 Thanks. Well, normally I never speak from a prepared text. And this time, because it was a keynote, I prepared the text. And I'm going to try to stick to it. But what that means is I don't know how long I'm going to be speaking, which also means I don't know how much time you all have for questions, which is a lot more important than any speech I could give. But I'll try. I think I have about an hour. What I want to talk about today is essentially the theme of the next panel, the challenges of the 21st century. And for old guys like me, it's amazing how far into this century we already are. Time seems to fly the older you get. And this century began with a war that still hasn't ended. But the circumstances that surrounded the commencement of the war in Afghanistan are really quite different today. The government that we wanted to displace is long gone. But its key support is far from destroyed. The Taliban continues to operate both inside Afghanistan and from safe havens in Pakistan's tribal areas. It's been joined by other groups, like the Haqqani network. Al Qaeda, whose act of mass destruction triggered our war in Afghanistan, is really now a minor player in that country. But its offshoots are spread far and wide, from Yemen to Syria, from the Horn of Africa to the Sahel and Mali, something that we didn't anticipate on 9-11. Our most crucial ally in those early days when I was serving in the Pentagon was Pakistan. It's now become a major question mark for American policymakers. Is it still part of the solution? Or with its own homegrown Taliban and its on and off support for the insurgency in Afghanistan? Is it now part of our foreign policy problem in Central Asia? Russia sprang to the support of the United States in the days that followed 9-11. Today, it's re-emerging as a major rival to American influence in the Middle East. Having re-established itself as a critical actor in the Syrian Civil War, just pick up today's newspaper and you'll see how the summit between our president and Mr. Putin has not gone exactly swimmingly. Like Russia, Iran was prepared to cooperate with us in the removal of the Taliban and the reconstruction of Afghanistan. And in fact, in Russia's case, Moscow agreed after some hard negotiations but still agreed to forgive all $8 billion of Afghan debt. We chose not to work with Tehran. 12 years later, Iran has now crossed a whole bunch of red lines that were set either by us or by Israel or by the West generally. And it may soon be close to the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons capability that threatens to destabilize the entire Middle East. China, which we faced down during the Taiwan crisis, Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996 and which barely avoided a clash with us during the April 2001 Hainan Island EP-3 incident, pretty much stood on the sidelines in the aftermath of 9-11. Today, flexing its military muscles and supportive claims in the East and South China Seas, deploying its navy to support anti-piracy operations and learning quite a bit from those operations, it's continued to a massive force whose anti-access area denial strategy poses a far greater challenge to the United States than ever before. When the United States attacked Afghanistan, the Arab world had seen little change in the previous quarter century. The traditional monarchies continued to amass money to buy arms that they didn't really use, while the secular kingdoms continued to be ruled by the same dictatorial kleptocratic families, many of which had seized power in the 1960s and 1970s. A dozen years later, the Arab Spring had removed the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. The United States had fought an eight-year war in Iraq. They resulted in the replacement of the Sunni strongman, Saddam Hussein, with a Shia strongman named Nuri al-Maliki. And NATO, backed by the United States, had toppled Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, who had previously reached an agreement with us and with the West to dismantle his nuclear program. In the past decade, Turkey's been the most stable Muslim state in the Middle East, as of last week. That's no longer the case. In fact, it's ironic in a way that while Iran held elections after which people literally danced in the street, Turkey's streets are bloodied by clashes between liberal protesters and pro-government police, as well as independent thugs. When the Twin Towers were hit in September 2001, the United States appeared to be at the apogee of its power, economically as well as militarily. The previous year, the federal budget had been in surplus. The national debt was being reduced. The stock market was soaring and the dot-com bubble had only just begun to burst. Today, we continue to struggle toward recovery after the Great Recession of 2007-2008. It's only begun to bring what for a time were runaway budget deficits under some degree of control. But that control has come with a steep price tag, the sequester that no one believed would come to pass and now promises to remain part of the budgetary landscape for perhaps another year, if not longer. And full disclosure, I was absolutely convinced that there would be no sequester. Now, hopefully, I'll be wrong again. Even without a sequester, the Defense Department anticipates a fourth round of budget cuts. And these are in addition to the Gates cuts to 2011 Budget Reduction Act and the sequester itself. So any further cuts are a fourth round. As a result, and with the exception of the personnel accounts and defense health accounts, which have been protected from any reductions, operations, procurement and research and development have all suffered and are likely to continue to do so. Now, you may ask