Now, a discussion with democratic congressman adam smith on the issue of foreign aid and National Security. Representative smith is the top democrat on the House Armed Services committee and the guest speaker at this hourlong event hosted by the u. S. Institute of peace in washington, dc. Good morning, im jim marshall their president of the United States institute of peace, and i want to welcome our guests. Let me briefly tell you what the United States institute of peace does. Essentially we stop fights. We do that globally. All of you are familiar with stopping fights. Youve probably done it yourselves. The techniques we have to use globally are very different than trying to keep friends from getting into a fight in a fraternity or Sorority House and what we do is terribly important to the country and to the United States success in temperature fer furthering its strategic globally. Our batting average is. 500 but when we get a hit, its big deal. Having mentioned batting average is have to first say that adam and i have been teammates for years, not only were we members of congress together, both democrats, both on the Armed Services committee, and also on the democratic baseball team, and i will say that adam batted 1,000 in this years game. He went 22, and one walk so he was on base all three times. Played center field, no errors. Thats because we have a great pitcher right now. And they couldnt get it out of the infield. And so maybe one had been hit to adam. He would have caught and it thrown out whoever needed to be thrown out. A really good baseball player. And he is a great member of congress. Ive known him for a number of years. In fact describe congress often as being kind of like a high school. A lot of different abilities and different interests and different folks. Like lake wobegon high school, everyone is above average. But adam is extraordinarily thoughtful and among other things, he takes notes. So, you see, he has a tablet with him. I dont expect him to be taking notes during the event but he takes notes all the time. He is writing what is going on with the intention hell probably write a book, and im going to read that book. This is a thoughtful guy who had quite an interesting perch as a member of congress, and then he has been taking notes. So he will have an awful lot of interesting things to say about his experiences in congress. And i am just hopeful he doesnt cover the really stupid things i did or said while i was member of congress. And with that, i want to introduce congressman adam smith, the Ranking Member on the Armed Services committee and a good friend to me and a good friend to the institute. Adam. [applause] thank you very much. Its great to be here at the United States institute of peace. The mission that jim and all of you do here is incredibly important. I got the opportunity to meet with jim and one of his colleagues yesterday and hear about the work. It is incredibly important, and i appreciate that work and im honored to have the opportunity to speak to you today, and take your questions and learn more about the subject, which is how Development Diplomacy and defense need to Work Together in u. S. Policy to create greater stability throughout the world. I do appreciate having played baseball with jim all those years and like my first 12 years there we always lost, because well, the republicans were better. Then sedrick richmond, who i didnt even know, got elected in louisiana, and he is young and can throw over 80milesanhour. Which doesnt happen very often in baseball. So now we win. 220 this time matter of fact. [applause] so, actually, i came at this issue from a variety of different angles, and number one ive been on the Armed Services committee for 17 years, and then i chaired the terrorism subcommittee, which had jurisdiction over special Operations Command so i got travel around the world to a variety of different conflicts, obviously, iraq and afghanistan, but many places in africa and the philippines and others, sort of see what our department of defense is doing to try to keep the peace, try to move forward with stability. At the same time, in the state of washington, we have an incredible presence of Development Agencies. The Gates Foundation being the most obvious. But path and a variety of others are out there as well, and they sort of pulled me in and i start ed doing traveling to see what was going on in latin america as well. And what struck me was the intersection of the two. The more time i spent with our special operations guys, the more they told me, we need to fund development. We need to fund that to get stability. That it is far, far easier to build a society that has opportunity so that you dont get to conflict, than it is to have to bring in 100,000 u. S. Troops to try to restore stability. The two go hand in hand and have to Work Together, and i think we ref learned that lesson. You heard sect gates in the years before he left talking about how important the state department was and, and that it is not enough to fund the department of defense if you underfund the state department. They have to Work Together to achieve stability. I believe the lessons have been learned. Now we just need to implement the policies that reflect that there are still many challenges to fully funding and fully supporting the development and diplomacy average arm of this. The department of defenses budget is enormous compared to what we spend on diplomatics and diplomacy and development. And we could use a shift in that. And then theres the trust issue as well. The relationships are improving but there is