 Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to resume. I'm going to introduce our moderator, Tom Ricks, who's an ASU Fellow at New America, known to many of you as the writer of many important books on the US military, Fiasco, The Gamble, The Generals, just to name a few. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and I'll hand it over now to Tom to introduce Senator McCain. I can't think of a group that needs less of an introduction to someone than Senator McCain. You all know who he is. You know he's an American hero, and you know he's a fun guy to talk to. What's up? Senator McCain, welcome. It's a real honor to have you here, and we've had the parade of the circus come through. Now you and I are going to clean up after the elephant. There you go. You know what? There's a story about that, the guy that did that all these years, and somebody said to him, why do you keep doing this? Why don't you go out and get another job? And he said, what, and leave showbiz? Anyway, that's the kind of way I feel being with you, because I should be questioning the expert rather than vice versa. I know nobody who understood the war, the conflict in Iraq, as well as Tom Ricks, and reported on it in depth and candor, and taught a lot of us a lot about it. So thank you, Tom. We're here at the end of a two-day conference on the future of war. There's been lots of talk about blurred lines between war and peace, about ambiguous situations, about no distinction being left between public and private, foreign, and domestic. Is the US military ready for this world? Well, first let me say, I'm not sure they're going to be ready for any conflict if sequestration continues. We had a hearing with all four of the Uniform Service Chiefs. All of them, obviously, at the top of their profession. And Senator Angus King of Maine asked them, said, if sequestration continues, we'll let's put the lives of the men and women under your command in danger. All four of them said, yes. My friends, I can sit here and Tom and I could spend the rest of this time we have together and identify waste and mismanagement and ways to save money in the Pentagon. But with the meat acts of sequestration, that's not the way to do it. And we are really impacting in so many ways that are not really visible right now. And one of them, by the way, that disturbs me, probably more than anything else, is that some very highly qualified, high quality men and women, both in senior non-commissioned officer ranks and mid-level officer ranks are leaving. They're just tired of it. Are you talking to people who are leaving? Oh, yeah. What are you hearing? They tell me we're tired of it. I don't know where I'm going next. We don't have the proper training. We can't operate. Pilots are flying two days a month to people down in a talk to down in Fort Bragg. They haven't had a real operational readiness exercise. And they can't remember. As you know, Tom, the first thing that happens when you cut the military is they cut the readiness, the operations, and maintenance. Those that are the easiest and yet have the most long-lasting effect. So first of all, right now, if we keep up sequestration, I'm not sure we are going to be able to defend the country given the enormous increase in threats since sequestration was enacted. But let's say that sequestration is not. Let's say we're able to reverse it. I think we're going through a period of adjustment to the new kinds of conflicts, the ideologies, the sectarian aspects of the conflicts, which you first saw back in 2001, 2002, 2003. And I think we need to have a far better understanding. What Henry Kissinger testified before the Armed Services Committee and what we are seeing is the breakdown of the old world order. The nation state is now breaking down throughout the Middle East. How do you make a military better prepared to adapt to that new world order or new world disorder? One thing that we have to understand is that when one group of people can inflict an attack on the United States as they did 9-11, and that changes everything the way we do business. Anybody who gets on an airliner knows that. Anybody who understands the need for security that has cost trillions to react to 9-11. And obviously, their objective is to attack the United States, not to defeat the United States, but to attack the United States. So I think we have a lot of adjusting to do to this new form of warfare. We have some very bright people in the military. Some of these young generals and colonels I've been incredibly impressed with. And they're sort of working through it at places like Fort Leavenworth and others. I'd just like to give you one example. After the attack, after we invaded Iraq, David Petraeus went back to Fort Leavenworth, as you know. And he spent two years with some of the brightest people he could find. And he came up with a strategy that worked, the surge. When we were losing, you chronicled that, as well as any other observer that I know. But he had developed a strategy that did succeed. And the US Army bitterly resented him for it. They resented