Weve got one minute to kill. Ok. By the way, i am going to ask you to start. I go to you first. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another panel. Iscussion this is dissecting the pentagon strategic choices and management review. I am marvin calvin. I am a Senior Advisor to the center for crisis reporting which is located just next door. August 2011 which is only two years ago Congress Passed and the president signed into law a legislative monstrosity called the budget control act. It was a way of doing something when nothing seemed worse. At least at that time. A joint committee was set up to control the spiraling deficit. That if were warned they fail to come up with a solution sequestration would automatically although. These cuts have now begun. Was already prepared to cut 150 billion dollars over the next 10 years. 500stration would require billion in cuts over the next 10 years. Warnedek check hagel that cut of that magnitude would not only affect entitlement such as salary, likeng, education and the but it would since readiness and capability. Itthe u. S. Had been ready is necessary to fight two wars at the same time with these cuts. That would no longer seem to be possible. What to do . Effectiveked highly budgetary experts to explain reality and options to us. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise institutes and if i got this right, during the last president ial campaign she helped governor romney. s loss should in no way be extract to mckinsey. The other is a senior fellow here. Recently our panelists call off third and oped urging congress to reverse sequestration. Why dont we start with you. Then we will go on to mike and i will ask you a questions and we will finish at 11 30. Thank you for moderating. It is a pleasure to be here. Thats only do we recently author the oped in the wall street journal about some of , we met with secretary hagel at a meeting last week. We talked about some of what was discussed during that conversation. I think you have set the ground very well. Sequesters not the starting point. So much in washington feels like we are always starting at square one. This is the fourth year of budget cuts. The job done has been well under way. There were a series of capabilities ever since. There has almost been roughly one dollar wintry dollars taken out of this. They are constantly banging the drum. That is why you hear them talk endlessly about how damaging sequestration is. This is not the first dollar of defense cuts nor is it the first capability or capacity that is being unwound. A lot of the things we will talk about our overdue. So many of the choices that the pentagon had recently laid out, i think that should have been under consideration for years ago. Not to say that a lot of the were not of value or utility. This is not their first efficiency journal. There were a lot of things done rightly and wrongly. Im not sure the Lessons Learned have plugged in. What we have now is the Defense Department and congress that continues to have to go back to the same money and priorities for dod every year. Were doing this on an annual basis. We are are doing it piecemeal. It is chipping away at the cuts as opposed to big richer strategic planning, inking about this. We really do have to live with this. How do we handle this for 10 years . 2013. What we saw in were going to start to talk about serious change in planning. Pick it up. By the way, mckinsey cannot be lamed by governor romneys loss. Has them polite enough has been polite net polite enough to not remind us that she is from georgia. This has been very well framed. Some of the additional budget cuts that are now being considered i think are ok. Not have the exact same view. I do not want to suggest that everything i say she would endorse. We think there are room for efficiencies. Some of them are that you can congres accomplish then. They are worth doing. In the briefing that we heard last week from secretary hagel and his team, which develop some of the ideas that were also expressed by deputy secretary carter. We saw an estimate that perhaps 40 billion could be saved over 10 years for new efficiencies. That is on top of the other efficiencies that were already identified as part of other budget cuts reviews. It is worth pointing out, and congress is not yet authorized many of those previous efficiency. We are even deeper in the hole than we thought. We are not going to have to persuade congress to change their minds or find other ways to save comparable amount of money. These are authorized. Some of these efficiencies could save somewhere around 40 billion over 10 years. Every time he asked the pentagon to try harder and go deeper they will probably find another 5 billion or 10 billion there. On balance theres never going cuts. Be and and all cuts. The end of all 40 billion. Lets say we can do that. Then there is another examination of possible savings which we wrote about in this wall street journal oped 10 days ago. They have to do with things like reductions in certain elements of military compensation or reductions. Easy. Are not they are not inherently desirable. [cell phone ringing] cut the that we should compensation is not proper phrasing. We would like to make sure that every possible benefit that can be proposed that the received. Certainly wounded warriors. Certainly the families of deployed soldiers. Certainly troops trying to get a g. I. Bill so they can transition to the or. People deserve compensation that is not tendered or compensate hindered or compromise. An example would be the prevalence of commissaries. S andhave plenty of walmart others. They are not trivially easy. They are cutting back on the compensation or at least the rate of growth of compensation for our volunteer force that has done so much on behalf of all the rest of us over the last 12 years and before. ,ou add up all of those savings which are more or less along the lines of what i would agree with an similar to the ideas that we had in our op ed, that is another 85 billion in savings. If you add those, we are up to about 105 billion in additional 10year savings. The good news it is almost the amount the president is proposing to save over his tenure latest budget plan. We do not have