still a general feeling, i think, amongst many in the department of defense, that ante diplomacy and Development Side they dont understand why security is important and on the Development Side they feel like the military shows up and undermines our mission. Were doing better. One of the most encouraging things i have seen is usaid, doing a fabulous job. He is meeting regularly with the head of the special Operations Command, to figure out how they can Work Together to actually use the best of all three elements of our Foreign Policy, defense, diplomacy, and development, in order to build and go furled. You look go forward. You look at iraq and the amount of money we spent and the amount of troops, the amount of lives we lost, going in there in what was particularly initially a military dominated operation. We were not prepared for what came after the fall of saddam hussein. The Defense Department to some extent tried to take over, and in an area where they didnt really have the expertise, but we had underfunded the state department where that expertise was supposed to reside so that it was very, very difficult. That was enormously costly. And actually one of the most interesting trips i took while i was on the Armed Services committee was a trip to the philippines, where we had not problems as large as iraq and afghanistan to be sure, but they had various terrorist groups in various insurgencies there, and were special there. Special Operations Command there is, and so us usaid, and our troops there have not fired a shot or been involved in conflict. What theyve done is trained the local Security Forces and how to provide adequate security, and theyve worked with the usaid and other Development Agencies to build schools and drill wells and correct the atmosphere where people dont want to be part of an insurgency. I think one of the greatest misunderstandings or misstatements ive heard in a long time, its become popular to say that poverty has nothing to do with instability and terrorism, and people make that argument bass they look at people like Osama Bin Laden and others who say these people are middle class or way above middle class. Its the intellectuals who tend to start terrorist movements and thats up questionably true. Incredibly throughout the world we have seemingly Endless Supply of people who are convinced they have the one true philosophy that will save us all and feel it is there obligation to jam it down our throat. Those philosophies well always come up. The question is do they find people who will follow them . Are they just some crockpot on a corner spouting off ideas, or too they build a movement that begins to cause damage, and that happens when you have people who dont have a feeling of opportunity. Of freedom. When you look across the world, where al qaeda is recruiting, you look at a world of dysfunctional government, lack of opportunity, lack of jobs, lack of freedom. We have to put in place those broader Building Blocks of a just society in order to stop terrorists. I have no illusions here. Even if we do that, there will still be challenges and still be a need for the military. There will still be people who rise up against that. But it will be a much more manageable problem if we properly implement the development and diplomacy legs of this stool in order to build a more secure world. And i think that is what we need to do and where we need to go. I think things are getting better. I am the cochair of the caucus for effective foreign assistance with andrew crenshaw, and i look at the lessons we learned and how we implement policy, and it is getting better. We are understanding that its not really Effective Development to simply spend u. S. Money to hire a bunch of u. S. Contractors to go into a country and build a bunch of stuff they then leave. Its got to be bottomup. The Millennium Challenge Corporation was a really inspired idea. The notion of working with a country for them to develop their own Development Policy and implement it through their governing structure with our help. Instead of a topdown approach, a bottomup approach. We have made some improvements. The other Big Development in this area is the private sector. Again, the Gates Foundation is the largest element of this. Like 35, 40 billion, some unbelievable amount of money. You have son a ton of other groups rise up to get involved in developing policy, and i think they have taken an approach that has helped spur the government side of it to greater efficiency and effectiveness. Theres a bill introduced last congress, this congress, to measure outcomes of foreign assistance, whats working, what is not, so we can begin to get a betteryard what we should fund and where we should direct our dollars if this is going to work properly. So youre moving in that direction. I still think there are some improvements that need to be made. My biggest argument in u. S. Development policy is that we need to elevate the importance of usaid, and concentrate the money. Right now theres Something Like 35 different pots of Development Money run by a whole bunch of different agencies. If shaw wants to Impact Development he has only a tiny little sliver of that money in order to do it. And i always hold out as the model the department for International Development in great britain. What theyve done is concentrated they have lifted to a cabinet level department. Does not report to anyone. And they concentrated the money so if you are in charge of Development Policy you are actually in charge of Development Policy. You control the money and where i goes and where in the program