The Best Defense: Protecting America In An Age Of Austerity

January 10, 2012

The Center for National Policy hosted a discussion with Lawrence Korb, Spencer Ackerman and National Security Network Executive Director Heather Hurlburt about what might come next after Secretary of Defense and former CNP Chairman Leon Panetta has issued new Strategic Guidance that promises to redefine the mission and means of how best to protect American interests and values for years to come.

For event photos, click here.

SCOTT BATES: Well, thank you very much for coming here today. And on
behalf of our chairman, Peter Kovler, here and Lester Hyman on our board, thank you for
your support. I’m Scott Bates. I’m president here at the Center for National Policy.
How can we best provide the best defense for America in the 21st century? That’s
the core question. And for the last many years, those of us in think tanks and in the
defense community have been talking about this in great earnest. But the attacks of
September 11th and the Iraq war in many ways postponed this day of discussion or this
day of reckoning about what is a sustainable national security structure for the United
States in the 21st century.

It was not until the death of bin Laden and our pullout from Iraq and the defanging
of al Qaeda to a great degree that we’re able to have this kind of discussion. But
we’re in an atmosphere of constrained resources and a fractured political process.
And former CNP Chairman Leon Panetta, now Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta, took on this challenge of figuring out what is the best way to build America’s
sustainable defense structure. And just days ago, the result of his work became apparent
and President Obama went to the Pentagon along with Chairman Dempsey and talked
about what the new review might mean for America’s defenses.

The scope of their work is sweeping. And in the words of President Obama, the
strategic review is intended to, quote, “Guide our defense priorities in spending over the
coming decade.” And all of you that are in the industry know that it’s not just a decade
this will impact. It will be longer than that. And so this discussion has begun.

The Panetta proposal, while the first word may not necessarily be the last, and at
stake are hundreds of billions of dollars, the direction of geopolitical strategy on a global
scale, tens of thousands of jobs, and the ultimate issue of providing the right kind of
national security to prevent war, to build peace, and always to prevail in action when
forced.

So to help us discuss this important moment in American history, we’re joined by
three leading defense thinkers. Heather Hurlburt, over here on the wing, served as former
special assistant to President Clinton and was on the State Department policy planning
staff. For the past several years, she’s been executive director of the National Security
Network and appears frequently as a commentator on TV and radio. And was just
minutes ago briefing over on the U.S. Senate side. So thank you for being with us,Heather.

Spencer Ackerman, to my right, is senior writer at “Wired.com” and a national
security reporter and blogger. Spencer began his career at the New Republic and
currently writes for “Wire” magazine’s national security section, which is called “Danger
Room.” And I know many of you are daily visitors to “Danger Room.” And we’re very
glad to have you, Spencer. And my intelligence sources tell me that, if you dig deep
enough, you can see a picture of Spencer at Guantanamo Bay surfing. So he’s a very
interesting guy, and has also been in Iraq and Afghanistan. And essentially, his
professional career has been at the front lines of action in the 9/11 decade. We’re glad to
have you here, Spencer.

And, next to me is Lawrence Korb. He is in fact a living legend in the defense
community, maybe not elsewhere but at least that, right? (Laughter.) We can call Larry
Korb captain for Mr. Korb served on active duty for four years as a naval flight officer
and he retired with the rank of captain in the Naval Reserves. We can call him doctor
professor, as the Germans would, as Mr. Korb received his Ph.D. in political science and
taught at the Naval Academy, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and, most important of all,
at my alma mater at the University of Dayton in Ohio. We can call him Mr. Secretary
because Mr. Korb served as assistant secretary of defense in the first Reagan
administration and was responsible for manpower, logistics, and installations. His
appearances in the media, commentating on defense issues are too numerous to mention.
His published work span decades and have appeared in every major defense journal that
there is. Mr. Korb is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a
senior adviser for the Center for Defense Information, and adjunct professor at
Georgetown University.

So thank you, all of you, for being with us, and for all of you for attending. I’d
like for our panelists to share their insights and views and then I’m looking forward to
opening it up for conversation with all of you.

So, Heather, how would you like to kick off today? And thank you.