to make a lot of cuts into military muscle. There is room for some cutting. Upmy recent book, i wound advocating about 200 billion in 10 year savings. I was prepared to recommend certain specific weapons programs. We all are going to have different takes on what the right number of Army Divisions over grades or joint fighters we should purchase. My take was that in addition to this hundred and 20 or so maybe another 75 or 100 billion from cutting muscle. The pentagon seems to have arrived in a different place, in a similar place. Then i had to keep going. This is not a criticism. Our skimmerreview or skimmer it is called by people who do not like having again from the pentagon budget. The idea here is that were going to have to look for ways to save this 500 billion dollars. Sequestration is currently the law of the land. Above and beyond the kinds of changes i have artie mentioned, then some modest tweaks to capability. They did a couple of things i really do not like. I do not sure im not sure the authors like it either. To downsize the u. S. Army quite a bit more than is artie being planned. And the way for other discussion topics. Let me give you a sense of what is being considered. The u. S. Army right now is just over half a million activeduty soldiers. It has grown up to about 560,000 during the peak of the iraq and afghanistan wars. We also mobilize a national guardsman. All of these numbers are quite modest compared to the 1980s, the cold war. They had 800,000 were says. U. S. Ve had a much larger army totals during korea, vietnam, world war ii. Being down was a girl from the clinton years and from secretary rumsfelds early thinking. It was not huge. It did not reverse because of the end of the cold war. Now we are planning to go down to basically where they had been. The skimmer is envisioning reductions of maybe 420,000 are rher. I think this is a bad idea. Problem i have with the want. Stration as they not want to do these counterinsurgency missions. This is the largest sentiment we had after vietnam for sentimental reasons. Tot sentiment when taken excess leads you unprepared. You might have to do a counterinsurgency whether you like it or not. There is the old saying that you may not have interest in war but it may have an interest in you. We may not have an interest anymore and counterinsurgency but what cap ends when not just but it begsmired even lebanon and jordan. The onlyened when atential way out may see trustee. I could go on with hypothetical examples. They are going to sound a little crazy. They are going to as crazy in 2000 if i had mentioned afghanistan as the source of the 9 11 attack. You cannot always anticipate where war has sprung up. We have a lot more to discuss. The kind of cuts to the u. S. Army at least being considered within the skimmer process i think are highly imprudent and leave us catching on to the latest fad in warfare. That we canretend decide in washington that we will never do it can. We made that kind of mistake before as a country. Thank you very much. Let me ask all of you a quick question. Do you think by the end of this Year Congress will have acted on sequestration specifically for the military . They would have acted separately in each chamber. There will not be any change to the law. We can realistically look forward to the implementation of sequestration. I fear she may be right. If you look at the 2014 budget, the cuts that would be required by sequestration are so harsh for that year and there is no way to facing realistically, it is even a worse debacle then sequestration over the 10year horizon. It dwarfs even what we going through this summer. If compounds what we are going through this summer when almost all the almost half the airports and we are not fixing the stuff we need to i think ve ifess may ultimately sa say 52 billion need to be softened. They do not do anything that is fundamentally changing the basic logic of sequestration. Just becauseble the specter of sequestration next year so horrible for the armed forces. If that be the case, were working with the reality of very massive cuts. You have given us a hint about the practical effect. To fulfilly exist the desires and the strategic aims of the country. As i mentioned earlier, we have lived in this country for a long time with the belief that we will fight two wars at the same time. I assume he mean the rack and afghanistan. And afghanistan. That did not take into account that there could be an outbreak of hostility in korea which would involve the United States momentarily. If we look at the strategy now and we look at the amount of money that is going to be available to be spent, what do you think will be the of that on the strategy itself . What would you recommend to the president . What would you recommend that he begin to consider as a change in the strategic aims of the u. S. To conform to the economic reality . I would not want to advocate that. M artie disappointed that they have officially moved on from the outstanding contract. This has been i am already disappointed that they have officially moved on from the outstanding contract. Our planning are formally changing quietly to move away from the to wawo war simultaneos capability. Where are we going now . The department is sticking by its guidance. The guidance last january. Because the rebound to asia. An increasingy emphasis on asia and to hold this in the middle east. At the expense of capability in other regions of the world. The military is shrinking. We do not have a choice. Have a single ship in southern command. You cannot say it is not eurozone. It is a relatively sound strategy. The independent panel called for qdr independent panel in 2010 which was a stress test for obamas first. Efense strategy some argue the Bush Administration started this. It is not zerosum. I do not see any scenario where the congress could continue. What you are saying is that economically we will not be able to do that . Their artie moving away from that in realistic time. The previous position is to not break the strategy. We also heard this reiterated at the pentagon last week. Move it as were to is. A quarter trillion in defense of budget cuts proposal by senator patty murray, larger than the president in his