 Good morning, everybody. Welcome. We're delighted you're here. This is a little unusual setup. We normally would not be using this space, but we're still a construction site. We're not quite done with our new building, and the big hall on the second floor wasn't finished, and so we decided to move you up here to the ninth floor to the boardroom. And I'm going to move this out of the way so you all can see. Don't worry about that. Well, for coming, this is the first of our military strategy forum here at our new location. I do want to say a sincere thank you to our friends at Rolls Royce that make it possible for us to offer this discussion to the policy community in Washington, and it's very helpful. I also wanted to say a real thanks to Adam Smith for joining us today. I've had the privilege of working with Representative Smith for a number of years and I'm amazed at the time and the energy and the dedication he's willing to give to very complex and technical issues. That's not necessarily the case with members of Congress these days, to be candid. It's just quite refreshing to have a member that wants to dig deeply and understand the complexities of matters before he talks. That's a wonderfully rare phenomena these days in Washington and we appreciate him and his leadership for that. We're here today to discuss a pretty complicated and complex topic. If you look at the title here, the last two words are most important, transparency and oversight. The democracies have to undertake difficult and complex foreign policy. But democracies have to debate things. Public policies open in our system. We have to find a solution that reconciles our democratic values with the actions that governments have to undertake. That rests squarely with the Congress and leaders in the Congress who are our representatives to deal with these complex issues. There's just no way around it and so we're very fortunate to have someone with his commitment and dedication to really understanding things is willing to take the lead on complex matters like this. Mr. Smith, thank you for your leadership and thank you for coming today. Kath, do you want to get us started for real? I just want to say thanks to all of you for coming. I'm going to move this out of the way so some people can see. Thanks. Thanks very much. My name is Kathleen Hicks. I direct the International Security Program and I'm very honored to have Representative Smith with us this morning. And we're going to start with you making some opening remarks then we'll turn to a conversation between us and then we'll open it up for some questions and answers. We have a strict timeline for you. You have to get on a plane so I'm going to ask my timekeepers to help us stick to a 10 o'clock end time. So with that, please over to you. Thank you very much. It's great to be here and I really appreciate the working relationship I have with Dr. Hamery and with CSIS. Dr. Hamery mentioned my desire to sort of learn more about issues. Nobody has been more helpful in that effort than John. The level of expertise here at CSIS is enormously helpful. They've been very generous with their time working with me and my staff as we try to puzzle through some very difficult and challenging national security issues. And what I want to talk about this morning is sort of how we continue to proceed with our fight against al-Qaeda and their ideology. Certainly during my time in Congress nothing has changed our policy both domestically and globally more than 9-11. It was a major C-shift and we've been reacting to that event in many ways ever since. Certainly we've created the Department of Homeland Security, National Director for Intelligence, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and as we've gone tried to figure out how do we fight this war and how do we fight it effectively because as we all know it's unlike the other battle that we've ever fought in a variety of different ways. And what I want to try to do this morning is sort of set the frame for where we're at and where we should go at this point now more than a dozen years after the event. How are we doing? What are the challenges? How do we move forward? And I think the central conundrum and the challenge that we have is we're still trying to accomplish two things. One, it is still a war and I think there's a lot of people who forget that as I always like to put it al-Qaeda declared war on us in 1896 and they have not changed their mind. The only thing that is stopping them from attacking us is not a lack of desire, it's our ability to stop them from doing it and that really hasn't changed. Now the organization, the ideology, the groups have metastasized and moved and changed in a variety of different ways, weaker in some way, stronger than others but trust me if you're in the national security environment here in the U.S., if you work at DOD, if you work at the CIA, when you get up in the morning, the primary thing you're thinking about is whether or not there's going to be a terrorist attack and what you can do that day to prevent it. It is a dominating aspect of our national security policy as well as it should be. For all the challenges that we have for trying to work the relationships with Russia, with China, the Asia pivot, what's going on in Latin America and elsewhere, the number one thing on our minds is protecting this country and the number one threat to that is terrorism and is al-Qaeda in their various offshoots. How do we stop that from happening? So we have to fight that war and one of the best ways to fight that war is basically to get them before they get us and that involves military action of one kind or another. Now the second thing that we've been trying to accomplish both President Bush and President Obama have tried to figure out how to do this is to win the broader ideological struggle basically to stop people in the Muslim world from wanting to join organizations like al-Qaeda to figure out what role we can play in bringing greater stability and moving towards a more moderate effective competent form of government in many of these countries. Now the great challenge here of course is number one often conflicts with number two. We see that most notably in the drone campaign. Undeniably it has been effective. Without question the ability of al-Qaeda central leadership to plot and plan attacks against the U.S. and western targets has been significantly degraded. It's been degraded by a lot of things but one of the biggest things is we have effectively targeted and disrupted their leadership. When your top terrorists in the world are spending pretty much all of their time every day worrying about how they can stay alive it means that they can't plot and plan as effectively and that's worked. But the other thing that's very true is that military campaign has also made it more difficult to win that broader ideological struggle. Basically to convince the Muslim world and others to get away from al-Qaeda. Because the one narrative that al-Qaeda has that works is that they are the one group of people standing up against western aggression. Standing up against the west's attempts to influence and otherwise attack the Muslim world. And to the extent that they are in the middle of a war in which we're shooting at them that feeds into that narrative. Now that's not an argument for not doing it. It's an argument for trying to figure