HEATHER HURLBURT: Thanks, Scott. And thank you all so much for
coming. There’s been, of course, an enormous amount of ink spilt on this topic over and
over the last week but I think there are some sort of basic pieces of it that are a little bit
obscure so I thought I’d use my allotted eight or nine minutes to talk quickly about how
we got here and what are the key questions that the strategy review really opens up,
because I think when we get five years out, we’ll see that this, Scott, as you alluded to,
really opened up at least as many questions as it closed for the American defense and
national security establishment.

And so the first point I would make about that, you alluded to my time in the
White House. And the funny thing about that is I spent most of the last year of the
Clinton administration working on a draft of a national security speech that was never
given, that was supposed to kick off a period of significant reform in some of these same
issue areas, in particular how to take a more – how to find a way of describing the two war
standard in a way that more accurately reflects the reality that even back as far as
World War II the United States was able to win in one theater and hold in another but not
to contemplate winning in the Pacific and invading Europe at the same time.

So these are issues – these issues that have been presented to us in the last week
have been around a long time. The pivot to Asia – you know, people have been saying
that the United States was about to pivot to Asia since about the time I got out of
undergrad with a degree in Soviet studies, just to date myself a little bit.

So these – one of the really fascinating things about how this process was done is
how it pulls together in a way that’s at least somewhat publicly comprehensible, debates
that have been going on outside but mostly inside the security establishment inside the
Pentagon in some cases for decades. And I’ll touch on a couple, and I know Spencer will
tough on a couple as well.

The second thing that I would note is the astonishing for Washington smoothness
and lack of bureaucratic leaking that took place around this whole process. And this I sort
of think of as the dog that didn’t bark. And it’s really quite remarkable if you think about
the Pentagon in particular as having both one of the best formal media operations in
Washington but also being deviled by some of the most accomplished lead groups in
Washington who know exactly where to go and who to talk to. And that, in fact, you
didn’t have an extraordinary number of hostile leaks in advance of this thing being
released is really fascinating and I think somewhat underreported development.

And, Scott, I would reverse a little bit the order of factors that you cited. We
would not I think be sitting here today having this conversation were it not for the state of
the economy and for the political conversation about the budget deficit. The death of
Osama bin Laden, the withdrawal from Iraq, neither of those factors by themselves would
have been enough to catalyze this kind of action out of the Pentagon.

What catalyzed it was the very clear understanding in the Pentagon, in industry
that there were going to have to be changes as one senior commander said that the spigot
was closing so there were going to have to be changes and it was going to be managed
and that this process’ smoothness is in many ways one of Secretary Gates’ final gifts to
the department which Secretary Panetta has really picked up and run with to have run a
process which began last March that was very smooth and that occasioned so few leaks.

And I think five or 10 minutes out of the presentation at the Pentagon last week
were devoted to telling reporters over and over how many different agencies and
subagencies were consulted and how many rounds of consultation there were. And those
kinds of ritual incantations were all a way of reminding that this process was really run in
a quite astonishing manner and given all the stereotypes that are out there about
Democrats and the military that have flourished over the last 30 years I think it’s worth
noting.

And it’s also – it’s interesting to contrast how there are a number of ideas that
have come forth in this strategy fairly unremarked that are not dissimilar to what Don
Rumsfeld was trying to do in 2001 before 9/11 which many of you will remember –
occasion howls of protests, oceans of leaking and lots and lots of anger within the
Pentagon. And two things have happened since then. One is 10 years have gone by.
Second is a number of the innovations that Rumsfeld was pushing for are now just being
used and so they’re less controversial, but also, as my grandmother liked to say, you
catch more flies with oil than with vinegar. So that’s a second point I would make about
this.

So what are the new realities that we’re going to be looking at? First of all, the
reduced troop levels, which is the one sort of concrete operational change that we got out
of the strategy. Again, an interesting and somewhat underreported consequence of this is
not that the U.S. can’t start another land war, can’t have an invasion and occupation, but
that you’ll have to call up the Guard and Reserves from the beginning to do so. And
what’s interesting about this is all the people who over the years have suggested that the
U.S. reinstate the draft to make a political point, this is about as close as you can get
without actually doing that to create a system where you cannot undertake an Iraq style
invasion and decade-long occupation without having to go out and ask the country to
make sacrifices.

MR. BATES: And so, Heather, is this why the National Guard is now going to
get a seat at the table with the Joint Chiefs?