latest budget process. The would have been strategy. The full sequester would have stopped it. Based on the double and triple whammy hold, we are not just talking sequester dollars anymore. We are talking about readiness own tab. T is also its it is under which a talk about later. All of this combined me that any scenario is that a minimum bending strategy. One. Nk it is a sound i do not know how you can keep it. You have written that you go from two wars at the same time concept to one war plus two. I assume you mean smaller engagements. Could you spell us out that out for us . I think it is good you are focusing on the strategic choices as we think about different levels. Otherwise it seems like just moving around. There is room for debate even within the budget. It is not as if all wars came in the same cookiecutter shape. The basic logic is that we thought we would have to fight iraq and north korea at the same time. It turned out to be a rock and afghanistan. You can debate whether you had to do both but we did do both. Our military was too small. We were a little bit off in our calculations. That is why secretary gates ultimately had to increase the size of the army and marine corps. In the 2010 ledger numeral 2010 defensew review, they solved it to have it be definitive immediately. This is a 20 year old, if not more. Whether there is room for the second one to be a little more gradual and a little less definitive. In 2010 president obama started to move a little bit away from that robust rhetorical emphasis. Saddam hussein was gone. Even though iraq is still very turbulent it is much more likely to be in overland invasion fed to it measures. Iran is still there. It is also relatively unlikely to be an invasion threat. It could eat a lot of other threats to the invasion. That was 2010. In 2012 this guidance we are referring to, the january guidance softened a little further and talked about the second war not needing to be thought of as an all out war at all. There is still the notion that ay have to punish an aggressor. There is some semantics here. It is like playing with reality. A little bit. I would support the logic to that point. We did have to shift more of our with chinads our war and also toward iran. These are both unlikely to be classic big land wars. They could be more maritime or a tear, cyber, special oriented complex. I think was ok. Seeing with thesayin sequestration specter is the possibility of going down to Something Like one war and nothing else. Maybe you can still do korea, maybe. This is often not how the world works. We all know that our good friend mark just let things to try to this. Ate in the unlikely event that he succeeds that could be an International Implementation force backstopped by american troops to make that successful. They hit one of our embassies one place and know me call a truce and go back to life as normal. That is pretty and then me call a truce and then we go back to normal. That is pretty optimistic. There are a number of scenarios. That is why i talk about one plus two. You should be able to do one all out war and to simultaneous smaller missions. Hopefully their multilateral. They could be longlasting. That is where i come up with an 420. That should be around rldwhat is the part of the wor that the United States military must be focused on more than any other . It is the moment middle east. Strategically, the Defense Department has to do both. They have to think about the world as it is in this very moment and reality. What is happening . Breaking out in crises everywhere. 20n think of buying 10 or years. They need to do both. Presumably they are. They are. If you look at the example the budget request from last year, the immediate concern is the middle east. I think that is exactly right. That means what . Break that down. Mike spoke about iran. One could think about syria. Want to think about the huge problem in egypt. There is everything going on in north africa. What the middle east mean to us now . What it means to us is probably debatable. You military experts. Let me say quickly for dod. Ight now it is iran looking at the capabilities that might be required to deter flict breaking out or miscalculating in International Waters or prevailing in some type of military efforts, whether we are supporting someone else are undertaking our own. There are many other things happening. To a special forces and counterterrorism missions. That is certainly not what we are limited to. There is ongoing planning. , that is anw example. Im trying to get at this. I have a feeling we are talking theory, not necessarily reality. Think about it. You have both spoken of iran. If the United States in the next year or three decide that and must take on iran and the Nuclear Program and korea the mteof at is not small operation. Korea is bigtime. We arty have troops in south korea. Theidea of one plus two, two,of whittling down sounds to me as if it is not related to reality. United states has to be in a position whether it is 1 plus two of taking on any combination of military challenges. Can the United States do that realistically and might of what is happening in the American Economy . In light of what is happening in american politics. In light of the fact of sequestration. Being having strategy determined by people up on the hill who may not have a clue as to what strategy is all about. Is that right . You are framing these very starkly. It is our National Security after all. We have to get away from a theoretical discussion. I threw around numbers. If you ask me why we have to be able to do to smaller missions at the same time, i would say typically because that is the area we are doing. The expectation is that we will keep 10 or 15,000 u. S. Troops there for a number of years. Middle east peace is president obama possible. I do not know what kind of force may stop it. Probably one or two brigades. Againstability of war iran is probably in the 30 range. Hopefully not 50 . If we do wind up in that kind of a strike we should remember we do not always get to decide when wars and. You may get to decide when you start them. You usually do not get to decide when they are over. Having to show up on the persian area is a pretty plausible notion. When he