out how to balance it in any war. Obviously if you choose to attack you will further anger your enemy. But you're also trying to vent them from attacking you. So how do we strike that balance? Well President Obama when he got into office I had a very, very broad and specific vision for how to do that. This was you know it's now become sort of a cliche. We're going to reset the whole variety of different relationships. And the goal basically was the notion was that the world was not fond of the Bush administration. That they viewed us as too militaristic, too self-interested. Trying to force our will upon the rest of the world. You had renditions, you had Abu Ghraib, you had the war in Iraq, you had a whole bunch of issues. But we're going to change all that. We're going to figure out how to work cooperatively with the rest of the world. Deliver a different message so that we can build broader support. And I think it's fair to say at this point five years into it that that really hasn't worked. That at this point and I haven't seen any polling data, but if you were to poll people amongst our allies in Europe, you know in the Muslim world and elsewhere that the level of support for the United States is probably about back to where it was during the Bush administration. Now that's not the be all and end all of this. We're not trying to protect our national security from thinking that the number one goal there is for everyone to like us. That's not the approach. But it is an important element. And I think one of the more troubling things is not just the lack of support that we see from some of our allies, but domestically, here in the US. Some of the central underpinnings of our campaign to try to contain al-Qaeda and try to win that broader ideological war are not as supported in this country as we would like. People have long wanted us out of Afghanistan. There is considerable concern about the drone attacks. The NSA revelations have undermined some confidence. Now there's a number of different reasons. What I'm going to do is point out the reasons why I think we have not had as much success as we had hoped in terms of building broad support for our campaign and then second what we ought to do about it. I think the reasons why are fairly clear. Number one, as I've already mentioned, is the drone strikes. It has gotten a fair amount of attention. You know the number of civilian casualties, the justification for those attacks. The world is focused on this. Now I do believe that drones are getting an unfair portion of the blame here. A drone is a weapon of war. I don't think the rest of the world would feel any better if we were launching cruise missiles from a ship out in the ocean than if we were using a drone. I don't think that changes it. I think there's a little bit too much of an emphasis on how this has fundamentally changed things. That a drone is more dangerous than sending in a SEAL team as I said, launching a bunch of cruise missiles. I don't believe that. If anything, drones are more surgical. They're not the perfect instrument that they are sometimes described to be. I think that is a mistake. We should be clear as Secretary Gates was yesterday in a speech he gave. It's war. In war, civilians suffer. That has been true from the beginning of time and we should not pretend that somehow we've uniquely come up with some way to prevent that. We want to minimize it. We're trying to minimize it as much as possible. If you're in a shooting war, there's going to be innocents who suffer. We want to try to minimize that. The drones are one of the biggest reasons. I think another big reason is the fact that Guantanamo is still open. For all of the efforts we've made to change our interrogation to replace an emphasis on normal civilian constitutional trials, the fact that Guantanamo is still open, that's all the rest of the world needs to know. All those other efforts get swept down into the rug by the fact that we still have over 160 people locked up in the prison down at Guantanamo. I think that has presented an enormous challenge. The other challenge, of course, is the Arab Spring. Thomas Friedman said this best, no president in the history of our country has faced as chaotic and difficult a situation in the Middle East as President Obama. Every day there are impossible decisions about who do you support, whether you're talking about Egypt or Bahrain or Libya or Syria. It is a chaotic situation right now. We've seen developing difficulty to maintain our relationships with allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, because everybody wants us to do something different. We have broad, understandable goals. The trouble is, as usually is the case, those goals occasionally conflict. We want democratic government that truly represents the people. We want stability. We want to stop the rise of extremism. That's great, but what do you do when you have a situation like Egypt? Mubarak brought stability, but he didn't exactly bring democracy and freedom. So no matter which way you choose, you are contradicting one of your stated goals. This is one of the major problems we have with Saudi Arabia right now. Understandably, when a democratically elected government was removed, however you want to describe what it was that we moved it, that is contrary to our goal to democracy. But it so happens that the democratic government that was removed wasn't really terribly democratic. So how do you strike that balance? I think that has presented an enormous challenge. And I will just briefly also mention the fact that the federal government here in the U.S. has been unable to function, unable to pass budgets. I could go off on considerable length on this topic. I won't accept to say two things. Number one, the nihilism of the Tea Party. The basic notion that all they want to do is hurt the federal government. And they are incredibly indiscriminate about how they go about doing it, is a real problem. One of the things the federal government does is it provides for our national security. So if you are hurting our federal government, you are hurting our ability to do national security. I mean, I cannot imagine what it's like to work at the Pentagon right now. I was talking with a bunch of people yesterday and said, how are you doing? I said, well, it's great. The federal government's open. That's how low a bar we have set. We're actually open. So things are good. You know, with a CR, with sequestration, every four or five months of threat of a government shutdown, there is no way you can function effectively. Whatever you may think of how large the federal government should be, it is completely and totally unacceptable to set up a situation where it can't function on a day in and day out basis and make no mistake about it. That hurts us and our ability to work with the rest of the world. They do not see us as as credible of force as we should have been. So those are some of the challenges that have made it more difficult for us, I think, to as effectively advance our policy. I'll just fire up a couple of quick things and then take your questions. The things that I think we need to change. Number one, there is a need for greater transparency and oversight of our drone strikes. And we also need to make clear why we're targeting people. Because there's a bunch of different groups out there and that's the thing about Al Qaeda. You've