And then an examination of the culture and lives of africanamericans during world war i. There was a real year of conflict when africanamericans came home. They were welcome in their home communities. In terms of reforming how americans thought about race relations, i dont think it did. It didnt have the impact that africanamericans hoped it would. The story of Abigail Scott dunaway, an oregon pioneer and Political Rights activist t. Shes an example of one of the really great diaries. She describes whats happening between the people, she describes troubles that happen. She describes the landscape and the scenery and its clear i mean, you get a pretty good inkling here that shes a pretty good writer. That skill served her well later on in her career. Here, wayne morris from oregon. He was a bit of a curmudgeon. He was a man of high principle and if you didnt have the same level of principles and integrity as he did, he would be vocal about that. He was very critical of other senators. He stood his ground. He couldnt compromise sometimes. So i think at times people were trying to move him adoan long and were frustrated in the end. But he is well known for his integrity. Watch saturday at noon eastern on cspan 2s book tv and sunday at 2 00 on American History tv on cspan3. Working with our cable 568 yats and visiting cities across the country. On sunday, author and journalist matt tie ebi will be our guest. If you grow up looking at thousands of thousands of faces until you see that one face that was put on earth just for you and you fall in love in that moment rges for me, trump was like that except it was the opposite. When i first saw him on the campaign trail, i thought this is a person whos unique, horrible, and amazing, terrible characteristics were put on earth, you know, specifically for me to appreciate or unappreciate or whatever the verb is. Because i had really been spending a lot of the last 10 to 12 years, without knowing it, preparing for donald trump to happen. Hes a contributor Rolling Stone magazine and is author of several books. His most recent book insane clown president diswatches from the 2016 circus during our live threehour conversation well take your questions on mr. Tiabbis literary career live from noon to 3 00 p. M. Eastern sunday. House Armed ServicesCommittee Chair matt thorn bury worked down with michael othan ly lynn. Good morning, everyone and welcome to brookings. Im in the Foreign Policy program. As you know i have the privilege and honor of welcoming back chairman thorn berry to discuss matters of defense, policy and other subjects under the sun. Hes the chairman of the house Armed Services committee, the first texan ever to have that role, in fact, and a texan whose family goes back to ranching in 1881. Probably wonder what hes doing in rainy washington when he could have been back home in the texas springtime. Were both grateful for you all being here today. Were going to get quickly to meters of the Defense Budget, defense spending and where the entire debate may go with the release of the president s budget tomorrow. I thought just to get us energized on a good monday morning if you can please join me in welcoming the chairman to the brookings. Applause i thought i could ask you to summarize your reform bill last week, any couple or three headlines that you wanted to make off that and one additional aspect to my question might be, i remember when you were here talking about your efforts are senator mccain and others on last years acquisition form. A lot of whether what you emphasized is look, if it saves money, thats nice but the biggest goal is to get information quickly. Im struck that youre trying to help the taxpayer with reforms and efficiencies that may save money looking hard at contractors, looking hard at theirs kinds of requirements, Logistics Matters and how we purchase regular supplies. I wonldered if you could explain the latest reform proposal in the context of how you think about acquisition reform. Sure. And maybe ill 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. The budget largely deals with the rebuild, what you spend money on, etc. On the agility side, we face a world with the wayest 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 into the hands of the war fighter in a timely way. We owe them that. A lot of what weve done in the past two years has focused on the big acquisition programs. Planes and carriers and all of that. This years bill focuses, as you mentioned, more on the daytoday sorts of things. So probably the thing that will resonate the easiest with folks is one of the reforms we propose is to allow dod to buy things on commercially online like on amazon business to business. And there are several other competitors like that. So now youve got two choices. You can go off the gsa schedule, which costs more and which Many Companies have decided theyre not going to participate in because of the requirements. You can go through that contracting process, which takes forever and you got to do the bids and all of that sort of stuff. None of which is the definition of agility. So one of the things is to allow dod folks to go buy commercially off the shelf items online on these online portals. We also try to update the audit, the way that companies are audited on the costs they incur. Theres lots of different sorts of audits at dod but this one basic starts bringing in private sector Accounting Firms to do the jobs. 70 of the live cycle costs of programs are on sustainment. Not on buying it at the beginning. Its on everything it takes to keep it operating over its lifetime. Yet we dont really Pay Attention