me, well, wait a minute. All that we know officially is that the Milpers accounts are protected. That's true, but defense health is part of O&M, operations and maintenance. And nobody's touching that. And if you don't touch that, you've got to cut other operations and maintenance expenditures, which means exercises, training, and all the kinds of things we do to be a credible ally and a credible threat to those who aren't our friends. And in fact, America's credibility is an ally. Tarnished not only by the cold shoulder it turned toward erstwhile allies like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Pakistan's Pervez Mesharaf, but also by its Iraqi adventure, stands to be further undermined if it continues to cut back on operations as a result of the sequester or indeed any further cuts. Moreover, our country is increasingly looking inward. Marine Americans of both parties have taken President Obama at his word that nation building begins at home. Likewise, the opposition to increases in defense and foreign assistance spending has become increasingly bipartisan. The only constant since the turn of the century has been North Korea. The latest Kim, young Kim Jong-un, is no different from grandpa or papa. North Korea remains as isolated from the world community as ever and as hostile to the West and the United States in particular as it's been for more than a half century. That kind of consistency we could do without. So let's take a step back in light of this and review our predictive capabilities. Few of any American analysts predicted that the United States would go to war in Afghanistan. Few are still anticipated that the Afghan war would drag on to become America's longest or that the simultaneous war in Iraq, once hailed as a slam dunk, would consume the better part of a decade. Then again, with the possible exception of the Iraq war, which was initiated by the United States, few of any of America's wars were foreseen well before they began. Clearly, in a mere dozen years, the world has fundamentally changed. The threats to stability have changed. As I mentioned, only North Korea, though it's now under new management as it were, has retained the hostile posture that was formulated by Kim Il-sung in the late 1940s. Predictions about what the world might look like a dozen year hence, much less about the next war in which the United States might find itself, are therefore exceedingly hazardous and likely to be wrong. A dozen years before the Berlin Wall fell, no one predicted that it would or that the Soviet Union would collapse in its wake. And in the late 1980s, as I mentioned, no one had heard of the Taliban while Saddam Hussein had been actually an ally of ours in the Iran-Iraq war. No one anticipated that the so-called Arab Spring would begin when a small-time vendor would emulate himself in Tunisia, that several leaders would fall in the wake of his suicide, and that Syria would erupt in civil war. Nevertheless, and generally speaking, military planners and analysts, I might add, have tended to straight-line whatever might be the current state of affairs in which they have worked to identify future potential contingencies. Now this might not be exactly the same thing as what's called fighting the last war, because, for example, for 30 years, American military planners deliberately downplayed any lessons or requirements derived from the Vietnam War, which was the last major war prior to Operation Desert Storm. Nevertheless, straight-lining is close enough. Straight-lining means the presumption of a fundamentally stable world condition, however good or bad it might be, and the anticipation of continued reliance on the same strategies, operational approaches, tactics and weapon systems that are currently in vogue. Today that means anticipating continuing straightened economic circumstances for the United States and its major allies, the growing economic and political power of the bricks, the continued resurgence of fundamentalist Islam, and in response, the increasing reliance on cyber, unmanned vehicles and special operations forces as the primary focus of American combat operations for the foreseeable future. Now certainly other capabilities, notably maritime air and space, have not been ruled out, but these other capabilities have been far more vulnerable to budget-driven program adjustments, which is a nice way of saying cuts. Indeed, it increasingly appears as if budgets are the driving factors behind strategy and the anticipation of threats, rather than a limiting factor, once threats and the basic strategy to cope with them have been formulated. The Department of Defense is currently on the verge of completing the strategic choices and management review, and of course, being the Pentagon, there's an acronym called SCIMR, SCMR. This review represents the third strategic review in four years, beginning with the quadrennial defense review of 2010, the review that led to the so-called pivot to Asia the following year, and now the strategic choices and management review, the SCMR, which being budget-driven will invariably rob the pivot of much of its credibility. Shortly, the Department will be undertaking yet another QDR, with a result that will have had four strategy reviews and changes in five years. In effect, budgetary fluctuations are driving strategic fluctuations. So many changes in strategy means there isn't any strategy, at least none that allies, adversaries, and neutrals can understand. And Americans too are having a hard time knowing exactly what America views as its international role over the next several decades. States and non-state actors who might have malign intentions toward the United States can only take comfort from such strategic confusion, to the extent that the state of America's defense spending influences their behavior at all, and it's not clear that they will cut back on their designs just because we're cutting back on our budgets. It is only to encourage them to pursue their objectives more aggressively. At the same time, America's inability to predict future contingencies muddles its strategic posture even more. Is China an adversary or merely a rival? 