got some groups that are formally affiliated. You've got some groups that just adopt the ideology. Who's who in this mix? What we need to make clear is our number one goal is to stop those groups that are plotting and planning attacks against our homeland and against Western interests. There's a lot of other groups that we don't like. Boko Haran in Nigeria is a major problem. They are not right now plotting and planning attacks against us. That puts them in a different category. It is definitely clearly self-defense if we are going after groups that are plotting attacks against us. And the thing about that is it changes. It was Pakistan for a long time. And then the underwear bomber and the attempt to bomb the cargo planes, all of a sudden some of these attacks were coming out of Yemen. And we had to respond to that. I, you know, make no apologies for the fact that we targeted Anwar Al-Waqi. He was targeting us. That is the classic definition of self-defense. We should make that case unapologetically. But unfortunately far too often we don't make it clear why we're doing this. Now I understand the need for secrecy. But we don't have to reveal all of it. But it is my personal opinion that whenever we do a targeted strike, whether it's a drone, whether it's sending in, you know, a special operations team, whatever it is, we need to at least briefly explain why. Now I realize some of these strikes are on the Title 50 side. So they're secret. But that's our decision. We can reveal what we want to reveal. We don't have to reveal it all. But we do have to reveal enough to say this is why we hit this person. And it was clearly self-defense. I also think it's good that the President is moving us towards getting this more into the DOD Title 10 side. So there is greater transparency. And we also need to be more inclusive of Congress in letting them know on a regular basis what we're doing and why. I also, without getting into a lengthy explanation of it, as I said, Guantanamo is a big part of this. There is no reason we can't close that prison. We should. It would be an enormous step in the right direction. The third thing that I think we need to do is something that we have done. We just need to do it more broadly and make it clear that we're doing it. And that is build partner capacity. Instead of the US showing up and firing the shot, let us work with local allies to hopefully, number one, stop an insurgency before it gets started. But number two, make sure that it is then local forces that are enforcing the law. We've done this effectively in the Philippines. We've had a presence there for quite a while. They're battling insurgency of a variety of different stripes down there. It's been by and large effective. There's been a recent uptake here in the past couple of months. But no US person has ever fired a shot. But we have been integral in the success there. Same is true in the Horn of Africa to some degree. We've worked with Ethiopia and Kenya and Burundi and Uganda to build up their capabilities so that it is a local fight. It is not something being dictated by the United States of America. I think that too would help if we continued to build that local partner capacity, which as I said, we've done effectively. We need to do more work. And then, yes, let us try to get to the point where we actually fund our government on a regular basis. I could get into that again at greater length, but I won't. We'll leave it at that. And I also think the last thing I'll say is we also need to better manage expectations as to what the US could do. I think a large part of our problem with allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia is they expect that whatever problem it is, we ought to show up and solve it. There's always been a far greater gap between expectations and capabilities, but that gap is growing because the rest of the world is becoming more powerful. The US is not as dominant as it used to be. And I think this expectation that no matter what's going on in the world, the US can show up and fix it is a huge problem. I remember during one of the riots in Cairo, they interviewed a young man, and this was as a result of the movie that played that got the Muslim world all upset in a variety of different places, led to a bunch of attacks on the embassy. The young man basically said, look, this wouldn't be on the internet if President Obama didn't want it there, which was kind of an interesting way of looking at the world. But we need to make it clear that we're not controlling everything. And that was one of the problems I had with Syria. Basically we had an international norm, and the US stepped up and said it's an international norm, but somehow it is the sole responsibility of the United States of America to enforce it. That again reinforces the message that if there's something bad happening in the world, it's because the US simply decided to allow it, that we could decide otherwise. That is not true. When I was visiting a refugee camp up in Northern Jordan, I was just shocked at the number of refugees who said, why don't you stop this? Assad must go, he must be stopped. Why isn't the US doing it? And I was like, because we really aren't capable of doing it, we cannot fix every problem in the world. And I think the Obama Administration understands that. They had pushed early on and continue for a more cooperative approach. Let us work with our allies to try to figure out how we solve these problems instead of assuming that the US has to show up and fix it. That expectation is something we cannot meet. That's why, for instance, in Afghanistan everything that happens is our fault. Either we didn't do enough or we did too much. We pulled out after the Soviets fell and after Najibullah fell, and that led to problems. Now we're back in and we have got to set more realistic expectations. And as I said, work with local partners, work with international allies to try to fix the problem. But this is going to be a long tough battle. We are not going to be universally loved while we are trying to protect our country from Al Qaeda and their various affiliates. We have to continue to prosecute that war. But I think we make some of those changes I mentioned. We can prosecute it more effectively in a way that will build greater support and give us a better chance of winning the long term ideological war, which after all is the most important piece. Great. Thank you very much. That was quite a tour to force across many of the most relevant issues today in national security policy. So I know we'll be obliged to stay inside our time. Let me try to pull a few of the elements you raised together in the following way. Early in your talk you spoke on the use of unmanned systems and obviously in the news it's the aerial systems and it's the lethal strikes in particular. But I think it's safe to say there's general consensus that these systems will become ubiquitous in terms perhaps not of their lethal use but in other cases. And certainly while it's aerial now, land, sea will proliferate as well. What is your sense of how the United States, given the struggles we've had on the lethal targeting side in terms of transparency and perceptions of the systems as different, somehow unique and different than say a cruise missile or an F-16, what are some of the ways the US can lead the rest of the world in setting norms in this area? Well