goes and if it is universally recognized as the most effective government Development Policy out there. Would like to see us move the u. S. More in that direction, to elevate the importance of usaid, so begin to consolidate those programs. The problem with that, of course, is everybody has their own program and in the u. S. , we tend to like to basically protect our own program, and particularly in a era when budgets are being cut and challenged, theres a tendency to narrow focus and say i care about education for women in africa so im going to make sure theres a line item for this program and we have to spend a certain 5789 of money. But in doing that you tie the hands of those in charge of Development Policy and make it more difficult for though make the type of decisions that are necessary. Another example is we made an effort to reform the food for Peace Program. The food for Peace Program is an excellent program. A great idea. U. S. Agriculture and u. S. Shipped, taking food to places in the the world that need it. The problem is we have written into law the requirement that 85 of our food aid has to go through that program. And there are times when it makes more sense to simply buy the food, closer to the source of the problem, and get it to the people who need it then. It is a more costly, more expensive, and more time consuming program to go through the food for Peace Program, and you need a balance. So, the state department has proposed closing that gap to say that didnt mandate 55 of it go to food for peace. The problem is a lot of this money gets spend on u. S. Interests. Agriculture and u. S. Maritime. I cant blame them but its a block to our ability to have the necessaryibility to be as efficient as we need to do. If had one overarching goal, it is to bring defense, diplomacy, and development closer together, particularly defense and development. The military spends a lot of its open money on development programs. They do health care in some case, afghanistan and elsewhere, they have built schools and drilled wells weapon need to build a Greater Partnership there and make sure the people with the right expertise are degree right jobs and at the same time the people on the Development Side need to understand how important security is. Yes, there are lot of places in the world that when the u. S. Military shows up, it can undermine the confidence of the local population. But if you dont have security as a starting point, you dont have development. And we have certainly seen that in iraq and afghanistan, where you have seen people pull out Development Projects because it has not been safe. So you need to work with the military to make sure you have a secure environment to do the good work you need to do. That partnership needs to be strengthened. I think there are steps being taken by people at dod and usaid to strengthen the partnership but weed in to look for every opportunity to make that as strong as possible in order to have the proper National Security posture in order to bring greater stability to the world. At the end of the day if you had to sum up the goal of u. S. Foreign policy and defense policy, it is stability and security, then the steps to get there, and economic opportunity, diplomacy, all of that is credit dollar security and stability. We have the elements within the u. S. Government to do that policy. We need to make sure theyre working as well as they possibly can together. So, thank you for the opportunity to at least outline those ideas and i look forward to your questions, comments. And answers are also welcome. So, i look forward to questioned. Thank you. [applause] those who had questions, maybe you can lined line up behind the mics. That will make it easier for us to actually get you heard on the television cameras, and let me start in this is not so much a way as an observation. The National Intelligence committees 2030 report estimates that by 2030, half the worlds population will be middle class. That means that the other half of the worlds population is going to be mostly still quite poor. Are we heading in the right direction and what do you think the effect of this trend, which is more and more people climbing out of port poverty and middle class will have on questions of violence robbed the world around the world. It will improve the situation. The more economic opportunity, the better off, about is a stark reminder how many are still left behind. And i think it is a great challenge to make sure you pull as many people up as possible. Were not going to eliminate poverty. Not going to eliminate people who struggle. But we can certainly reduce the numbers, and there have been a number of places that have made progress in that area. You can see the difference. I guess if you had a broadly scattered middle class so that the entire globe is essentially covered, then you have individuals who really invested in not having violence possible up, and so they can work with those individuals who are feeling disenfranchised, feeling as if they have no opportunity, lack freedom, that sort of thing, in their communities, which lessens the task we have globally trying to keep peace. Thats a great way to put it. They are invested in stability. Look, there are number of people who are ideological, going to be violent. But most people who get forced into that. When you read the stories about countries that have fall apart, like lebanon. These people just want to get through the day, feed their family, have a decent life and, if you give them that, they wont consider violence for a second. So thats the direction we need g