100 years ago, Britain was still smarting from its costly victory over the Boers, a war that went far longer than they anticipated against an opponent that they thought was a slam dunk. And had Germany, Britain did, had Germany as both its major trading partner, sound familiar, and its most serious military competitor as well. It was not evident that the two countries would go to war, until, of course, they did the following year. But history doesn't repeat itself, and there is no evidence that points to an American-Chinese confrontation a year from now. But the absence of a credible and consistent strategy that would help minimize the likelihood of war is, to put it mildly, not very helpful. The same applies to Iran and North Korea, both of which may be emboldened by America's seeming lack of a strategic compass. In particular, even if the United States is pivot to Asia, avoids the budget acts of the SCMR, and the QDR that will follow it, America will be hard-pressed simultaneously to protect its posture in that region and in the Middle East at the same time. How Iran's supreme leader, who, notwithstanding a new seemingly more moderate president named Hassan Rouhani, how that leader continues to control national security policy will, who continues to control national security policy, will interpret a downsizing of America's Middle Eastern presence is a major cause of concern. To the extent that Tehran views America's interest in the region on the wane, it will discount Washington's threats of possible military action in the event that Iran enriches uranium to the point that is on the verge of nuclear weapons production. That, in turn, could trigger the military response that virtually the entire American national security community, myself included, wishes to avoid. Whether the long-term ramifications of any such response would only be negative, be they worldwide Muslim hostility to the United States, Iran acquiring the bomb some years later, or the spread of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the region, or any combination of the three is simply unknowable. More fundamentally, can we be so sure that the international environment will remain the same in 10, 20, or 30 years' time? Already, we're seeing several of the bricks losing their economic steam. India's growth rate will be closer to 5% rather than the 9% or so percent that's been over the past few years. It's poor infrastructure, illiteracy, corruption, and bureaucratic mismanagement promises to continue to bring downward pressure on its growth. Brazil, with its continuing heavy reliance on the public sector, I believe it's about 40% of the working population is employed by the state. Likewise, has begun to show signs of a slowing growth rate, despite its ongoing exploration and initial exploitation of vests energy reserves. South Africa, another of the bricks, has yet to realize its vast potential natural wealth. And Russia, the R in the bricks, suffers from corruption, a lack of the rule of law, over reliance on the oil and gas sectors, and a frighteningly low life expectancy rate, especially for its males. Moreover, it's increasing authoritarianism and willingness to pressure smaller states, just ask the Georgians, has once again prompted fear in Europe that at some point the current peaceful era may come to an end. Finally, that most powerful of the bricks, China, has its own problems. Inflation is rising, as are wages, both of which are leading to a decline in the growth of foreign investment. Corruption and the resilience of state-owned enterprises are distorting economic growth. There's a growing prosperity gap between the countries north and south, while minorities, whether in Tibet or in Xinjiang, remain restive. Can a breakup of China, so recurrent in its history, happen yet again? Or would its leaders, fearing they are losing control over their increasingly assertive population, resort to a foreign adventure as a nationalistic ploy? Of course we don't know, but we need to hedge against either possibility. And China's far from the only state that could break up. We're witnessing that possibility in Syria today and could see it in Iraq tomorrow, where the Kurds, increasingly self-reliant, have virtually lost interest in Baghdad's unitary regime. Iran is also an empire, with Kurds, Balux, and Azeris, all having multiple allegiances. Mike the Molas, fearing for their own survival, finally crossed the nuclear rubicon. And if so, what will the West really do about it? Then there's Pakistan, nuclear armed, radicalized, with a powerful military and a troublesome Taliban. Can Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, already once deposed by the military, bring some order to his chaotic country? Can a war with India continue to be avoided? Can in America, with less international credibility, resolve another South Asian crisis as it did twice before when fighting and cargo threatened to explode into full-scale war? We may be surprised by other developments as well. What will happen to Turkey's growth and power if the rioting that we're witnessing today leads to Erdogan's downfall? What will happen to Jordan and its beleaguered King Abdullah if the flood of Syrian refugees continues unabated? Will Saudi Arabia remain intact once its own King Abdullah, or perhaps his