I think that's difficult because again I'll come back to the central argument that the norms that we're looking at is really when is a lethal strike appropriate? And I don't know that the drones sorry, I know we're supposed to call them unmanned systems. I can tell you worked at the Pentagon. That's very good. The drones, whatever it understands. I don't know that the change is a fundamental question. I mean it's been said well be careful because other countries are going to develop these things. True. But how they use them is going to fit into many of the same conundrums and difficulties of what's an appropriate way to fight. I mean we've seen that in Syria. Assad has killed tens of thousands of civilians. He's killed apparently a few thousand with chemical weapons. I agree that chemical weapons are a greater problem but you still have that you know what is it? Well you know if you're killing someone in war the instrument that you use is really only one piece of what is not even the most important piece. But I do think that we can make it clearer that what we're doing here is fighting a war because I think people have forgotten that. They sort of assume that like the drones we've got them so we're going to use them. When it's all part of fighting this larger war you have to make the defense case. You have to make the case within international law which I think is right there for us to make and frankly when you read the Amnesty International and these other reports their main complaint is that they don't know. Now they go from saying they don't know to saying that they do know which is an interesting little transition. You're not telling us why you're doing this therefore we know that you're doing it illegally. A bit of a leap of logic there but the point is transparency. Transparency in oversight that's the number one biggest lesson. And I think that's true of any military action. As far as you can get into spying issues and all that I mean that's you know the world has changed in terms of information as we've all known. I can't begin to articulate sort of how we manage all of that. But on the using it as a weapon of war I think we should stick to traditional international norms. So that goes right into the authorization for the use of military force and the president I think has said that he's interested in working with Congress to modify it. What are your thoughts on how the AUMF you know is still applicable today given as you said the movement of the fight from Pakistan to other theaters. And you know how Congress can help the president craft a way forward. Well I think it's very much you know still applicable and you know it's gone through a fairly tortured history because originally it was tied directly to those who perpetrated 9-11 and it's sort of morphed from some interesting court decisions that interpreted it more broadly and then we codified it in Congress in 2011 that basically allowed it to be those groups that threaten us. Al Qaeda, Taliban, associated forces and again it's within the self-defense context. I would say it's highly unlikely that we're going to modify the AUMF because I've walked down that road. You change a punctuation mark in that thing and you're looking at 10 years worth of lawsuits from both sides frankly. People were wow Congress must have meant this. People interpreted congressional intent as if we move as one body. We had about 535 different intents. Good luck figuring those out. But you know that's the risk. If you change the AUMF and that's why the White House was nervous as hell when we did it in 2011 it wasn't so much that they wanted it to be their authority or less authority. It's just that if you change it you then give rise to a variety of different legal actions. So I think it's probably going to stay where it's at and then the larger question is as Al Qaeda and their different groups move around and that's why again emphasize the clarity. There's a lot of different groups out there hundreds for that matter who affiliate in some way with the uniquely violent and nihilistic ideology of Al Qaeda. But there's only a few that are actually plotting and planning attacks against us either in the home level. Those are the ones we need to focus on. It was Afghanistan prior to 9-11. A lot of it moved to Pakistan. It moved to Yemen. Somalia is a bit of a tougher question. We now have concerns about what's going to happen with AQIM and Mali and Libya haven't yet reached that point. I think the existing AUMF gives the president sufficient flexibility to follow those targets and modification would cause more trouble than it could solve. I'm going to ask one more question. I'm going to open it. Fair warning to the audience. So have your questions ready. As the ranking member of the Authorizing Committee for Defense, given your I think very appropriate comments about the effects of the shut down and continued uncertainty on the defense and national security community, what is it that you and your committee are thinking of being able to do in this year, in this environment to help on both the overall strategic front and creating some kind of pathway forward for the defense community in particular? Well it's very difficult. We're working on a variety of issues on authorities 1206, 1203 different pieces to try to give greater flexibility to the warfighter out there as they confront and deal with the challenges that they face. We continue to be strongly supportive of the Special Operations Command and the Special Operations Command is going to be a key piece of this ally development, basically building partner capacity. They refer to it, I've always loved this phrase, as preparation of the environment. What are you preparing it for exactly? The answer to that question is we're trying to prepare it so that we don't have insurgencies. That's training security forces, that's making sure that governance is happening, EXO-COM does medical care. They do med caps in different places to try to build local population support. A lot of this is what we've done in the Philippines. We're really emphasizing that because the big war approach in this ideological struggle you think drone strikes have negative consequences. Sending 100,000 plus Western troops into our country is not a winner. So I think trying to focus on that, building the partner capacity, using the asymmetric tools that we have to give the flexibility to fight that. That's all great, but as long as we're lurching from crisis to crisis and you have sequestration in the CR, as you know better than anybody, it's just tough. It's tough to function when you don't know how much money you're going to have or where you can spend it. We are going to have some mics going around if you can raise your hand. If you'd like to ask a question and I ask that you give us your name and affiliation if you have one and we have one right up here. Let's wait for the mic for a moment. I'm Harlan Oman. Thank you for your understatement and restraint in describing the political situation today. I'd like to go back to the ideological struggle. Ten years ago the Defense Science Board released a report to Don Rumsfeld about the war on terror in which it said quote, the United States cannot win the war on terror unless we win the war on ideas and we are losing the war ideas. That is true today. During World War II, we in the Brits had great propaganda. During the Cold