House Armed ServicesCommittee Chair mac thorn perry sat down to talk about military ready did iness and defense spending. Interviewed by the Brookings InstitutionMichael Ohanlon. This is an hour. Good morning, everyone and welcome to brookings. Im Michael Ohanlon in the Foreign Policy program. As you know i have the privilege and honor welcoming back to brookings, congressman mac thornberry, from texas to does defense policy, matters, many subjects up the sun. The chairman of the Armed Services committee. First texan have that role. His family goes back to ranching in the 13th district to 18811. Wonder what he is doing in rain any washington dealing with federal budget when he could be back home dealing with texas springtime. Were grateful for your service. Were grateful for you being here today. It is a momentous time in american Foreign Policy and defense policy well get quickly to matters of the Defense Budget, defense spending where the entire debate may go with tomorrows release of the president s budget. Congress gearing up in the normal hearing season on these subjects. I thought to get energized on a good monday morning, please join me in welcoming the chairman to brookings. [applause] chairman thornberry, before we get to the summit, i ask you to summarize the acquisition reform bill. A couple three headlines to make off that. One additional aspect to my question might be, i remember last year when you were here and elsewhere talking about your efforts with senator mccain and others on last years acquisition reform, a lot of what you emphasized, listen, if it saves money thats nice but the most important thing to get technology to the war fighter quickly and efficiently. I know that remains your driving concern but i was also struck in this bill youre also trying to help the taxpayer with reforms and efficiencies that may save money, looking hard at contractors. Looking hard at various kinds of requirements, logistics matters, how we purchase regular supplies. So i wondered if you could explain the latest reform proposal in the context of how you think about acquisition reform. Sure. Maybe i will start broad with a bit of context as you alluded. I think, as far as congresss responsibilities when it comes to National Defense these days we essentially have two. One is to help rebuild the military and the second is reform to help the military be more agile and innovative. And so, the budget largely deals with the rebuild, what you spend money on, et cetera. On the agility side we face a world with the widest array of complex challenges we have ever faced, and, where a world where technology moves and adversaries can direct investments and capabilities at a much faster pace than they ever have before. All of that requires us to be more agile and thats the reason i think acquisition reform is so important. As you point out, it is about getting the best our country can provide. The hands of the timely way. A lot of that focused on the acquisition program, planes, carriers, if you will. This bill focuses on the daytoday sorts of things. The thing that will resonate the easiest with folks is, one of the reforms we proposed is to al you how dod to buy things on commercially online, like on amazon businesstobusiness. There are several other competitors like that. So now youve got two choices. You can go off the gsa schedule which costs more. In which Many Companies theyre decided theyre not going to participate in because of the requirements. You can go through the contracting process which takes forever and you have to do the bids and all that sort of stuff. None of which is the definition of agility. So one of the things is to allow dod folks to go back to buy commercially offtheshelf items online on these online portals. We also try to update the audit, the way that companies are audited on costs they incur. There are lots of different sorts of audits at dod. This basically brings in private sector Audit Companies to do some of this job. It is happening in other agencies. It ought to be able to happen in dod. Just two more right quick, 70 of the life cycle coasts of programs are on sustainment. Not on buying it at the beginning. It is on everything it takes to keep it operating over its lifetime. Yet we dont really Pay Attention to that. We buy the cheapest thing that we think will get the job done at the beginning. One of the changes is to require you consider sustainment costs from the, from the getgo. Service contracts, dod contracts for, 50 is services. Not weapons and equipment. And yet if you asked dod what are you spending this money on . Summarize one understand in the state of play on your proposal, as we all know President Trump has proposed a quote on quote 50 billion increase in the Defense Budget for 2018 but thats measured against the sequestration level so lets say president obama level is maybe a more reasonable benchmark is your slideshows, its only about a 20 increase which is real money but only a few kinds of the Defense Budget overall. And what you are now suggesting is that President Trumpsproposal is not enough. And you want to add roughly another 37 billion to what he suggested and i wonder if you could partly because i think our technology is failing here but layout a little bit of what the major components of that additional 37 billion would be and we can maybe talk a little bit about each of them again, just a little bit of context. Last year as House Republicans were putting together an agenda to run on the speaker asked our country to look at what we think we need to be spend on defense. What would it take to repair the damage that has been done from eight years of brs, five years of the budget control act, operational tempo, all these things that have inflated so is charged to us was okay, its figure out what it would take. President trump is elected, he starts talking about a specific size, etc. So what we did was to say how much money would accomplish the goals that