MS. HURLBURT: Well, that’s because Pat Leahy asked for it. But, yes, actually
that is – it’s a very – it’s a real sort of motion back toward the idea that if you have an
occupying Army, it’s a citizen occupying Army, which we turned out to be in fact but not
in idea this time. And it remains to be seen whether that has the political effect that its
backers think that it will. Frankly, my guess is that the Pentagon thinks that it won’t and
I would tend to agree with them. But I note that.

Second – and Spencer has done really excellent reporting on this – is how we now
have enshrined in strategy the heightened role of irregular and special ops forces so we’re
now looking at – we are just at the beginning of a debate and discussion about strategy,
ethics, international impacts of these tools of war that were really – we’re where we were
with nuclear weapons in about 1946 in terms of not having thought or people outside of
various small circle not having thought very much about doctrine, not having thought
very much about ethics, not having thought very much about their effect on targeted
populations, and not having thought very much about what the world looks like when
everybody has them, which everybody will soon being as even Mexican drug cartels are
now testing out their own drugs. So that is a savings right now that’s going to dominate
our thinking about the military in the future.

In parallel with that, since I mentioned 1946, there’s been a quiet debate within
the military about the role in place of nuclear weapons, which you would never know
about if you didn’t follow these issues pretty closely. But that a surprising number of
very senior flag officers unless you happen to be responsible for submarines, ballistic
missiles or nuclear bombers, have been saying we should be spending less money on
nuclear weapons. They should have a smaller place in our strategy and they should take
up less of our operational planning. Now, that was not – that’s tentatively hinted at but
not outwardly said in the strategy.

At the same time, as you have folks in Congress who have been trying to push
additional funding for a new generation of development and potentially also testing of
weapons and the weapons complex. So that’s one where military thinking and civilian
thinking are going in opposite directions. So expect lively and vigorous debate on that in
the years ahead.

And the last point that I would raise to keep an eye is that this represents very
gradual change, both because everything in the strategy is quite familiar to military
thinkers who, as I said, have been arguing about it for a decade or more in many cases,
and because the cuts envisioned amount to only about 8 percent of Pentagon budget.
And, indeed, the Pentagon budget would start rising again by the end of the five-year
period which, in comparison with past builddowns, which were more like 25, 35 percent
is tiny and very manageable.

So, of course, the two questions are: number one, politically what’s the response
to that? You know, we have a leading presidential candidate who thinks we should be
growing the Pentagon budget instead of shrinking it 8 percent. And, on the other hand,
will – as you know, the sequester represents a more than 8 percent cut, what will the
budget look like going forward? Is this enough that we aren’t revisiting this discussion
again in two years and then what does that look like? So in all those ways, this moment
that we’re in right now is going, in retrospect look like much more a beginning of a
debate than an end of a debate. And, with that, I’ll yield to Spencer.

MR. BATES: Thank you. And Spencer has written very interesting pieces about
what this might mean within the military too because there might be some contradictions
between what we’re saying is military doctrine and what the shift in emphasis in budget
line items might mean. So, Spencer, please.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Thanks very much, Scott. Thanks to Peter. Thanks
for CNP. And because my friend Heather ended on the budget, I thought I’d sort of start
off talking about something that I can’t really come to a stable conclusion about what I
think about it but what I think might be a good way of sort of framing the question, which
is just, you know, first – you know, you look at these really enormous numbers that we’re
looking at. And you wonder – I think this is probably the right way of viewing it. To
what degree is cutting the budget along these lines politically feasible and to what degree
isn’t it?

So look at the number that’s about to fall out of the defense budget according to
the plan that was announced last week – the Pentagon calculates that as $487 billion over
10 years. First of all, that’s a really amazing sales pitch by the military because – you
know, a lot of times when us and the press report this, what people tend to hear is the
$487 billion. They don’t hear that over 10 years part. Over 10 years, if these cuts didn’t
go through, if nothing happened, the Pentagon is going to spend $5 trillion.

So that’s just kind of a baseline comparison for what we really are talking about
in terms of what’s actually going to fall out. So $487 trillion – if you believe that that’s
the largest amount of money the Pentagon could conceivably get through a Congress that
at least in the House is pretty inclined to spend really whatever on defense, then you
might view some of what Secretary Panetta has done a certain way.