War we did extremely well. Reagan's comment to Gorbachev take down the wall. Why are we so inept and almost derelict in not having some kind of a broad black, gray and white propaganda campaign to discredit and do all the things we need to do? As you know the only thing that state is doing is trying to turn a couple of youth off the internet from becoming al-Qaeda. Why has it been impossible for us to mount the sort of ideological campaign that is absolutely essential and actually could have big dividends for a relatively small amount of money? Well as a couple of these, first of all a great point, again a quote Tom Friedman twice the same morning but the same piece he wrote, you know to underscore the fact that we're not winning the ideological struggle, you know Syria I think is a great example of that because okay you've got Assad, you know, not popular by any stretch of the imagination, you've got a group of people trying to overturn him, you've got a lot of sort of moderate Democrats who want to overturn him and create a better, you know, style of government. Not western, I think that's an important point in the ideological struggle and that's one of the challenges we have. We should not approach this by saying we want the world to be like us, okay. The Muslim world doesn't want to be like us and can't blame them for that. So we've got to stop, it's not the same as the Cold War. And the Cold War basically, you know, the way I summed it up is, you know, the way we won the Cold War was here's your grocery store, here's our grocery store, we win. But when it comes to the Muslim they have religion is much more central to the way they want to govern. So trying to convince them to be like us ain't going to work. We've tried that for a while but in Syria, so you've got the moderate elements and then you've got al-Qaeda and there are foreign fighters coming from all over the Muslim world and they are all coming on the side of al-Qaeda. If there is one single solitary soul who is shown up in Syria to fight for the free Syria movement, to fight for freedom and democracy then I am unaware of it. And that gives you an idea of how we're not doing as well as we should. The second reason I think that's very, very difficult is we have very little credibility. And that's a problem, that makes it hard and as a member of Congress I can tell you how difficult it is when you don't have much credibility in great and painful detail as a matter of fact. And for a variety of different reasons, I thought it was very interesting in Egypt that both sides were claiming that the other side had US support. I mean even the people who were opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood were claiming that well the US was behind them and I forget the argument but basically if it appears that the US is involved in something it is by definition not credible. And so how do you handle that? And I do not think we have been as creative as we need to be both in terms of the most effective thing is negative campaigning. The al-Qaeda movement has killed more Muslims than any movement in the history of the world. So they are not good. I mean with the Taliban we can very clearly show and to some degree in Iraq we were successful in that. The Iraq Awakening, the Sons of Iraq movement was driven by the fact that these nihilistic violent people are killing you. They are terrible. So I think we need to use that more effectively. But I think the real challenge is in a transparent world how do you do propaganda? We haven't figured that out. Propaganda is in many cases dependent upon sort of plausible deniability and the hidden hand. There are no hidden hands. And that makes it much more difficult. And actually one other big problem we have is the whole NSA thing. People had this perception and a lot of those articles were just flat wrong about what we were doing. We're not doing what they said. Good luck convincing people of that. So I think the credibility is a challenge. The most effective way to do this is again partner capacity. The most effective messengers and the way we ought to approach it is to get moderate credible elements. And there are some groups out there doing this. In the world they have to be the messengers. If we're the messengers it's just not going to go over well. So that's where I think we should focus our efforts is building that partner capacity and delivering that message. Very good. Let's come over here. Hi, James Kennedy from the Open Society Foundations. As we continue to kind of expand our efforts in building partner capacity it seems like we might encounter the dilemma of democratic values versus achieving stability. And at times we have likely will continue to fund units that are either engaging in questionable behavior or are perceived as engaging in questionable behavior. And when we do that we might be losing that second challenge of the ideological battle. So how do you strike that balance? And where does congressional oversight of programs like 1206 come into play in finding the right balance? I think that is one of the single biggest problems we have. Because to begin with there's no government that isn't going to have something that people could criticize. I mean no matter who you're backing, no matter where you're at, there's going to be an argument that they are not as open, they are not as free, they are not as fair as they should be. I think buying with things like the Lehi amendment trying to limit our ability. If you have situations where militaries are committing atrocities we have to pull out. We have, if there is a democratic government overthrown, we have to pull out, we did that in Martinia and Mali, we're wrestling with that a little bit in Egypt. Look I don't have an easy answer for that question. I will say this I think disengagement is the wrong approach. I think saying that if you do anything bad, we're out of here, we're not going to have anything to do with you is more harmful than helpful. We need to continue to emphasize the fact that we are much more aggressively trying to push these countries and these allies to have greater respect for human rights, to be more democratic. And we certainly have done that in a number of different places, but it's never going to be a perfect system. And again I think the power of negative campaigning, if that's what people are concerned about, I love that Amnesty International came out with this huge study of our efforts where's the Amnesty International study of all the people that Al Qaeda has killed and how indiscriminately they've gone after civilians. It's not even comparable. And to say that well, but they're not trying to do that, so we're not I mean let's have a little balance here and let's point out that the people that we're fighting have killed far more innocent people than we have. And they do it intentionally as part of their plan. So I think that we have to also emphasize the alternative, because there is no perfect system. If we're held up to that standard, if we say look, in the U.S. you have to only support perfect governments, and we have no rules for the other side. That's a propaganda war you can never win. Okay, it's right over here in the purple shirt. Ken Meyer, Kurt Woldachs, you've expressed your belief that the killing of UNREL Wallachy was justified. How about the drone attack on his teenage son, who was also an American citizen? I'm