successor, departs from the scene? Will more African countries break apart as Sudan has done? And if so, what are the implications for the further growth of Islamic extremism on that continent? Finally, and in that regard, will Islamic extremism continue to roil the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world? Or will it subside, as it did, for example, during the 8th and 13th centuries? One could go on and on about scenarios that might seem far-fetched today, but when seen in the light of even the past 30 years, are far from unrealistic. The key word in addressing these possibilities, and that, of course, is all they are, is a word that has just been used, hedge. The United States certainly has the wherewithal to hedge, and will increasingly do so in the next few years as it begins to exploit more of its energy resources that hydraulic fracking and related technologies are making available to it. Hedging doesn't mean jettisoning the capabilities it has today, be they military, diplomatic, or economic. It means adding to them in a judicious manner. In the military sphere, it means expanding, not contracting, our maritime, air, space, cyber, and missile defense forces. It means preventing the shrinkage of our land forces. It means retaining our advanced special operations and unmanned system capabilities. It means, in a word, preventing our current budgetary woes from undermining the forced posture that will be ours for decades to come. It also means beefing up our diplomatic resources, be they consulates in states where they're sorely lacking or military assistance for those states whose interests converge with ours, but as resources are wanting. And it means rethinking our economic assistance programs and our use of our economic clout as our oil and gas reserves are increasingly exploited while our intellectual property continues to expand at record levels. There are too many people, including some in our own government, who would like our country to offload many of its long-held international responsibilities and in turn, and turn in on itself. They see the years when America established its current international economic system as a bygone era, its leadership of alliances as a vestige of the past, its military might as an anachronism. They're not realists. For realists are people who want America to employ its force with care and foresight to recognize that America's uniqueness means that its political culture cannot be summarily transferred to other states via regime change. Instead, these kinds of people are pessimists at best and defeatists at worst. They see American leadership as something that is no longer attainable. And I might say they're entitled to their views. It's just up to the rest of us to ensure that those views are never realized. Thank you. Well, there's time for questions, and I'll be happy to take any that you throw at me. It doesn't mean I'll answer them, but I'll take them. I've silenced you all. No such luck, please. Doctor, that's probably the... My name is John Richmond. I'm a foundation member. It's probably the gloomiest report I've ever heard on world affairs. I don't know if you want to give that to the United Nations someday. You really didn't talk about America's innovation, the fact that we have survived all these crises through the centuries. And I think innovation is the thing that America will prevail. So perhaps you couldn't talk about American innovation. Well, yeah, I mean, I did mention, first of all, oil and gas, and I said technological innovation, and my real concern isn't that we can't prevail. My real concern is that we turn in on ourselves. 3D printing, good example of the kind of thing that we clearly have a lead on. We've had a lead on cyber for quite some time. The issue is not either our physical or intellectual resources. The issue is our will. That's my concern. And am I pessimistic? Well, I'm pessimistic to the extent that we've become complacent about the sequester. That if you recall, the history of the sequester was that people in the administration concluded that there was no way Congress would live with a sequester because defense would be cut. And the Republicans could never stand for it. Well, guess what? There was no deal. The Republicans stood for it. Not all Republicans today support getting rid of the sequester to protect defense. Yes, the House Armed Services Committee and on the Senate side, the minority on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the defense appropriators, yeah, they're all for protecting defense. But not all Republicans are. Tea party certainly isn't. And so you've got, and that's why I said this is a bipartisan thing. You can't blame one party or another. We seem to have, we seem to be going through this bipartisan ostrich-like approach to international affairs. That's what worries me. It won't take very much to turn it around, but it needs to be turned around. Does that make me pessimistic? I'm not pessimistic about the United States. I'm just concerned how long it'll be before we turn it around. My goodness, okay, yeah. My name is Betsy Morris. I'm from our- Speak up a little bit, please. I'm from, my name is Betsy Morris. I'm from the Norfolk, Virginia distance campus in the government accountability office. So my question is a little bit more detailed. And by the way, you are a rockstar to me because in my early years at the GAO, I read many of your memos in policy, so it's nice to put a name with a face. Could you talk a little bit about the planning process and the QDR? And I fear, given what you said and the discussion about innovation, will we be here in two years talking, saying that the QDR didn't do what it needed to do? We don't really have a strategy