President Trump has set forward, but could be responsiblyspent , we believe in fiscal year 2018 and thats where we end up at that 640 billion dollars. I think that the budget the administration will propose is roughly 3 percent more than what president obama had suggested this year, its roughly afive percent increase over current your funding. So i think it is fair to say its basically the obama approach with a little bit more but not much. Whats the difference . We tried to lay that out and i think this shows some broad categories. Air dominance for example is about 10 billion above what president obama had projected. These are kind of broad labels, thats not just for airplanes. That includes the maintenance and the operations, the training thats required for us to go against adversaries like russia, china which we have not doneso much of. So thats the reason you see these categories. Some of it are bringing our Ground Forces up to date. Some of it is Ballistic Missile defense and if i were to look at this today looking at whats happened with north korea, im not sure we put enough into missile defense, both increasing the interceptors and current systems which are woefully short and research into other kinds of systems that hopefully will be more effective. Im not sure we put enough into munitions, by the way. It was a little bit in munitions and appropriation bill that just passed. We put some here but we had some significant munitions shortages in various items if you look at it but thats the reason there are these categories. Im afraid when we talk about budgets, we get into these numbers games and say this number, that number, throw them around. What we lose sight of his what those numbers mean and which capabilities are we willing to forgo with a different level of budget . We have to be concrete about that because the men and women on the front lines will have their life affected by what we are not fixing. By the new capability where not getting or whatever choices, we need to make it more concrete rather than a 640, 620, will split the difference and that sort of thing is the way this debate revolves. Tooand thank you for putting the slide up, this is the base base budget. Were talking about the base budget for the department of defense and Nuclear Weapons activities in the department of energy of the 640 billion you would recommend would have an additional 60 billion in overseas Contingency Operation costs. Is that your ballpark . I think all the estimates have roughly 65 billion in operating towards the ocl accounts and we can get into more discussion about that but youre correct. This is the budget categories, the 050 account which includes the nsa and department of energy and other things, this is not trying to change the longstanding practice of putting some base costs in the o5o account. In other words there are people who have been saying what we should try to do is take all those war costs in the overseas Contingency Operations budget, many of which are based budget related and try to do proper budgeting, but back in the space. You dont have enough money to do that, this is not polishing that bowl. It does not accomplishthat goal. That is a worthwhile conversation to have , what concerns me is that if theres just transfers from o. C. O. Into the base budget and people call it a defense increase, it will not be accurate. It will not tell you the facts which is you really have increased anything at all, change the label on the money. I think its worthwhile conversation to have because putting base requirements into o. C. O. Makes it difficult. And means the money is not spent as efficiently as it could be and yet we have become very dependent on that over the years to get around the budget. So the 2018 proposal you are offering as you said is designed to fund things we know we can do reasonably well and reasonably shorter, is it fair to say this is consistent with the candidate trump vision of roughly 350 ship navy now, general goldsteins proposal to increase the size of the air force which candidates also propose, getting the army back to 540,000 or so active soldiers. Are those the Structure Goals behind this . Yes, i want to be clear, you cannot accomplish those goals in a budget or two. It takes time. General goldstein has told us for example it takes 10 years and 10 million to grow a fighter pilot. So air force today is roughly 1500 pilots short, you cannot snap your fingers and open the trainingpipeline big enough. To fix all those problems. This takes time. And if im can make one other point, earlier this year we had the testify about the state of our military, one of the points that general wilson, vice chief of the air force said is air force pilots today are receiving fewer training hours in the cockpit. Then they did during the whole military of the 1970s. So that was my reaction. I went back then and looked, okay. We all know about the hollow military. Nobody was would suggest that we had equivalent problems with people and so forth. But there are a remarkable number of parallels between what we, the damage done today and the damage that was done and what did it take to get out of that. The last year of jimmy carters administration was a 50 percent increase in defense spending, president reagan comes in and has a 17 percent and next year and 18 percent and next year 13 percent. Then three more years of 10 percent. Thats what it took over to overcome the neglect and damage done in the 1970s to our military and i think that sort of context kind of helps us with the size and the duration of what sort of repair work is needed for the problems that we face. I noticed that in the two weeks for example an aviation week and Space Technology article last week there was more data about which aircraft which Mission Capable rates, do you think we need to get more of that data in the public because i know theres a tension between classification concerns, not wanting to tip off adversaries