not as familiar with the specifics of that, which attack that was, but I think that that's a fine example of why we need to be more transparent in explaining the reasons for our attacks. If an attack happens, I think there has to be at least a one paragraph justification. And even in the case of Wallachy the administration has not publicly released their legal justification for it. They've alluded to it in some of the speeches that were given, and you will go case by case by case. I don't have any doubt that there are some drone strikes that were mistakenly made, that there actually wasn't, you know, and for whatever reason, they misread the target, they misread what they were doing, they didn't know where they were dealing with, you know, that that's fine, but that's why transparency is important. So I don't have an answer for that. I don't know the specifics of that attack. We do have oversight over this, and we do regularly get briefed. I apologize off the top of my head, I don't remember the details of the different attacks there, but I have at one time or another been briefed on them, and that is that is a bit of a misconception. There is oversight in that sense, you know, anyone in Congress, certainly on the Armed Service and the Intelligence Committee, has access to all the information for why these attacks were done. Part of my problem in presenting this is that's classified information and I, even if I did know the answer to your question, I couldn't give it publicly, and that's where I think the Administration can be more transparent. They can keep a lot of it classified, I understand the reasons for that, but they can also choose to release enough so that people know here's why we did it, and that there is a clear justification, because I think as I said in the Amnesty Report, the biggest part of it is no transparency. We don't know, you know, this attack, that attack, whatever, was a justified wasn't it. The Administration says that it was. Personally, I believe them, but the broader public hasn't seen the information and understandably is skeptical. So transparency would be enormously helpful. And like I said, the oversight that Congress is able to exercise is helpful, but we can't be transparent about it either. That's just us, you know, doing our oversight in the Executive Branch. We can't then go out and talk about it. I would just add that the UN report, which came out just a few days before the Amnesty Report, I think in Timeline, hits this point very hard on transparency. I think it's quite a nice report. Yes, right here. Hi, sir. Tanvi Misra. I'm from UPI News. I was just wondering in terms of you said that some of the attacks might be mistaken. And I was wondering, would you advocate for repercussions in those cases? And also there is critique that oversight and transparency would interfere with national security decisions. So if you could comment on that as well. Sure, two things. First of all, no, this is war. And that's one of the things a lot of people don't understand. In war, mistakes are made all the time. And as I said up front, civilians suffer in a war zone. They always do. And I think part of the problem with some of the arguments on the Unmanned Vehicles campaign is that we've tried to argue that, well, this is different because they're more discriminating. And all those things are true. It is somewhat better than a traditional military invasion. It's somewhat better than an F-16 or a cruise missile. It is still war. And it is still war in an area where civilians are going to be vulnerable. And we went through this in Iraq and Afghanistan, all these different situations where there are certain times when the mistakes that are made, we had the horrific case with a joint base Lewis McCord soldier who killed 17 Afghan civilians. That's a crime. That was intentional crime. He's been prosecuted and convicted. But I don't see any evidence of that level of criminal intent, but it's war. And in war mistakes will happen. I'm sorry, the second part of your question was... Yeah, no, I think there is that balance to be struck. But again, I think the administration, and all administrations seem to have this attitude, we can share nothing if we share any information and instantaneously are going to make us vulnerable. Which of course is particularly ironic in this day and age when it comes out anyway. Part of their justification for not talking to Congress is well, we don't trust Congress not to leak it. And a lot of the times where Congress learns about it is we read it in the paper from stuff that was leaked by the administration. Wouldn't it be better to have told us in the first place? And again, I understand sources and methods. And I understand that very, very well. Served on the Intel committee. You want to protect that. But how does it make us more vulnerable to simply come out in one paragraph and say here's what we know about this guy. This is why we took this shot. It was in self-defense because this person is affiliated with this group that are plotting these attacks against Western targets. People will then, and I'm also aware of the fact that if you do that, how do you know? You've got to tell us. Then you can say it's classified. But it at least makes justification. I think the administration and President Obama's speech, Mr. Brennan gave a speech and Jay Johnson when he was still a counsel at DOD gave a speech all in the last year which sort of laid this out. I think the administration sometimes believes that they assemble all the different facts, they give a speech and then it's done. We explained it to you. Leave us alone. We're going to go back to work. It is a more constant process of justifying and explaining your actions. A message has to be repeated. As a campaign person, I already said the moment at which those of us working closely on the campaign are absolutely sick to death of our message is the moment at which it is just beginning to penetrate with the people we are trying to reach. So you have to repeat. You can't just sort of sum it all up. I told you, you're supposed to believe it and leave me alone. That's why I think a little greater transparency and why we do the strikes would be helpful. And I think you can do it in a way that doesn't jeopardize national security. Okay, let's see. How about right here in the middle? Hi, I'm Pat Hoes with Defense Daily. Congressman, you keep on saying that we're at war. We're at war. And we are. But your remarks remind me of what General Geop said about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, where we may kill more of their soldiers, but eventually we will tire of the war. The fact of the matter is that budgets are down. Sequestration is the law of the land. How much longer can the United States afford to be fighting all these wars all over the world against an enemy that will continue to respawn as long as we are prosecuting these efforts? It just seems that we have a limited amount of money, but our prosecution does need ever more amounts. Yeah. In this case, I disagree with you very, very strongly. The answer to the question is how much longer can we prosecute this war as long as it takes is the answer. This is not Vietnam. This is not some domino theory abstraction. This is a group of people who as we sit here today are trying to figure out how to kill as many of us as possible. And we need to figure out how