forward and the Defense Department is budgeting based on cuts. Well, some people say that we should really get rid of the QDR, but the QDR is simply a lineal descendant of the defense guidance, the defense planning guidance. It's had different names over the years, but there's always been a document that the Department of Defense produces that sort of outlines its general goals and its immediate objectives and then the effort is to align those objectives to budgets. And what the QDR normally does is just that. But now you've got this skimmer which is doing exactly the opposite. It's not the first time that the Department has adjusted strategy to budgetary realities. No question about that, but I think this may be the first time it's been explicit about it. And by becoming explicit about the fact that budgets drive strategy, you run into two problems. The first is you no longer have true planning documents. So I don't know what the QDR will look like. Once, you know, if this mentality is absorbed by the Department, then the QDR will simply be another budget-driven document. The second problem is if you allow budgets to drive your strategy, you're probably gonna overlook things because it's so much easier, basically budgets are marginal changes each year. That's what they consist of. Well, sometimes you can't just make marginal changes to your strategy. You've got to look at the world around you. Part of what I was just saying is the possibilities for completely different directions leading us to different paths of possible warfare or whatever. Those kinds of non-linear developments tend to get lost when you do budgetary types of predictions. And that's my concern about straightlining. It's a natural tendency. Where I am today is where I'll likely be tomorrow. And therefore what I do for today is what I'm likely to do for tomorrow. You cannot straight-line world developments. It never happens that way. And anybody who would have told you that there would be an upheaval in the Arab world because some fruit vendor decided to blow himself up or actually burn himself. You know, if somebody told you that, you'd say, well, you're nuts. I mean, how can that possibly affect Hassani Mubarak? Much less Bashar Assad. That's where budgetarily-driven planning documents really get you into trouble, I think. Yes, sir. Good afternoon, Professor. Lee Cordner, NCC 93 from Australia. If I understand your thesis correctly, the greatest challenge to the United States in the 21st century is the United States, right? The internal challenge of your own bureaucracy and all the rest of it. But I just wondered if you could perhaps broaden the canvas and talk a little about non-traditional threats to global security, regional security, that sort of thing. In other words, you alluded a number of times to non-straightlining, the need to think much more broadly and innovatively. So from your perspective, what are some of those other key issues that need to be considered? And I guess the second part is, how do you see this inwardly-looking US administration dealing with them? Thank you. Well, right now, of course, the most obvious non-state threat is Islamic extremism. It's kind of akin, by the way, to anarchism in the early part of the previous century. They actually bumped off one of our presidents, the anarchists did, crown princes in Europe, parliaments. I mean, actually, if you look at the damage they did, it was in many ways worse than what the Islamic extremists have done today. There may be other kinds of non-state actors that we haven't considered. The real issue becomes, how do you deal with them because the laws of war are different? And it's not just a matter of whether you try them in a civil or a military court. It's, how do you fight them? You don't have a forward edge of battle area like we did in the Cold War. To me, the issue is twofold. One, as you say, and I said it, the challenge is the United States, if it looks inward, will not serve as the great deterrent or maybe the great enforcer in appropriate moments, not always, when these kinds of threats arise. But the other is something worse. I don't, you know, many people say, well, if the United States doesn't do this, our allies will do it. You know, you Australians are a good example of taking care of the Solomon Islands and some other places where we've almost contracted out to you to keep stability in the region it's not for us that you're doing it, it's for yourselves. And we trust you because you're amongst our most reliable allies. You fought alongside us for a century. So your kids have died alongside our kids. The problem is that I don't see any of our allies stepping up their defense spending in anticipation of our looking inward. I don't see anybody saying, well, we have to make up for the fact that those Americans now have a sequester. Quite the contrary. And even your country. You had some really great plans a few years ago. I don't know how many of those are getting realized now. And of course, you're gonna have an election and not too many people are betting on your incumbent. So that means more change. In which way will that go? Look at the Royal Navy. You know, the shrinking Royal Navy, which the only competition it has with the British Army, who's shrinking faster. Look at Libya, where the British and the French took the lead and ran out of gas awful quickly. And it's still not publicly known just to what extent the United States really helped out there. And there's some good reasons for that. But it's pretty clear that that help was needed. Well, what happens if the United States keeps turning further and further inward? If our allies don't pick up the slack, as they're not likely to, and we do straight line where