him for it. He liked politicians. He talked to reporters. And he was successful in Iraq. In the army, that was three strikes. I'm not quite that cynical. But I do know that around him, he recruited a cadre of young people that looked up to him and admired him so much that he did leave behind in the United States Army a group of the Colonel McFarlane's, the originator of the N-bar awakening. And those people are still there. I would bet you the majority have left the army at this point. I'm afraid you may be right. I keep, because I keep on noticing it from emails, like, oh, they're working from McKinsey now and so on. I think you may be right. And one of the aspects of the military that you have seen and I have seen over my lifetime is there's really two ways up. One is the political path, and the other is the performance path. And quite often, the political path ends up in the positions of highest level. But so in short, a long answer to your question is we have a lot of adjusting to do. And we are in asymmetrical warfare, and we've got to understand that. Sir Michael Howard, himself a veteran of Anzio landings, wrote that adjustment, being adaptive, is the key to future victories. How do you get a military that is more adaptive? We had General Odi Erna here this morning, basically saying the US Army, as far as he could tell, did everything right in Iraq because the problem was that the rest of the government didn't show up. That's a mighty, unreflective position to take, I think, and not one to prepare as the Army for adaptation. Well, I think that, and you would agree, that he may have been referring to the fact that once George W. Bush had the courage to fire the Secretary of Defense, fire a whole lot of people who had us on the path to defeat, which you chronicled extremely well, and brought in Petraeus and this new group of young officers that they did succeed. And my friends, they did succeed. I can show you the statistics of the reduction in attacks, the Russian, all of the indicators of success, but it required leaving a residual force, a stabilizing force behind. It required that we didn't do it now. We are paying an incredibly heavy price for it. Do they have to be more adaptive? Yes. And I'd say in one area that you and I have discussed in the past where we've got to be a lot more adaptive, and that's in acquisition. I'm glad you brought that up, because I want to ask you a question about that. But I just mentioned there are people out in Silicon Valley that I've talked to that I've said, hey, why don't you come and join us and get into the business and help us with this new information warfare challenge that we are facing, the internet, the propaganda. And they said, we don't want to have to go through that labyrinth and that obstacle course that you call acquisition in order to get a government contract. What the hell, we make products and we put it out on the market and we make money. We screw around with coming back to Washington and try and figure out how the Pentagon works. Now, that's really alarming when you see what the great advantage America has in the world is we have the most innovative people on Earth. I was out, by the way, the other day at a place called Snapchak. Have you ever heard of Snapchak? There was not a person in that room over 25 years old, including the kid that was running it, which is only worth $4 billion or something like that. You know, it's staggering. And to think that that young man would want to come and do business in the Pentagon, I mean, that would be crazy. So we've got to fix the entire acquisition system and we have failed miserably. Do you see any quick fixes for it? Well, one of the things we need to do, among other things, and I don't want to get into weeds, but we've got to make the service chiefs more responsible, put them into the acquisition process. We have to do that. At a hearing a year ago or so, the chief of naval operations was one of the witnesses. And I said, look, the Gerald R. Ford was supposed to cost $10 billion. It now costs $12.4 billion. I said, do you know who's responsible? Do you know what his answer was? You know what his answer was. No. Somebody's got to start to be held responsible for God's sake. What could my state of Arizona do with $2.4 billion? At Ash Carter's confirmation hearing, I put up a list on the wall, not on the wall, a list at the hearing of $40 billion in programs that never got started, that never turned out a product. $40 billion. I mean, it's staggering when you think about it. And here I am fighting like hell to repeal sequestration. And then, of course, this is thrown back at me. And I don't have as good an answer as I want to have. So if I would argue my priorities, repeal sequestration, but fix acquisition, fix it. And it's bound to be able to. Do you know that there's never been an audit of the Pentagon? Do you know that? There's never been an audit. Do you know that the Pentagon can't tell us how many people are in their employ? Plus the contractors. Yesterday, Missy Cummings, who you may know, like yourself, a former Navy