to stop them. Now, the good news in that is it's not quite as expensive as you described. Hopefully what we've learned in the last decade as I said earlier is that full-scale 100,000 troop invasions are not, they're unbelievably expensive and they're not a successful way to prosecute this war. But if we build partner capacity, if we maintain our intel, it is far, far cheaper to do this than people realize. We have built an excellent infrastructure. We are tracking them and by and large we've been very successful as we know at disrupting those al-Qaeda cells that are targeting us. The larger problem is the ideology, is the metastasization of it and the problems in country after country that has poor governance that just creates a huge opening for extremist ideologies. But that's a different problem. That's a problem, frankly that the rest of the world and those countries are most responsible for. The specific problem of stopping terrorist groups that are plotting attacks against us has to be something we can't give up on that. We can't say, nah, we're just going to stop trying to stop them and see what happens. And I think we can do it in a cost-effective manner and I think we have to. Now it would be vastly more easy to do if we would get rid of this ridiculous isolationist know-nothing nihilism that the federal government is awful and we must cut it. People say the Tea Party is running this country, the Tea Party is not running this country, Grover Norquist is running this country. Grover Norquist who said he doesn't want to eliminate the federal government, he just wants to shrink it now into a small enough size so he can drown it in his bathtub. That is the ideology that the Republican House is governing on. And we can argue all day long about how big the government should be and there's plenty of things wrong with the Democratic Party. I'm not going to argue that at all. But when you come to the point where you consistently kick the crap out of the federal government by not funding it, not passing appropriations bills, threatening a shutdown every four months, threatening not to raise the debt ceiling because that will quote stabilize the economy, that undermines our ability. Now I hope that at some point we will get over this. That definitely makes it more difficult. But again, it's too important a problem to walk away from. Congressman Bear McConnell mostly retired. What about domestic use of drones? DoD is quite constrained. CBP not so much. What are your thoughts? It's a difficult issue. I will sidestep it slightly by saying that's not the topic this morning. I'm more focused on the AUMF and the broader world. It's a huge problem. We've had that issue and it's not just drones, it's cameras. Cameras are proliferating. A major controversy in the city of Seattle right now that they wanted to put cameras up in the port of Seattle and there's backlash against it. There have been counties and cities that wanted to get drones for very different things and people are concerned about it. I could give a lengthy, lengthy answer about the policy implications of all that. I'll just sum up by saying it's a big challenge because a lot of time you want to have that information. You think about the people who we've captured because of the camera and the bombing in Boston. The fact that there were so many cameras around enabled us to fairly quickly catch by itself. It's security versus liberty and people have been debating that for a long time and that debate is getting increasingly complicated due to technology. Alright, let's see. Right in the back here. Yep, the hat. Thank you. I'm Andre Silverzio and I'm a U.S. Army colonel retired and used to teach counterinsurgency working for the interstate travel company in Michigan now. Anyway, this is I have to say, I think it's the most brilliant, lucid, objective description of how we use drones and why we use drones and the whole thing of trying to deal with the terrorist threat from whatever source. Now, my question is this on drones. My feeling is from hearing President Obama's, for example, speech at the N-D-U on national security and your presentation this morning is that his idea, what he's working towards is phasing out drones using them now for the reasons you articulated. We're in a war and then they work to the targets that are targeting us. But you gave such a great description as he has to of the blowback and the long range problem encountering their etiology. So my question is this, do you believe that his intention, which was implicit in his comment, the war on terrorism like all wars must end? Well, implicit in that is dealing with the ideological part by phasing out the drones and turning this over the handling of remnants of Al Qaeda or whoever over to police forces and cooperation among police forces and intelligence agencies. And Senator Kerry believes that when he said I think that is the intent. This is also a challenge and this is one of the battles that we fight in Congress. Senator Graham is on the exact opposite side of this, for instance. This is the controversy over Al Libby captured in Libya. And they basically think that we should treat it as a war, it should be in military custody. Heck, they were very aggressive about trying to say that anyone we capture affiliated with these groups should be in military custody here domestically. And basically the entire argument for that is that there is perceived that there is some greater value that you can get out of questioning somebody in military custody than questioning them in a traditional law enforcement setting. Well, debate that a little bit. I think the FBI has had a reasonable amount of success in getting information out of people in a traditional law enforcement setting. But even granting for the moment that maybe there's a little bit more information you can get out of the military custody setting, the downside of the perpetual war approach is what is being missed. And the fact that our allies, the Muslim world, the U.S. citizens get tired of a perpetual war approach. Now to the extent, and that's why closing Guantanamo, the other thing I didn't mention about remarks that I meant to, you know, we need to move towards getting rid of indefinite detention. Of getting rid of the notion that we in the U.S., uniquely amongst all countries, have the right to grab anyone in the world and hold them without charge indefinitely. Now we may have a justification for that. I understand the benefit of it, but the downside in terms of winning that broader ideological war is enormous and cannot simply be dismissed. As much as I would like, well I wouldn't actually like to live in this world, but as much as some people would like to live in the world where once we decide something is important to us everybody else just has to fall in line, that's not the way the world works, all right? We have got to figure out how to work with them. And one of the most important things we can do is move back towards, I guess the cliche in Congress would be regular order, okay? Which is we got a constitution, we've got a court system, which once upon a time was the envy of the world. To the extent that we get back to that, that helps us in that broader ideological war. You have mentioned closing Guantanamo a few times, so I did want to make sure you had an opportunity to talk a little bit about that. There are various ways one can do that, in combination or in singular, transfer release movement to a U.S. civilian or military U.S.