we are today, and as I say, I hope we don't, then there's a serious problem. And the ultimate outcome of that is all we're doing is encouraging the bad guys to throw their weight around even more. Whether it's in the East China Sea or the South China Sea or the Middle East or wherever. That's my concern. Yeah, Karen. Professor Zachime, I believe you were one of the think tank scholars that signed a letter recently talking about defense spending and decreasing the rate of growth in defense spending. But you ended your talk today saying we've got to be robust across all domains from cyber to everything else and the services have to be strong. How do you kind of make sense of those two seemingly very different perspectives? Well, they're not entirely different. I think we spend a lot of money on things we shouldn't be spending our money on. And I'll get to those momentarily, but I don't believe that even if you found all the possible efficiencies that you could find in the defense budget, you would be able to avoid not having some kind of break, B-R-A-K-E, on these ongoing cuts. Now, how could you save money? Well, we know some of the easy ones that are easy to talk about and hard to implement like base realignment and closure. I wouldn't bet the family farm on BRAC. There are others that maybe because of this financial budgetary crisis might happen. For example, better scrutiny of our wartime contracting. I was on the wartime contracting commission. We identified, and we came to, we finished work in September of 2011, and we found that beginning with the war in Afghanistan and through that period, the end of that fiscal year, out of $192 billion spent, $60 billion were wasted. That's a lot of money. And so if you have more scrutiny over subcontractors, you have an internal audit capability, which the Department of Defense doesn't have, DCAA, the contract audit agencies, a very different kind of animal. If you have offices in the Defense Department, both the joint staff and the Office of Secretary of Defense, where you have someone at the three-star or the Assistant Secretary level, whose job it is to watch these things, you might realize savings. It's not clear to me, although I'm sure if some folks in uniform will be very upset, why we need commissaries? Why can't, that's one I would contract out. I guarantee you, Walmart can do the job. They seem to do it for everybody else. Still another area. We tend to lump contractors as one big group. Well, they're not one big group. There are contractors that build things. There are contractors that think about things and analyze things. And then there are contractors that basically retire out of their jobs, flip their badge and go back to the same job. And it's those contractors that I think we can cut. And I know that many civil servants belly ache over that and say, my God, I have all this work. But the truth is we've developed a culture where if you've got somebody that will do the work for you, day or night, weekend, Christmas, New Year's, whatever, you're gonna offload that work to that person. It's a natural reaction. I think if that person disappeared, the civil servants would be taking on more because that would also be a natural reaction. I think we can cut a lot of what are colloquially termed butts and seats contractors and save a lot of money in doing so. I also think we can cut civil servants, but not through a meat ax. I mean, apparently we've added 100,000, excuse me, that was the contract, we've added, yes, 100,000 civil servants since 2000 in the Defense Department. Now, you don't wanna cut out the young people. They're the ones who are actually technically more proficient because if you're a civil servant, you don't have to do professional military education. You can come in with your master's degree that you got and never take another course for the next 40 years while you're serving in the Defense Department, which kind of means you'll be a little bit behind on technological development. Well, you don't wanna cut the person who's just come out of grad school and is at the cutting edge of this stuff. So what do you do? And if you don't wanna inflame the unions at the same time, you go after, you target the middle grades and you get those people that are in the verge of retirement and you incentivize them to get out early. My experience is that once a person hits about 45, that's what all they're thinking about. Okay, when am I gonna get my pension and what am I gonna do with it? So you incentivize them to get out. You won't have trouble from the unions. You won't have the last in, first out kind of syndrome. You'll keep your senior executives who have the historical memory and you'll save a ton of money. So that's just a number of things. There are others that, hey, why shouldn't there be a moratorium on people leaving the Pentagon that you can't work for a butts and seats contractor for three years? That'll already change things big time. So there are things that can be done. Defense health clearly is another one. But the truth of the matter is that all of this is kind of irrelevant in the big fight we have, which is over taxes and entitlements. And defense has been caught by these two big elephants. Defense is collateral damage. That's my biggest concern. If we were able to solve the debate over raising taxes on the one hand and lowering entitlements on the other, then I don't think we would be having this kind of a discussion about how much we can spend on defense. And remember too, we are at historically low interest rates. Once those rates start moving up to historic levels north of 4%, you effectively have accounted in your debt servicing for virtually at least half the Pentagon's budget, if not more. So