fighter pilot, and now Professor Rick Duke. Far better than I was, yes. And she knows a hell of a lot about drones. A very impressive talk. One of the things she said about drones is she's seen that the US Defense or District is not particularly interested because the profit margin is so small. They want to build big, expensive programs, not thousands of little drones. Is there anything you can do about that? Well, first of all, I think there's going to be more money in it because we may have seen the last manned fighter aircraft in the F-35. We will have manned aircraft for logistics for a whole lot of reasons. But I think we're going to see a technology that we use drones in. It's already been proven. When a plane can loiter for 12 hours, a drone can, and fire on a target, what do you need a pilot for? Now, we're going to need pilots, but certainly not for the role that the traditional fighter and attack pilot did. And so I think there's going to be a lot of money there. I was disappointed in the ideas that the Navy initially had on what kind of drones they want, but I think we'll try and fix that. By the way, a drone landed on an aircraft carrier and took off for the first time in history not that long ago. That's huge. It's almost like the Kitty Hawk. Are you going to encourage the Navy to go for a UCAS? Absolutely. Absolutely. And do you think they're pursuing it fast enough? I don't even think they have yet decided on really what they want in drones to tell you the truth, much less whether they're going in the right direction. And so what we really need to do is have much more congressional scrutiny, but force them through the Defense Authorization Bill to come up with certain results and models and certainly definition of missions. One of the problems right now is that they're not really clear on all the kind of missions they want drones to be. Today, my friends in Ukraine, the Russians are flying little drones. And as soon as a Ukrainian soldier sees that little drone, that soldier has about 60 seconds to get the hell out of the way, because there's going to be an incoming artillery show. This is already, you can see how it's changed the way we fight wars already dramatically, the drones are playing that incredible role. Is there anybody else in Congress interested in defense issues besides you? Lindsey Graham, of course, is. Oh, that's your mini me. There you go. My illegitimate son, Lindsey Graham, we've got some new members of the committee that I'm very excited about. Joni Irons' guard, Tom Cotton, Iraq and Afghanistan. Dan Sullivan, Marine Reserve is who's had command. We're starting to get some new members who have had recent Iraq and Afghanistan experience. And that's invaluable, especially on the personnel issues. They know what it's like. They know what it's like. And so I am encouraged by this new crop. And there has been a number of new ones in the House of Representatives as well. You don't have to be good at the military in order to have had military experience. Don't get me wrong. Sam Nunn was an example of a person who never served in the military, but was an outstanding chairman. I think you would agree. But it really helps to have some people on the committee and around you that say, wait a minute, you're asking now, by the way, you're asking now, aircraft carriers deploy for 10 months. That's too long. That's too long to send young men and women away from their families. They should not have to deploy for 10 months. And lastly, allow sex abortions. I won't touch that one. I want to turn to questions from the audience. But Peter, I just have one request. The clock here has gone screwy. I have no idea if it's correct or not. So I don't know how much time we have left. Could I just mention one thing while we're fixing that? One thing that I've tried to do, when Republicans took control of the United States Senate for the first time in, I don't know how many years, in the 1980 election was the Reagan sweep, John Tower became the chairman of the Center Armed Services Committee. And what he did was, working with Scoop Jackson in a bipartisan fashion, they had a series of hearings getting the best minds in America before the committee. That's been my role model. We've had Kissinger and Schultz and Albright and Scowcroft and Brzezinski and... Anybody under 80? Well, I'm partial. Anyway, you should have had some of the people from the panels here the last couple of days. It's been very dynamic. And by the way, I think more than half women. Is that correct? And we have, also by the way, our staff, we have a very... We have the largest number of women on the Center Armed Services Committee staff that's ever in history. But so because I've wanted these new senators and there are a lot, by the way, do you know that over 60 United States senators have been there six years or less? Of the 60s, Democrat senators that voted for Obamacare, 30 are left. So there's been a really significant... Those who are for term limits here should be happy. So we really have to try to focus. We'll never succeed, but we want a policy, as