For instance, I remember before the Budget Control Act last year, the thing that
introduces us to this concept called sequestration, which freaks out a lot of people in the
Pentagon, there was this hearing in the House with all the service vice chiefs, the deputies
essentially of all the different services in which all of them start talking about the number
that the White House had put out, $450 which now the Pentagon calculates as $487
billion over 10 years, and they start kind of moving their hand, you know, can we really
do this, I don’t really know. No one really seemed so comfortable with it. And they
started talking about the pains of austerity that were going to hit them and were going to
hit all of the military national defense under this plan.

What ends up happening, and what Secretary Panetta does when he comes into
office is he starts talking only about sequestration. He starts talking only about the
prospect that an additional $600 trillion over – $600 billion over 10 years to maybe even
$1 trillion or so over 10 years. That is what at one point he very colorfully calls a goofy
meat ax scenario and everything you start hearing him talk about is like focused like a
laser beam on sequestration. Some on the left start freaking out because it seems to them
a lot like Panetta is saying something that might conceivably become policy that when
looked at over the grand sweep of builddowns that Larry helped preside over and a lot of
people here have lived through and experienced, isn’t really so great. But here’s Panetta
saying, no. Absolutely. This goofy meat ax scenario would leave us really vulnerable,
who knows what could happen.

Something interesting happens there which is the service chiefs start freaking out
over 450 billion over 10 years/ 487 billion over 10 years. And now they start thinking
only about sequestration.

And when it comes time for them to agree to endorse and testify about the
reduction that was announced last week, they’re cool, not perhaps enthusiastic, but they
can now live with 487 billion in cuts to come over the next 10 years. And so their shifts
were what the political scientists call the (hovering ?) window, the conversation moves
away to terms which have shifted.

On the other hand, if you do think that larger cuts are either possible or desirable,
if you think that even one trillion like a coalition called – used its sustainable defense task
force some defense doves come out with, we think one trillion over 10 years is really the
right number responsible. We should do this because we have other national priorities
and so forth. You know, it’s a debate worth having. They’re going to be really mad with
Panetta because now Panetta has said again and again and again that can’t happen.
That’s a really problematic situation and he’s kind of blocked and tackled away from
that.

At the same time, the idea that that scenario won’t happen is predicated on the
idea that Congress can come up with this omnibus defense – this omnibus budget deal
which spreads the pain out and avoids the dreaded sequestration. I’m not a congressional
reporter. I see very little indication that miraculously that can happen.
So the nightmare scenario that Panetta has painted as a way at least in theory of
getting Congress to suddenly not go wondering and go along with all of these things
might actually come to pass and then Panetta is going to be in a very unhappy position of
having argued that this thing is going to be a disaster and now he’s got to implement it.

One of the things that we couldn’t get answered in the press corps last week when
this document came out is this document predicated on the idea that cuts of $1 trillion
over 10 years can happen? In other words, if sequestration is a reality, does the Pentagon
have to then go back and revise this thing or could it actually implement it of cuts greater
than 600 billion over 10 years? I don’t have an answer to that. It’s not really been put
forward in any kind of straightforward way. And what we’ll see when I guess the
beginning of February, when the actual budget gets released and then when all the
hearings come through in Congress we’ll get something of a sense of that.

To speak to one point Scott raised and Heather discussed as well, on some
contradictions you come on as you read through this thing. I’ll just name one of them
because it’s one that I think is going to be very debated in the Army going forward. If
you look at – I brought a prop. If you look at this document, we’ve got something called
primary missions of the U.S. armed forces delineated. There’s 10 of these things.
And number nine is what the United States Army has had to do explicitly since
2007 and to some degree in reality mostly through the Iraq and Afghanistan war and
that’s fight a counterinsurgency operation. And what does it say about this? Its primary
line is U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale prolonged stability
operations. Now, after 10 years of ground war, that comes as something of a relief
probably to a lot of people. But what this document does say is it commits the U.S. to be
ready to conduct a limited counterinsurgency.

Now, advocates of counterinsurgency, opponents of counterinsurgency, critics,
fair-weather friends, et cetera, et cetera, probably all agree on one thing which is that
counterinsurgency is a manpower intensive, time intensive and resource intensive
endeavor. I don’t know what the limited counterinsurgency means. I don’t know if that
means you protect the population for a limited amount of time, if you have fewer
presence patrols, if what you do is you spend most of your time training foreign allies so
that they can hold territory after you cleared away from an insurgent force, I don’t know.
And I’m not sure that the Army knows. And I’m not clear if when the Army has
got to come up with its long-term plans for how we incorporate this guidance, if it really
knows how to instantiate that and how to train for it, what the tactics, techniques and
procedures that weren’t from Afghanistan and Iraq have to be ripped up on this sort of
thing.