to that. We just fwie cheapest thing that will get the job done. One of the things is youre required to consider containment costings from the getgo. The other, as you mentioned, Service Contracts of all the things that dod contracts for, 53 of it is services, knots weapons and equipment. And yet if you ask dod, what are you spending this money on and lots of other logical questions, they cannot answer it. So this years bill, we try to get our arms around the Service Contracting that dod does with an eye towards making it more efficient and more agile in the future. There are other things, but those are a few. I know a lot of people h may want to come back to this conversation in a little bit. Let me prove on to the Defense Budget. I think weve got slides up showing some of what youve presented and proposed. But even if they dont come up for whatever reason, let me quickly summarize what i think to be the state of your proposal. As we all know President Trump has proposed a quote unquote 54 billion increase in the Defense Budget but thats measured against the sequestration level. So president obamas level is only about a 20 billion increase, which is real money but only a few percent of the Defense Budget overall. And what you are now suggesting is that President Trumps proposal is not enough and you want to add roughly another 37 billion to what he suggested. And i wondered if you could partly because i think our technology is failing here, but lay out a little bit of what the major components of that money would be and we could talk a little about each of them. Le. Again, just allittle bit of context. Last year as House Republicans were putting together an agenda to ruj on, the speaker asked our committee to look at what we think needs to be spent on defense. What would it take to repair the damage that has been done from eight years of crs, five years of the budget control act, a high operational tempo, all of these sl accumulated, so his charge to us was ok, lets figure out what it would take. President trump is elected. He starts talking about a specific size navy, etc. , so what we did was to say how much money would ak polish the goals that President Trump has set forward but could be responsibly spent, we believe, in fiscal year 2008 . And thats where we end up at 640 billion. I think that the budget that the administration will propose is roughly 3 more than what president obama had suggested for this year. Its roughly a 5 increase over current year 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 showed some broad categories. Air dominance, for example, is about 10 billion above what president obama had suggested. That is these are kind of broad labels. Thats not just more airplanes. That includes the maintenance and the operations, the training thats required for us to go against highend adversaries like russia, china, which we have not done so much of in recent years. So thats the reason you see these categories there. Some of it is are bringing our Ground Forces up to date. Some of it is Ballistic Missile defense, if i were to look at this today, looking at whats happened with north korea im not sure weve put enough into missile defense, both increasing the number of interseptemberors in current systems which are woefully short and other research into other kinds of systems that hopefully will be more effective and cost effective. Im not sure we put enough into munitions, by the way. There was a little bit in the bill that just passed. We put some here but we have some significant munitions shortages in various items if you look at it. But thats the reason that there are these categories. Im afraid when we talk about budgets we get into these numbers games and say, oh, this number, that number, throw them around. What we lose sight of is what those numbers mean and which capabilities are we willing to forgo with a different level of budget. I think we have to be concrete about that, because the men and women on the front lines will have their life affected by what were not fixing by the new capability were not getting or whatever choices we make. We need to make it more concrete rather than a, ok, 640, 660, well split the difference. Just to underscore and thank you for putting the slide up. This is the base budget. This does not include war costs, right . Were talking about Nuclear Weapons activities in the department of energy but the 640 billion you would recommend would then have an additional 60 billion in contingence costs. Is that for ballpark yes. I have think most have 65 billion for operating in the oco account. Youre absolutely correct. This is under budget categories the 05 account which includes things thats not all strictly pentagon. This is not trying to change the longstanding practice of putting some base costs in the oco account. Some say what we should try to do is take all those quote unquote war costs in the operations budget, many of which are no base budget related and fry and do proper budgeting and put them back in the base. You dont have enough money to do that, right . It does not accomplish that goal. It does not accomplish that goal. I think thats a worth while conversation to have. What concerns me is if theres just transfers from the oco into the budget and people call it a defense increase, it will not be accurate. Its will not tell you the facts which is youre really havent increased anything at all. Youve just changed the label on the money. I think its a worth while conversation to have, mainly because putting base requirements into oco makes it very difficult to plan and means the money is not spent as officially as it could