much as possible, a policy-driven budget rather than just take the Pentagon's numbers and see how we can cram it into different areas. So I'm really trying to work as hard as I can on that aspect of it. And I'll tell you, the members have all been really happy to hear from these people. Yes, they're old, but there's hundreds of years of experience. These are the people that won the Cold War. These are the people that may have let us, America's finest hour in many respects. So I've been doing that and I've been very happy with the results. Now comes the hard part. Next week, Ash Carter's gonna come over with the budget and then we're gonna have one hell of a fight over sequestration. I will not vote for a budget in the United States Senate that has sequestration in it. I can't do that to the men and women who are serving. How many people are with you in the Senate on that? I don't know. I do not know. I've never been very good at counting votes, but I do know that there is real unease out there about continuing the sequestration. And there's all these meetings that go on. I've been to too many of them. Well, if we cut here and if we do away with this loophole or close that, one person's loophole is another man's. You've seen it all time after time. Okay, we're gonna go to questions. People in the audience, hold up your hands. It's a little bit hard to see you back there in the way back, okay? Yes, please. No, the guy, I think there's a hand behind you there. Yes. Thank you. Senator Brian Mangan, I'm a retired Marine. The reason I wanted to bring this question up is about a year ago, I asked the former command of the Marine Corps, General Amos, if there was a way out of sequestration. And his answer was, we've got to cut entitlements. My question is, how do we continue to ensure that the service members who are serving in the military of all branches are able to continue to serve and not be subject to pay cuts when we have this acquisition process that, as you very well stated, is considerably broken? And how do we make sure that we balance those two? Thanks, sir. First of all, we have to obviously understand the fundamental and that is we're having all volunteer force. Second, we just had in the last couple of weeks, in fact, I just left a hearing the Personnel Subcommittee, the Armed Services Committee, where this panel of very well-respected experts made recommendations on pay, benefits, retirement, et cetera. If we're going to do that, we have to show, one, that any changes should be prospective and not apply to men and women who are already serving. But I have to tell you that healthcare and benefits are now up to 20% of the defense budget. In the words of former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who was one of my really great, I think great secretaries we've had, these, quote, entitlements and benefits are, quote, eating us alive. So we're going to have to make some changes. They have to be prospective. But if we don't look out within, well, supposedly 10 years from now we're gonna go from 20 to 30% of the federal budget is going to be to entitlements and benefits. We just can't keep that up. And so this committee, or this commission that just reported out to Congress has some pretty good and innovative ideas. And one of them, by the way, is that every service member shouldn't have to wait to 20 years before they get retirement pay. That's a thought that we could keep people for 10, 12, 14, 16 years. And because right now 85% of the men and women who join the military do not get any retirement benefits. So that's kind of an idea I think we ought to kick around. But there's gonna have to be reforms to be made. I've asked Lindsey Graham to chair that subcommittee. He is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, understands these issues as well or better than any member of the United States Senate. And he's often given to suicide missions as well. So I've asked him to do that. But we're gonna have to address this issue. And could I just mention one other thing? Maybe it's a little sarcastic. But I've had so many people come up to me and said, listen, when I joined the military, I was told I'd have tri-care for life. That's the healthcare. Really? Is that why somebody at 18 joins the military because of tri-care for life? Give me a break. It might be why they re-enlist, though. Yeah, good point. But I think every 18-year-old I've ever known, including this one, I joined because I wanted to get into the fight. That's so, anyway. Would you support a tax increase to help preserve the all-volunteer force? I think it would have to be what kind of tax increase it is. And what a lot of us hope we could do, which we haven't done since 1986, is some reforms of the tax code, which over time would give us more in the way of compensation. But right now, I think it would have to be a part of tax reform rather than just say we're gonna increase taxes. It's cowardly that we haven't done tax reform. We had a question on the way back there, right under the spotlight. Peter Singer with New America. Thanks for joining