And that leads to I guess the last thing I would say from a strategy perspective,
which is you’re going to now have a lot of just counterinsurgency hardened, combat
experienced, all coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And I want to look at kind of
the officer corps of tomorrow.

If you’re a field grade officer, if your formative experience over the last nearly 10
years now has been as a platoon leader, as a company commander fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan as a grueling phenomenon and doing more in your 20s and early 30s than
most of us will do in our lives, now you’re facing a life of at least the next several years
in garrison, you know, back at home stations. In a scenario where the institutional
prerogatives of your service look a lot less important to the national strategy than perhaps
those of the Navy do, those of the Marine Corps do, those – especially those of the Air
Force do.

I think there’s an open question about whether the Army, even as it either decides
it’s going to go down or the Pentagon decides it’s going to go down for about 100,000
troops fewer than it is today, there’s a question I think about how you keep those officers
with that experience, who have been proving to be adaptable, capable thinkers and
leaders in the Army when their future looks, for lack of a better term, less exciting. And
that’s probably not the right term, but you’re going to be doing things that are a lot more
mundane certainly than you have previously. And I think this is going to be a real
challenge for the Army. And with that I’ll turn it over. Thank you.

MR. BATES: Thank you. One thing is clear I think and that’s that the father of
counterinsurgency, David Petraeus, will not be heard from on this topic, at least not
publicly. Mr. Korb.

LAWRENCE KORB: Thank you very much. After listening to Heather and
Spencer, there’s not a great deal for me to day. So let me try and take it in a different
direction by first of all making this point: no matter how much you spend on defense, you
can’t buy perfect security. And I think that’s important because every time you caught at
people talk about you’re endangering it – and I don’t mean to offend anybody but let me
relate to something that happened to me in Israel last year when I was there. And I heard
this story.

And, basically, it was about this elderly couple before they passed on from this
life, wanted to visit the holy land. So they went over there. Unfortunately, the husband
passed away while they were there. And the rabbi came to the widow and said, I’m
really sorry for your loss. He said, where would you like to have him buried? And he
said, you know, if you bury him here in Israel, it’s about $50. She said, how much will it
cost to take him back home? He said, at least $4,000 or $5,000. She thought for a couple
of seconds, she said, I’m going to take him home. The rabbi said, why – $50, $5,000.
She said, well, I heard that years ago there was a fellow buried here and after three days
he rose again. I don’t want to take a chance. (Laughter.)

And my point is no matter what you say, well, we don’t know about this. We
don’t know about that. And, you know, in the document that Spencer was referring to, of
course they had to say limited counterinsurgency because you don’t want to send the
wrong signal. I mean, these things go out. People read them.

I remember when I was in government we did a strategy, we didn’t mention Latin
America; oh, my goodness, you really got to talk about it. So I think it’s important to
keep that in mind.

Now, the next thing to – and I think Heather alluded to it a little bit, this isn’t a
big thing. This is much ado about nothing. Okay? Yes, it was budget to the point the
defense budget just couldn’t keep going up and up and up forever. I mean, it started
going up in 1998 when the Republicans pushed Clinton and Clinton didn’t want to be soft
on defense so he started increasing it. The baseline budget has gone up 13 straight years.
Is it going to up more? Of course not. And so if you didn’t have a budget, you know,
problem, I think – you know, you could bring it down.

Eisenhower, when he came in, you know, basically, he had the Solarium Project.
Some of you may remember this, about the debate between containment and rollback,
and decided on containment and basically cut the heck out of the defense budget. What
did he cut? Cut the Army because he didn’t want to go any more Koreas. Basically, he
adopted a strategy of massive retaliation. And Spencer’s right. It’s going to frustrate
people, but listen; I used to fly antisubmarine warfare. We don’t do that anymore. I
mean this is, you know, this is basically – you know, missions change and you’re going
to have to – you know, you’re going to have to adapt to them.

