operate with the rest of the people in there, because you had, you know, bifurcated command structures theoretically in charge of the whole. If this is working properly, the ambassador works with whoever the military leader is, socom is frequently a huge part of this, and then all the other agencies are underneath it. And they all have an idea and a plan for what theyre going to provide in kenya, libya or somalia or wherever, and structured, oregoned spending of the money wisely. The 2017 plan is the start of the approach, but at the end of the day, we are talking about counterinsurgency in the good sense. Counterinsurgency has a bad name because it is synonymous with nation building, but that is not what it needed to be. We can know that showing up in afghanistan or iraq and in a different part of the world that is completely different from america to say, all right, we are here and we will rebuild the country and show you how to run it. Not a good idea. Counterinsurgency on the lower form is simply smaller bits of help, as i described, to help the country maintain stability. It works best through the Millennium Challenge Corporation to work with governments to say, we will give you the foreign aid, but whats your plan . What are you trying to accomplish in the education and health care and elsewhere . And that has to work from the state department through the Defense Department in my opinion. I will close with that that and take your questions, because that is one of the biggest conflicts out there. D. O. D. Has the money at the end of the day. When the state department and all these other people are battling to have influence over a given country, if the department of defense is there in any sort of force, theyre the ones with the huge pot and it is 55 of the of the money. Discretionary budget. The other 45 is spread out over everybody else. So there is a tendency to have d. O. D. To do a lot of things that they should not be doing. One example was given to me in kenya and at dinner, there was a great argument between a young woman at state department and two navy s. E. A. L. S traveling with me, about the state department and the military running the country, and how security is where it all started. And if the military was not doing it, how would you be able to do that . But the the state department woman had a good story about how, you know, this branch of the military of the u. S. Went up to drill wells and without talking to the state department they went up to do it, and pretty soon the people actively trying to resist the u. S. Or paranoid started to spread rumors that the wells were poisoned so nobody would use them, because you cant trust the u. S. Military. If its u. S. Military, theyre here to crush you and take over your country. So, that is why you need a more cooperative effort. Thats why you need diplomats involved and engaged. So while we are talking about massive increases in the budget and cutting the state department, were making it more difficult to do this comprehensive approach. This comprehensive approach is vastly preferable than dropping 150,000 u. S. Troops into a country and trying to the pacify it. If we can do it for a small amount of cooperation from other countries and agencies, we definitely get more bang for our buck, but ultimately, we are more successful in what we are attempting the do, but that fight is going to play. General mattis said it best when he was trying to defend the state department. He said if you are going to cut the state department, you better give me five more divisions because im going to need them. Regrettably, while he said that, that is whats going to happen. The pentagon is getting a lot more money, and the state department is not. And a lot of the places in government are not either, so basically, as you are talking about the Security Cooperation, dont forget the whole of government approach. Yes, we need to train troops in troubled spots of the world to keep the peace and security. But security is a lot more than just the military. So, i will look forward to the questions and i thank csis for hosting this event. Thank you very much, representative smith. I know that your back is bothering you so if you have to stand and walk, that is totally fine. I dont have to do that. Its actually not my back but thats a different story. Okay. Apologies for that, and so, lets get to where you ended up which is this government and whole comprehensive approach, and challenging to say the least right now as you said the state department is going through whats best described as restructures or heavy pruning, siege force approach on them. What do you think sort of is the next stage or the era of the congressional viewpoint of where we go with the comprehensive approach. Do you know that if we are going to get to the point where the d. O. D. Is well resourced and takes on a lot of these missions is because the money is there, what then becomes the next stage of where we go to make sure we have the kind of security that looks more like the whole of government that you hope for . Well, i you know, i am not known for the optimism. I think that is up fair by the way. I am not being pessimistic, but it is what it is, okay. I simply try to assess the situation where it is at, but i will start with something positive which is that i am working with congressman ted yoho and senator coons and inhoff to do a fairly comprehensive Development Aid that puts more power in the hands of usaid and actually improves that particular leg of the stool, if you believe the defense, development, diplomacy approach to Foreign Policy. Its actually quite promising. Its ironic, because this is something that was central to my approach prior to 2008. And i worked with susan rice and gayle payne at the time to reform the way we do foreign aid. Because foreign aid is spread out over 40 agencies and in little boxes and pots of money that you cant it is very, very difficult to implement. Raj shah, and not the one in the white house, but the usaid guy for a while is as brilliant a human being that i have ever encountered and he did a marvelous job at usaid and gail after him. We never did the reform because the state department would not let go of it, and they wanted to control it, and i always thought that was a mistake. We should have the separate department of development, like they do in great britain. But its a turf thing. And the state department wanted it. So under the Obama Administration for eight years we did Nothing Congress youngally. Now raj did what he could within the confines of the law. But now we have the possibility of reforming that, and that would be a big step towards getting us at a better place of a whole government approach if the usaid had more power and authority. It seems there has always been this debate in washington over whether we should make true structural reform is possible and whether one should make big structural changes or one sort of absent a major crisis, one is forced back into what you have and do you fall on the spectrum by the way it sounds like an example there say view for a chance of i fundamental structural change. There is a chance. And, you know, it is always worth working on as legislator, that is what we do, legislate. So i would never say that we should walk away from it, and the challenges to getting there are daunting. Because of the can current structure and because of the money problem that i alluded to in my opening remarks. Is it going to bite us . Everybody is short of money, and we are living way crazy beyond our means and so then you tend to get locked into the patterns, and you dont have the freedom to innovate as you should. But there is a possibility to get to a better whole of government approach. Speaking of spending, we hear in washington how difficult it is, and many of us experience it, to try to explain anything like Security Cooperation or the preventative defense or whatever the comprehensive approach, whatever the term is, and so to the people who are thinking of where they want the tax dollars going and the value trying to explain the value of that when folks are looking at, you know, whether they want the taxes raised or they want the benefits decreased or whatever the issue may be. They dont want either one of those things by the way. What is the compelling case, if any, that you have found works if you will in terms of the talking about your travels, your experiences, and in this sector, and the value that it can provide to americans. Is there a way to sell this successfully . There is. There is a rather sizeable problem, that ill get to after i explain how to do it. I have been giving the speech for a long time, and constituents are straightforward on what is happening with this house if we are spending money, and across the world, how is this helping . So there are four ways that it helps. Three practical and one that is more idyllic argument. But to begin with the United States of america is still the largest economy in world by a comfortable margin and it is funny that china is catching us, and freaking out about china and we had the conversation in the Armed Services committee that they will be past us. And so i looked up the number and im rounding a little bit here. But last year we had 19 trillion and the gdp and they had 11. Argument, and then the health care argument, and basically disease spreads like that. Good article about the fact that the cdc and the health and Human Services were not being run by anybody at the moment is a problem, and maybe part of the reason that we have had more people die from the flu this year than at any point in recent memory, but it is if we have stability in these other countries then, you know, pick your favorite disease, and the bird flu was going to kill us and then it was the swine flu and not the swine flu, but something else. And so this is going to spread, and ebola of course, so making sure that we have Stability Systems to protect us as well and that stability leads to terrorists groups who want to the kil