us, Senator. To kick off this forum, we did a survey of our network of experts that range from technologists to lawyers to Navy SEALs, Air Force officers. And we asked them, what do we get most wrong about the future of war? And so I thought I would pose this question to a Navy officer turned senator. I think what we got wrong most of the conflicts we've been in is that you can win militarily but if you don't have the followup, you are going to lose every single thing that you've gained through force of arms. Great example of that is Libya. After we got rid of Qaddafi, and it was the right thing to do, by the way, because he was in the gates of Benghazi and where he's going to kill off several thousand people, Lindsey Graham and Joe Liebham and I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal and said, you got to do this, this, this, and this. Ranging from civil society to securing the weapons caches to helping them with border enforcement, treating their wounded, they had 30,000 wounded in no way really of treating them and build a society that had never known it. Instead, my friends, anyone will tell you, we walked away, we walked away. The same thing with Iraq after the surge succeeded and we're gonna see the same movie in Afghanistan unless we, and I'm happy to see that they're talking about now changing that calendar-based withdrawal more to conditions-based withdrawal. So I would say the first lesson is you can succeed militarily but you better have some kind of a follow-up. I was with the Emir of Qatar this morning, very interesting young man. And the question I had to him was, Bashar Assad is as big an enemy to the Arab countries as ISIS is. And I said, well, what happens afterwards? What happens afterwards in Syria? How do we make any kind of order out of chaos there? And he said, his answer was, well, we're gonna have to use some of the previous regime's people. In your book, Chaos, you talked about one of the biggest mistakes that Bremmer made was de-certifying the entire Iraqi military. That was one of the fundamental errors we made. So I guess if we're gonna go into a conflict, obviously we're going to win. But the most important lesson is is after you succeed, you have got to stay and you've got to do the grunge work, the real hard work of building a society, particularly in countries that really never knew these things. And so I think that's the biggest lesson that I have learned from all of these conflicts that we have been in. And I just finally like to add, there is many of commentators that say, well, Americans are tired of war and they're not gonna be involved. Let the fill-in-the-blank do it. Iraqis, Syria, fill-in-the-blank Afghans, whatever the conflict that's going on, fine. But I am convinced that Mr. Baghdadi wasn't kiddin' when he left our camp Buka after spending four years there when he said, I'll see you in New York. They are intent on attacking us. So if I thought we could withdraw from these places and everything as terrible as it is, the human tragedies, today we find out that they captured about 100, 150 Christians and you know what they're gonna do with them, ISIS did. But setting that aside, we have to be engaged. But once we succeed and we can succeed, we had better have plans as to how to, when the shooting stops, as to how to build a society and many times that's a place where they have never known anything like what a government is. What approach would you like to see taken to defeat ISIL? We have to have boots on the ground. We have to have forward air controllers, special forces, intel, trainers. Right now, as you know, they're only at the battalion level, they've gotta be on the ground. We've got to develop some kind of strategy for Syria. We have to rebuild the Iraqi army and believe me, that is, my friends in the military here will tell you, when an army is beaten, it's a long time to reconstitute that army. And anybody who says that the Iraqi military alone can retake Mosul obviously hasn't been talking to the same people that I have. And understand one of the truisms about warfare is air power is a vital factor, but it's not the decisive factor. Air power alone does not win conflicts. And so we're gonna have to have so many things, Tom. Why is the authorization for the use of military force ISIL only when Bashar Assad has butchered 200 and some thousand of his people? Is it because, as some people are saying, well we don't wanna alienate the Iranians who are gonna be our new partners, who are on the march everywhere in the Middle East, they're in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, our success story Yemen, the JV is there. So we have to develop an overall strategy and those elements have to have not the 82nd Airborne, not massive American troops, but significant number of American troops to do the things that these people are incapable of doing. And I know of no living American who can tell me what the strategy is to succeed not only in Iraq but in Syria. We're almost out of time. I'm gonna ask you one last question. Unless there are any two handers, my friend