there's lots of things that can be done here. Lots of ways to slice this cat and still get the kind of capability I was talking about. Yes, sir. Sir, Commander Brook DeWalt, Navy Public Affairs. You touched on this briefly at the end of your last question. But we seem to spend so much of our time focusing on the military side, three to 5% GDP, as what can we do with our portion of the problem? But we don't seem to have a lot of discussion about how that little bubble is in context to the bigger picture, the other 95%. Can you address any of that? And maybe why we're not talking about that? Well, why we're not talking about it is politics, but I'll address the first half of your question. No, seriously. This is a hot political issue. And my biggest worry is that everybody now is sort of comfortable with the sequester. So you just bury the issue and let the sequester do its damage and whatever. And that's why I think defense is collateral damage. Look, the law, the 2011 law, essentially presupposed like Graham Rudman did in the 80s, that defense accounts for 50% of the problem, which is true if you look at all controlled expenditures. Once you look at entitlements as well, not so much social security, by the way, but Medicare and Medicaid, defense is 20% of the problem. That's a big, big, big difference. And so once you're talking about 20% of the problem, you've paid for it. You've paid for it with the Gates cuts, you've paid for it with the budget control cuts, and you've certainly paid for it with the sequester now. But that's not how we look at it. And as I say, defense is not really at the heart of this. It was only at the heart of the issue when it was presupposed that the Republicans would put it at the heart of the issue. Once they didn't do that, it's no longer, you don't see debates about defense in the context of what needs to be done, in the context of a grand agreement about what to do about the debt. And there's something else as well. Our deficits are going down. So everybody's starting to feel complacent about it. Why are they going down? To a large extent because of the sequester. Now do we wanna wait until we impose some kind of taxes on the oil and gas that we're gonna find in the Dakotas, and that'll help our budget even more? Well, that's not gonna come all at one time. And any decisions that we make this year, next year, the year after, about what our forces, what kinds of forces we buy, and what kinds of programs we research and develop, they're gonna have an impact for 30 guys in the Navy, 50 years. I mean, you know, we're talking about really long term. You tell me what the world's gonna look like in 50 years. I mean, 50 years ago was what? 1963, Kennedy was shot. I mean, look, my son who's now in his mid-30s, when he was in high school, one time he said to me, Dad, did you ever hear of Robert McNamara? So I said, yeah, I know Bob McNamara. He goes, you know Bob, Robert McNamara? I said, yeah, why? He goes, but Dad, he's in my history book. 50 years, 50 years from now, we're gonna be in the history book, but the weapons that we're buying today will still be there. And that's why it is exceedingly dangerous to say, well, we'll wait until we get this whole tax and spend and entitlement thing right before we start worrying about what to do about defense. And it's even more dangerous because we cannot predict that world, which is what I tried to outline with some of the things I said. I hope I don't get nasty telegrams from Beijing. You're telling us we're gonna break up. That's not the point. The point is, we just don't know, and we have to hedge, and right now we're throwing that hedge out the window in my view. Yes, sir. What would you recommend as a way ahead to create expectation management? No, it's a fair question. So what should we do? I think, given that we don't have the standard bad guy, I wouldn't even call China the standard bad guy the way the Soviet Union was. Well, what we do need to do is start with what interests do we really wanna defend around the world? Okay, we can't do it all, but what would we like to do? And that was the old way of doing things. And then given what we would like to do, how do we think we might get there? And that would include things that we don't normally think about. I think one of the more important things that Andy Marshall has done for the department over the practically a century given Andy's age is thinking about things that folks in their daily inbox, outbox kind of work just don't. That needs to be brought in at the outset. And then we need to see, okay, given the budgetary realities, can we in some way account for these other things that might happen? Can we, do we buy systems that are more flexible because we wanna account for those things? For instance, one of the greatest debates that's gone on, oh, at least in Centoven and Smith, McNamara years, is what to do about aircraft carriers? Classic argument, if you run aircraft carriers for any particular mission, they usually don't come out cost effective. And that's PA&E or CAPE or whatever you call them, that's what they've always said, and they're right. But if you want something that does a reasonably good job, regardless of mission, you can't beat an aircraft carrier for that. So that puts a tremendous emphasis on flexibility, but flexibility is the kind of thing that seems to get lost in the wash when you start with budget driven exercises. If you start with your sense of a potential threat, you move to strategy so that you now know what your ends are, and then you start thinking about your means, you're gonna wind up with probably a more flexible force. That's what I would recommend. Well, I guess I really have silenced you all. Thank you very much.