So basically Nixon came in, okay, and cut the – you know – cut the military. It
wasn’t just budget. In fact, we had a balanced budged when Nixon came into office, the
last year of Vietnam. We had a war surtax. You want to get people involved? You
know, make them pay for the war. But Nixon had other priorities. Mark Shields doesn’t
call him the last liberal president for nothing. It was EPA, OSHA, and all of that kind of
stuff was Richard Nixon, and he wanted to cut the money off from defense and given his
credentials he was able – he was able to do it.

Now, when the military – oh, we can’t fight two wars, you know, China and the
Soviet Union, good, I’ll take care of that. I’m going to China. What’s your next
question? Well, with the Soviet Union – we’re going to have arms control agreements
with the – with the Soviets. And then kind of got lost because of all the other things that
happened. He goes to Guam and gives a speech on the Nixon doctrine. He says, hey
fellows, and listen to me, all you other countries, you have problem? We’ll send you
money. We’ll give you – we aren’t sending American ground troops. You got to fight
yourself, okay? And basically I think that that’s, you know, part of the message that
we’re seeing now.

Now, people talk, you know, well, my goodness, this is a big cut – you listen to
some of the so-called defense hawks talking about the end of the world. Okay, as
Heather mentioned, it’s 8 percent. In the second Reagan administration, we cut it 10
percent in real terms. This is 8 percent from your projected level, not where – where you
are. And they’re trying to explain – not all reporters are as – know as much about this as
Spencer – call me up. But I said, look, if you make $50,000 and I say in 10 years, I’m
going to give you $100,000, but then I come and I say, oh, we got budget problems, so I
can only give you $80,000, is that a 20 percent cut or did your budget go up? And I think
that’s the thing and Obama mentioned that. Hey, the budget’s still going to go up. It’s
going to be larger than under Bush. And people forget that under Obama the budget did
go up.

Let me tell you something, in 2008, when Bob Gates thought it would be his last
year in the Pentagon, he put in the five-year plan, and he said, in 2012, we’re going to be
spending $544. And he went through with the cuts and all this kind of stuff. You know
what he asked for this last year – $553, okay? So the budget was – was going up, and I
think you want to keep that in mind. So compared to previous downturns, yes, we’re out
of Iraq. We’re on our way out of Afghanistan. We may leave some troops. We’ve
always cut the budget. You cut the Army 100,000; you’re back to where you were on
9/11, okay? And we are not – hopefully in our lifetime do these things again.

If you read Peter Beinart’s book about the Icarus Syndrome, somehow we tend to
forget all these things and we can – oh, we can go in. We can reengineer Afghanistan.
We can reengineer – you know – hey, we’re powerful, but we’re not that good, okay?
And we don’t have the ability to do what we think. You know, when Maliki was here in
town, a group of us met with them. And that son of a gun is completely ungrateful for all
of the sacrifices we made – all of them, okay? And you may remember when we were
leaving the air base over there that their general says, the occupation’s over. When in
June 2009, when we left the cities and towns, go back to the bases, Maliki said, we’ve
repelled the invaders.

Okay, this is what we – and it’s not a question – you know, they said, oh, the
military wasn’t good. Clinton cut them. They marched to Baghdad in three weeks,
okay? They got – they got al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. So when you talk about two
wars – and Heather kind of alluded to it – in World War II, we basically fought in
Europe. We told the Pacific, do the best you can until we get this over, and then we – we
come over there. So I think in terms of – you know – this was not that big a thing.
We’re pivoting toward Asia. We have never ignored Asia. There’s still a carrier
in Japan. There are Marines in Okinawa. When did we get away from it?

Now, we didn’t pay attention because we were focused on (abilities ?), but we
didn’t do anything. Now, the problem you got with all this talk about it, you’re getting
the Chinese, oh, my goodness, they’re getting aggressive. We need to – you know –
that’s foolish, I mean in terms of the things you’re doing. You’re saying, well, I’m not
going to – I’m going to give Asia priority or give it the same priority that – that’s fine.
Now, you talk about weapons systems. Obama doesn’t want to cut a carrier
because you said we need that in the Pacific. Let me tell you something. Those carriers
can’t do a darn thing about the Chinese. They got all these anti-access weapons, which
they can buy much less, you know, than we pay.