Elliot Cohen says two handers, which is if you don't get to ask the question, you're gonna go home muttering to your spouse. Okay. Books. I'm gonna actually let out a dirty little secret about John McCain here. He's a closet intellectual. He reads a lot of military history. I remember before one hearing it said an armed services hearing. We were talking about the Boer War and the book you were reading on it. Is what one book you've read lately that has really illuminated your view of military affairs? I like a lot history as you mentioned. I read a wonderful biography of Napoleon that's new. If you haven't read it, it is really worth a read. It'll give you an appreciation for the intellect and the capacity of this man that most of us think about Waterloo. It's amazing what he did. Also, this recent piece in The Atlantic was an in-depth study. The one by James Fallows? Absolutely. And you know, I just read an old book called There's Not to Reason Why about the Charge of the Light Brigade in Crimea in War. And I'm telling you, my friends, it's worth a read. You can't make it up how bad the British bungled the brave 600 into the valley of death. And I mean, it is a remarkable, it's an old book and I'll tell you who gave it to me was Sheldon Whitehouse who was also a student of history and a remarkable one as well. So that's about what I read Kagan's book, of course. I had to, so otherwise he wouldn't speak to me. And so I thought it was excellent. There's a lot of good thinking now about this challenge and the way things are going. And so I do read avidly. And I kind of just make it one plug very quickly and that is Ukraine. My friends, they're being slaughtered. Vladimir Putin is on the march. Mary Opal is next. Lindsay and I have predicted every move that Vladimir Putin has made because it was so predictable. But to not give these people defensive weapons is really, I think, a shameful chapter in our history. They want to defend themselves. And the rationale for not doing so well would provoke Vladimir Putin or they can't beat the Russians. My God, that is ridiculous to say something like that. The French shouldn't have come and helped us because nobody could beat the British, as you know. And we should never have helped the Afghans when Russia invaded because they couldn't beat Russia. We really need to help these people. And I'm worried about two things. One is the dismemberment of the country and the most important part of it. And the three things. Two, the collapse of their economy. And three, a reaction on the part of the Ukrainian people against their elected government, which seems to them to be failing. And that can lead to a course of events that I think could be very damaging in the long run. I met with the Lithuanian foreign minister this morning. My friends, the Baltics, are feeling enormous pressure, not to mention Moldova. And I'm not sure where Vladimir Putin stops, but if you look at it from Vladimir Putin's viewpoint, I think he's done pretty well at a relatively low cost. And I'm not sure that he has a grand plan, but I do believe he is ambitious to restore the Russian Empire. And I do believe that he's a great opportunist. If he can see taking Mary Opal and restoring the land bridge all the way to Crimea, if he can go across to Moldova and not have a cost, that's fine with him too. But already the pressure he's putting on the Baltics is really intense. And one of the ways of that is Russian television. Russian television is really, they're doing a great job. We're gonna have to catch up with things like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. And that's one of the things that Corker and Menendez and I and some others are working on. I'm very worried about how far Vladimir Putin may go in his adventurism. And there's one school of thought that says his economy will sooner or later put a break on his activities. There's another school of thought that history shows when dictators have problems, domestically they strike out more. So these are very difficult times, my dear friends. And that's why I'm glad you're here and I'm glad you care. Well, we came to talk about the future of war and we wound up talking about Napoleon and Putin, which actually may have aspects of the future of war in it. Thank you very much. Please join me in thanking Senator McKay. Thank you, Senator. Well done. Thank you. So Harold Koh yesterday talked about the authorization of the use of military force and he said supersede sunset and silence. There is nothing that I can say that would supersede the richness of the last two days of conversation and really thought provoking ideas and critiques. So I'm gonna sunset this conference, but before the silence, I do want to thank the future of war team at New America. In fact, all of the New America team, our events team, our production team, all the people you've seen who've made this conference work and in particular our co-chairs, Peter Bergen and Dan Rothenberg and Bailey Cahall and David Sturman who really put all this together. So join me in a final round of applause and thank you.