trying to be specific about defense needs, how do you think we should handle that . Ive been pushing for more openness and frankly i have had , debates with the leadership in the pentagon about this. Because they are concerned about telling our adversaries you much about what our problems are. I focus being more political admittedly then theres this is to get the Political Support we need to have a sort of rebuilding that they did in the 80s. Were going to have to be more explicit about this. I will say when you have in life happens last month, you have a fair number of pilots go on strike. Because they believe the aircraft they were being asked to fly work safe. It does help wakepeople up. I think , we had a number of classified briefings with my committee and i think the more people know about the facts, the more urgent fixing the problem is. Let me bore in on one more example about readiness. As the argument gave combat teams and the last two or three budgets, the rte has been saying it wants to spend roughly a third of its brigade combat teams per year to the National Training center and dutiful unit three week long exercises and training that are sort of the culmination and one would think that if we then funding that for two or three years, and were doing one third of the brigades per year wed be starting to catch up and apparently were not. Apparently the army is still talking today in the same kind of dire tones that it was two or three years ago, at least in my ear about the state of readiness, lack of proper full unit training and exercising. So whats going on, is it because of all these healing resolutions and other problems that impede the army from, from carrying out his plans even if it winds up getting close to the amount of money requested . We have been spending 36 million on the military, thats not chump change so why hasnt the army been able to catch up . I think youre right for part of it. We have not been spending money efficiently and certainly for units to rotate through the National Training, they got a plan for it so we havent been doing that. Ill tell you again, part of the reason i believe the readiness problem are deeper than most of us have realized is just like we are cannibalizing parts off of planes, and other planes flying, cannibalizing partnerships, to keep other ships, we are cannibalizing our units. In order to make those that we are sending on deployments full. And so you talk to the commanders about this and product part of their challenge is they never have their full units. You have these people going all the time and so if they had a chance to go to the National Training center, they come back a bunch of their people are taken away and plugged into other units and so they lost a lot of that benefit. Nelly says the key, what hes looking for to increase the number of people in the army is. Increase structure, its to plug the holes. That you can put units together and units training together is whats required to go against these more sophisticated adversaries so i think thats, there are a number of other examples where our forces are so good when you send them off on a mission, they will accomplish that but if you look at the cost, the damage done to accomplish that mission whether its mechanics working virtually aroundtheclock for the cannibalization , thats part of the reason i convinced. Should one more part of the readiness to be there for maybe be thinking about how we do forward deployments differently in some cases, not that its going to solve it by itself without money but were going to pull in now, you still have that brigade in korea that generally unaccompanied and rotated so its a strain on the army. Should we start considering some of these deployments to be permanent presence for families, allow one unit to do one units job instead of the 31 requirements, things like that . I think so. We have asked for a study just on costs of permanent presence in air force rotation. Thats just dollars. What were talking about is the human bowl on families and elsewhere and i think we ought to look at those options. Part of the reason we ought to look at them is to show our commitment to allies. The part of it is a strain on the force and then we need to evaluate. I dont know what the cost data will evoke. Im not convinced that it is tremendously cheaper to rotate a bunch of units through rather than have that permanent residence. This is 640 billion , the war cost which is a lot of money in one sense but its only about 3. 5 percent of gdp, is that right . I think that the ballpark, its well below four percent still and i think one of the most revealing charts one can see is the percentage of gdp over time that we have spent on defense and what you see is the reagan is just plummeting. My last question and we will open things up. Of course, this is the inevitable question because everything sounds so reasonable while talking about it in defense terms but theres a question of how we pay for it and were seeing increasing discussion about president ial wants to at the state Department Foreign assistance, on domestic issues that are going to be controversial and a lot of people are saying the president s budget is doa on capitol hill even among republicans cause of some of these cuts. Im not suggesting that you want to get into this in every nittygritty detail but i do wonder if theres certain principles that you would at least counsel us to bear in mind as we think about how to pay for these Defense Budget increases. Id say principle number one is the first job of the government is to defend the country. And so the first dollar would we received from taxpayers ought to go to that purpose. X and then Everything Else is secondary. So i guess thats the principle where we ought to start. Focusing more on the budget, weve got to just keep in context two thirds of the federal budget are entitlement or mandatory spending platforms, we are now for defense were at 14. 7 p