Now, let me conclude with this. We don’t have a resource problem. We have a
management problem in the Department of Defense. Go back and take a look, and even
– if you saw John McCain’s speech, on December 15th, on the floor, where he talked
about all of the problems we have with every weapons system. Yes, we normally get
maybe 20 and 30 percent over. Now, it’s over 50 percent. You know, $400 billion in
cost – in cost overruns. You know, you got a fixed price contract on the tankers. They’re
already going over the fixed price. I mean, this – this type of thing. So you really need
to – and let me conclude with this. I – the next president, if Obama gets reelected, or
whoever it might be, if he asked me one thing to do, I’d say get yourself a strong deputy
secretary of defense. David Packard. Okay, give me a break. David Packard and Paul
Wolfowitz in the deputy’s job. Okay. Charlie Duncan from Coca Cola worked for
Harold Brown.

The Bush White House, the first Bush, when they thought it was going to be John
Tower, he didn’t get the job, then it was – (inaudible) – already picked the deputy, Don
Atwood from General Motors. Okay. And that’s really what you need to go in and shape
that, shape that place up.

Final saying is yes, we’re going to have to do something about military pay and
benefits, okay? Yes, we’re going to have to do it. And you can do it without breaking
the promises that you make to people. Nobody ever said we’d never raise TRICARE
premiums. That was not a promise. TRICARE for life doesn’t exist to 2,000, so what
about all the people who are already, you know, retired. Military pay is supposed to go
up with the employment cost index. It’s way over that. Even the Pentagon’s own studies
tell you that.

So I mean there are things that you can do if you want them, but, again, I think
it’s going to take strong management and people really making the case.
So my final thing is I tell those chiefs, okay, if you guys don’t do something about
the personnel, it’s going to cost you, you know, in the other areas. That would get their
attention. Thanks.

MR. BATES: The next time my mom complains about TRICARE, I’m going to
put her on the phone with Larry Korb. (Laughter.) And you’re going to have to explain
her that.

Great. I had a chance to talk with our panelists beforehand, but I – we have a
great crowd here today and we’d like to hear your thoughts and your questions. So raise
your hand, and especially you in the back, who’ve been patient back there and just
identify yourself and ask a question. A hundred and twenty bashful people, I don’t
believe it. Oh, good, here we are.

Q: Hi, Jeremy – excuse me, Jeremy Kadden, Congresswoman Shelley Berkley’s
office. Heather, you really got me thinking about this, the dog that didn’t bark. I was
wondering if you could – (inaudible) – a little bit more. I mean to what do you attribute
the lack of links. Was it just that they all recognized this is coming anyway, so we should
just get on board, or is it – is it just that they don’t like it? I mean, why were they all
fired?

MS. HURLBURT: Well, three things. First, actually, is the factor that Spencer
laid out that the sequester very efficiently came along a provided a worse bogeyman, so
that would be – that would be my point – point number one. Point number two is – and
I’m going to say this respectfully and as a fan of your boss, but it’s been clear in the for
profit sector and even in the Pentagon for a couple of years that this was coming. And I
say it’s clearer in those places than it is clear on the Hill that it was coming. And you
saw – and folks in the room can correct me on the timing of this – two and a half years
ago, you had a big round of defense mergers and you had a big round of buyouts, at a
moment where nobody, you know, would have – (inaudible) – defense isn’t doing badly
at all.

So it’s been understood that this was coming for a while, and so there is a certain
amount of relief that it wasn’t worse. And third – and I really want to insist on this point
because Gates and Panetta deserve joint credit for that and it’s so counter to sort of an old
stereotype about – and certainly countered with the stereotypes that we dealt with in the
Clinton administration – just well it was managed and how there was a lot of buy-in and a
lot of effort to get buy-in, which, you know, is the thing that dissuades people from
running to (Bill Goetz ?) or whoever it is. So I would – those three things I would say.

MR. KORB: And they also have a signed nondisclosure agreement. I can tell
you how much they trust – if I were a flag officer – maybe I’d quit. Okay, hey, if you
don’t trust me, you know to do – making a military person sign a nondisclosure
agreement that you – I mean, this is crazy. But they did. Gates did it and Panetta did it,
both.

MR. BATES: Other questions or thoughts.
Yes, sir.

Q: (Off mic.) Are there any thoughts about the new budget and the cyber
operations? Is that a growing area on the – (inaudible)?

MR. BATES: So cyber.

MR. ACKERMAN: Massively so. The Navy has (reconstituted ?) its Tenth
Fleet, now basically building around cyber operations, the last defense bill that was just
passed.