-based facility. Do you have a preferred approach to how one gets to closing Guantanamo? Absolutely. I really don't think it's all together that complicated once we decide we're going to do it. One of my former staff members just moved over to the Pentagon to help work on this effort and Paul knows this in great detail, but there's somewhere in the neighborhood a couple have been released, so I think we're down to roughly 160 folks there. And well over half of them, a long time ago, have been deemed to be releaseable. But there are concerns, the recidivism and all of that. But you would release those who were releasable back to their home country. Is there a risk in that? Absolutely. Every time you release anyone from incarceration, there's risk. But the argument then would be once you're arrested, we're just never going to release you because there's a risk if we release you. That's not good criminal justice policy, and I don't think it's good counter-terrorism policy. And everybody else down there that we determine for whatever reason that we cannot release or if we've tried them and convicted them, we will house them here in the United States. And there are many, many public policy arguments over the course of my career that have frustrated me because it's amazing how quickly people leaped incorrect conclusions and then they seem irreversible. But the notion that we cannot hold dangerous people safely in the United States to me is patently absurd. And yet it drives the debate. The reason that we have not closed Guantanamo, because keep in mind, this wasn't some big liberal goal. Gates, John McCain, George W. Bush said we should close Guantanamo. Why haven't we? Well, I'll skip the political argument for the moment and just say that the argument was grown, grew, that oh my goodness, if we bring them here it's placing us at risk. We can't bring dangerous criminals into the U.S. And that argument took hold. And some people used it for political purposes. In the United States of America right now, we have mass murderers. We have some of the most violent nihilistic people you could possibly imagine. We have terrorists. Ramsey Yusef, the blind shake, on and on, they're in the U.S. If we as a society cannot safely hold dangerous people, then we have problems that have nothing to do with Guantanamo. We can absolutely safely hold them here and we should. It's just that simple. Congress continues to block it. And how do we get around that argument? I don't know. Like I said, once it takes hold it becomes intractable. But the solution is simple. Release the ones who can be released. Lock up the rest in supermax facilities here in the U.S. just like we've done with countless other folks. Okay, time for one last question. Right over here. Colonel Ethan Griffin, Air Force Fellow here at CSAS. Representative Smith, thank you for being here today. You talked about building partnership capacity. What role do unmanned systems play in that? For example, ought the MTCR be revised? I'm sorry? Aught the MTCR be revised to allow U.S. leadership in that field? MTCR, you lost. Technology control regime? Yeah, well, there's a couple of pieces to that. Unmanned systems, by and large, number one biggest thing they are is an ISR platform. Basically an ability to gather information. And that's one of the capacities that our partners don't have. That's one of the problems we pull out about Afghanistan. How do we build that capacity of Afghanistan for that? So I think they can play a role. And one of the things I worry about is we've got this paranoia now about selling these systems. We've got a huge problem right now in Italy and elsewhere. And I just think that's a huge mistake. I've actually done a great deal of work on export control. And I think our export control policy has been a disaster because it's based on the premise that somehow we in the U.S. are the only ones that are capable of building military equipment. So if we don't let it out it'll never happen. That really doesn't work particularly well. What it does do is it devastates domestic industry in our industrial base. Satellites are the greatest example of this. When ITAR was passed in the late 90s we had roughly two thirds of the global satellite market. We're now down to about 20%. And understand how ITAR worked. And I'll circle back specifically to drones in a second. Basically if a component part that you sold would go into a satellite you couldn't sell it overseas without going through a complicated, you know, complicated doesn't begin to describe it. So basically if you sold a bolt that went into a satellite you could not export that bolt to anybody without going through this regime which was virtually impenetrable. So I think we need to have a more open way of looking at this. People are going to develop drone technology. We certainly should sell it to our allies. We certainly should. We need to build partner capacity so that they develop these capabilities that are able to do it. We're concerned about these things falling into the wrong hands. And I get that. But, you know, Iran they fall into the wrong hands whether we're not selling them to our allies or not. So I think we have an overly paranoid approach to export controls that ultimately harms us. So I think we have reformed it. One of the things that we got in the NDAA last year was a pretty dramatic reform of the export control regime which gave the administration flexibility and that's moving forward I think in a positive direction. But the regime right now is extremely problematic and the finally I'll say about this is it's very problematic because it harms domestic US industry. And I used to have these arguments on the Armed Services Committee in which a series of people would be yelling at me that we can't choose, you know, we can't choose corporations and businesses and international security. And I tried in vain for better than a decade to explain that that wasn't the choice, okay, because our industrial base is enormously important to our national security. One of the great advantages that we've had for decades is the best brightest companies in technology and equipment, you name it, were US companies. Now that's not to say that we can't buy things from overseas companies, but trust me we have a vastly better relationship with a US based company to meet our industrial base needs for national security if they are the leaders and if we hamstring them so that they can't compete they will cease to be the leaders. And once they cease to be the leaders we lose a national security advantage that is not insignificant. Now there's no way to, the rest of the world is coming up off the ground, they're going to develop technology we're not going to dominate the way we dominated post World War II but I would still like to lead and to hamstring domestic US companies ability to get markets is extremely problematic, so I think we need to reform that as well. Let me just briefly mention that CSIS in November will be beginning an unmanned systems drones working group series. We're going to look at a lot of these issues that have come up today related to drones. I ask the audience to join me in thanking Representative Smith for spending time today and giving us a great talk. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.