be and yet we have become very dependent upon that for years to get around the budget control act. The proposal youre offering, as you said, is designed to fund things we know we can actually do reasonably fwhel reasonably short order. Is it also fair to say that this is consistent with the candidate trump vision of roughly a 350ship navy now, dr. Gold fines proposal to get the army back to 540,000 or so active duty soldiers. Are those the four Structure Goals behind this . Yes. I just want to be clear, though, you cannot accomplish those goals in a budget or two. Right. It takes time. General goldstein has told us, for example, it takes 10 years and 10 million are dollars to grow a fighter pilot. The air force today is roughly 1500 pilots short. You cannot snap your fingers and then and open the Training Pipeline up big enough to fix all of those problems. This takes time. And i if i can make one other point on that. Earlier this year we had the vice chiefs who testified about the state of our military. One of the points that general wilson vice chief of the air force made is that air force pilots today are receiving fewer training hours in the cockpit than they did during the whole military of the 1970s. So that was my reaction. So i went back and looked. Ok. We all know about the hollow military of the 70s. Nobody would suggest that we have kwif lent 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 then. What did it take to get out of that . The last year jimmy carters administration was a 15 increase in defense spending. President reagan comes in and has 17 . The next year 18 . The next year a 13 . Then three more years of 10 . Thats what it took 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 have created. By the way, ive noticed that in recent weeks, for example, in an aviation week in Space Technology article last week there was more data about which aircraft have which Mission Capable rates. Do you think we need to get more of that material into the public . I know there are concerns not wanting to tip off adversaries but trying to be specific about the defense needs. How do you think we should handle that . Ive been pushing for more openness. Frankly, ive had some debates with the leadership in the pentagon about this. Because they are concerned about telling our adversaries too much about what our problems are. My focus being more political admittedly than theirs is to get the Political Support we need to have the sort of rebuilding like they did in the 80s, were going to have to be more explicit about that. Now, i will say when you have things like happened last month, you had a fair number of pilots go on strike because they believe the aircraft they were being asked to fly were not safe. It helps wake people up a little bit. I think but weve had a number of classified briefings with my committee and i think the more people know about the facts, the more urgent fixing this problem becomes. Let me bore onin on one other thing, army bringing aid teams. For the last couple of budgets, the army hack saying it wanted to send a third a year to do the full unit three week long exercises and training that are sort of the culmination. One would think that if weve tried to fund that twor two or three years and wed be doing apparently the army is still talking today in the same kind of dire toeps that it was two or three years ago, at least to my ear, about the state of readiness, the lack of proper full unit training and exercising. So whats going on . Is it because of all these continuing resolutions and other problems that imfeed army from carrying out its plans even if it winds up getting close to the amount of money requested . We have been spending 600 Million Dollars a year. Thats not chump change. Why hasnt the army begun to catch up . I think youre right in part of it. We have not been spending money efficient lib and certainly for units to rotate through the National Training center, you have to plan for that and we havent been doing well on this. Most of us have realize that just like were cannibalizing parts off planes, cannibalizing parts off ships, we are cannibalizing army units to make those we send on deployments full. You talk to the commanders about is this. Part of their college is they never had their full units. You have these people coming and going all the dime. So if they have 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 theyve lost a lot of that bet. General millie says the key what hes looking for to increase the number of people in the army is not to increase flush structure. Its to plug the holes so that you can keep units together and units training together is whats required to go against these more sophisticated adversaries. So we i think thats and theres a number of other examples where is our people are so good when you send them off on a mission, they will accomplish that mission. But fundamental you look at the damage thats done to accomplish that mission, whether its mechanics working virtually around the clock, thats why im convinced that the damage is deeper than we understand. Should wuchtd things be thinking about how we do forward deployments differently in some places . Not that its going to solve anything without money but we still have that bringing aid in korea and its generally unaccompanied and its rotated. Its a strain on the army. Could we start considering some of these i think so. We have asked an a study just on cost at least of permanent presence in europe versus rotation. Thats just dollars. What were talking ability is the human toll on families and elsewhere. I think we ought to look at those options