This is a kind of constant debate, but basically, it provides more leverage and
authority to the new military command that’s supposed to protect military networks, but
also take a very broad view of what protecting really means in electronic warfare and
cyber attacks, basically to launch offensive operations. And we’re not really sure what
that looks like yet, but yes, this is something that increasingly is part of the arsenal and is
just going to get more important because the prevailing theory is that it’s actually a more
cost effective version of warfare that you have to disrupt someone’s command and
control networks or just, you know, engage in an attack that might conceivably shut down
a major piece of infrastructure, or could be something as a lower scale, but still
significant as jamming electronic signals of say – we were talking about anti-access area
denial – Larry was before – in air defense system, like in fact we did during the Libya
war. So yes, you’re going to see that grow a lot.

MS. HURLBURT: Larry, I’m really struck about your Eisenhower analogy,
which it think you can extend to this and in the same – in a somewhat similar way to
how, you know, Eisenhower chose not to do rollback, chose to do massive retaliation
instead, and that had consequences that we talked about and tried to figure out how to
work with for decades, that we will look at this period and realize that choices were made
and conclusions were drawn, which leads us into this whole world of cyber and irregular
warfare. That we are only at the beginning from every operational, diplomatic, ethical,
practical, how do you care for the troops that are doing – how do you deal with PTSD for
people who are sitting in a room in front of a screen. But all of that, we’re just at the
beginning of, and that that’s going to – when we’re sitting here like Larry, and musing
back on our time in the early Obama days, we’ll see this as a turning point on those
questions.

MR. BATES: Great. Yes, sir.

Q: Yes, Matt Cary, director, D.C. Office of Veterans Affairs for the mayor. I
think DOD needs to build into their budget present and future costs going to war. And I
don’t care if it’s 3 percent or whatever, but something like that, because this situation
with VA isn’t going to hold out forever. People are going to lose interest in the coming
home issues because of other things. And also, they need to look at the transitioning into
civilian life. The DD214 need to have some kind of an email address on there that’s
current, not a mil one. And the other thing would be mandatory enrollment in the VA
prior to discharge, which the VA can do through executive orders.

MR. KORB: Can I – you make a couple of good points here. One of them is that
when I hear people talking about, you know, after Obama said, well I don’t want to cut
veterans benefits. That’s a different agency. That’s not what we’re talking about, though
the Budget Control Act kind of talked about security spending.
The other thing is, listen, let me tell you. Not only do we not pay for, you know,
pay for the war, or count these costs. Where we really had a moral failure is not
activating selective service, okay. Again, from my own experience and the ones I’ve had,
Ronald Reagan campaigned against draft registration. He claimed when Carter brought it
back it was an empty gesture. So they dumped this on my lap to kind of take it to the
president.

I get into the room with the president. Every one of the libertarians in there
opposed to it, and the budget people, and all. And finally, I’m thinking I’ve got to come
out with something here to get the president’s attention. And finally, I said, look, how
about the moral thing? And he said what do you mean? I said, look; let’s assume we get
into a war, a long war. And we have told the young men and young women in the
service, one year deployed, at least two years at home, and all this kind of stuff? What
happens if we can’t do that? If you have selective service, you will. And I tell you, all of
the military chiefs and particularly, they should have said, look; you want to go to war in
Iraq? Fine, you’re the president. You want to do it. We’re not doing unless you activate
selective service because we already got a big problem in Afghanistan and General
Shinseki told us how much – how many troops were going – let’s activate. Let’s – why
do we have it? When are you going to use it? And so we made it worse for these people
with – not giving them enough time. We had made that – when I was there – if you
spend a year or whatever time in a combat zone, you get least two back home. They
didn’t do it.

You had the surge. Fine, you want to have the surge, get selective service.
That’d get the American people’s attention. And if you talked about selective service
before you went into Iraq, you’d have had more of the senators and congressmen reading
that whole NIE. Do you know they didn’t read it?

How in heaven’s name can you be a public official and not read the whole thing?
And I – obviously I couldn’t, but when I talked to Senator Graham, who was then the
chairman of Senate Intelligence, if you read it, there’s no case for war, okay?

MR. BATES: I was working on the Hill then. I can assure you at least a dozen or
two dozen of the 535 read that. It was – yes, a lot of lessons learned for raising those
issues.