 And I'd like you to pass you over to our moderator for the next panel, Professor Colin Jackson who is with us from the strategy department. Thank you. So today's panel or the closing panel here is entitled National Security in the Maritime Force. Very broad topic but we were blessed to have a tremendous array of speakers here to talk to you on this issue. It's certainly a pleasure for me to introduce them, it's a treat for you to hear them. And I want to emphasize a couple of things in opening one. What is special about this panel is on one level the range of expertise and professional backgrounds on this panel. You're not only going to hear from scholars but also from distinguished practitioners, legislators who have dealt with the array of issues, some of which have been raised this morning and some of which we will explore here later. I'd add a second piece though and I think it's critically important. The common denominator on this panel is extensive and selfless public service and in a society where selfless service is somewhat of a deficit these days you're looking at a panel that has gone above and beyond in various capacities in the United States government. I do want to start with a thought here and this is connected to some of the themes that were raised on the first panel by several of the distinguished speakers thereafter. And I want to reference back to a very old book, Strategy and the Missile Age published in 1959 by Bernard Brody. He wrote an interesting book and the chapter in this book, Strategy and the Missile Age, was entitled Strategy Wears a Dollar Sign. And in it he has this sort of interesting call, again remember 1959. He says, we do not have and probably never will have enough money to buy all the things we could effectively use for our defense. The choices we have to make would be difficult and painful even if our military budget were twice what it is today. The fact that we are dealing with a less or some only makes choices harder and more painful. And so what I've asked the panel to do within the broad purview of talking about strategic challenges, how that might relate to resources and attention, which are always finite, I'm looking forward to your hearing from the panel members. So first I'd like to introduce the Honorable J. Randy Forbes, Congressman, for a number of years from the Hampton Roads region in Virginia. He served 16 years in the House of Representatives. He brings almost unparalleled experience on the legislative side in dealing with the issues that are most current and most important for this audience. He served as chairman of the subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces from 2013 to 2017. He also served as chairman of the subcommittee on Readiness from 2011 to 2013. In both of those capacities he was not only a legislator but an expert on a series of issues directly relevant to our discussion today. That is Navy policy, shipbuilding programs, weapons procurement, naval aviation, long range bombers, and far more. So it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to Congressman Forbes for his thoughts. Well thank you and I want to first of all thank Dr. Jackson for moderating our panel today. Thank all of you for allowing us to be here and let me just tell you what an honor it is for me to be with Eric and Sarah and I always tell Eric when I just get to sit behind by osmosis I pick up so many good ideas. So it's a delight to be on this panel and when I looked around today I know that many of you have been immersed for the last several months in strategic thinking and in national defense issues and so I had succumbed to the temptation that I was going to come in here today and immerse you further in some of those data points with the hopes of perhaps opening up additional avenues of thought for you. But I changed all of that yesterday when Mike Sherlock who's become a very dear friend of mine stopped my my office and we were talking so I'm going to blame this all on Mike but as we were talking we were talking about this panel we were talking about these students and Mike said something that was very interesting he said Randy these men and women are getting ready to leave here and they have the potential to change the world said you are coming in and you've spent 16 years looking at this through the lens of members of congress and legislators you've also been able to see how the administration works in this and you've been able to sit in the seats where they're seated. What is it that you would tell them in 10 to 15 minutes that would be the most important thing you think you could offer them to go out and help them change that world? And so I shifted what I was going to say and I came in earlier today as you began this forum and I purposely stood in the back and I watched the speakers but I also watched the people in the audience and I watched what they were paying attention to I watched the interaction and this is the assessment that I made. Many of you seated in here today wearing a uniform if you look to your right or you look to your left you will see not just some of the smartest people in our country but some of the most dedicated and committed people to national defense and to maritime forces and I'm going to use maritime forces in the navy interchangeably today but if you look at the people who are wearing the suits the men and women they also have been incredibly successful and they are committed here today to helping you and the question that I look at when I see all of that talent I thought if I could just for a moment virtually remove you and put in your place the group of people who would have sat in those same seats last year they also would have been incredibly smart they would have been incredibly committed and if I could have done that the year before that and the year before that and the year before that and for a decade I would have seen essentially the same brilliant people the same delving into the ideas the same degree of commitment that would have been there there was nothing that happened that I know of in any of these halls where a light turned on and in the last 10 years we said oh my gosh we have been wondering in the darkness for all of this time and now suddenly the light has gone off and we are changing no big curriculum change that is just revolutionized how we're looking at national defense so if that's the case over this last 10 years with all of the talent that's in this room let me just give you one statistic that just bothers me it keeps me up at night it worries me among all the others that we could delve into and it's simply this in 2007 the navy was able to meet 90 percent of our combatant commanders validated requirements last year we will meet less than 42 so if you just take that one statistic then what has happened with all of this brilliance all of these ideas that those curved lines are continuing to go like this and if I could be so bold if we can't turn them around we cannot succeed and we can't win so I thought about the essence of everything we study here boils down to one basic principle which is the importance of asking the right questions and so I realized this your goal is not to find the perfect answer your goal is to strive for the right questions and then to believe in the answers that you find and so this afternoon what I wanted to do I started off with six but I whittled it down to five because of time I want to offer you those five questions that I think with everything else you've studied I hope that you can ask an answer and I believe if you can do it successfully we can turn those curve lines around and the first question is simply this it's one I would ask people coming in my office I wasn't trying to find the answer I was trying to find out whether they knew the answer and the answer is simply this why should the citizens of the United States invest in the navy we need somebody a friend of mine said why should we buy the navy we need and it's not a purchase it is an investment we send our sons and daughters and our brothers and our sisters and our mothers and fathers that's an investment that's not a purchase but you would be shocked at how many people would come in my office over the years and I would look at them and say tell me why we need to invest in the navy we need and they would begin giving me jargon that would make very little sense and you know one of the things that I would do throughout my career if I had the luxury of being where Dr. Jackson sits today and I would have elected officials or leaders business or otherwise I'd always look at them and I would say this you know we live in a world of change and I hear over and over again how the successful business people the ones who adapt to change but then I'd ask them this is there anything any set of principles any core thing that if we change that we cease to be the united states and you know the one thing that would constantly come up after watching their eyes roll for a little bit of time is the concept of liberty and I know that's almost a dinosaur term right now but you know liberty was still the core of what this nation stands for and when I hear about losing to China perhaps losing to Russia that's not some kind of tennis match that I jump over the net at the end and congratulate them because they're now number one and i'm number two it's a change in world order and and liberty at its fundamental basis is not license it's dependent upon a rule of law and so when someone asks me why should we invest in the navy that we need I tell them it's so that we can defend liberty and protect a world order that gives us the opportunity for liberty to survive and the second thing I'll tell you is this they oftentimes ask why is maintaining the right navy more important than all the other investments we could make as a nation how many times do we hear that and I just want to offer this to you today that if someone comes up to you and says why the navy why not all the other options we have as legislators we have as americans that we could put our money in these different spots what is it that you tell them why the navy is so important why maritime forces is so important and let me just answer it this way the second greatest threat to liberty in the world today is a war between major powers the greatest threat to liberty in the world today is losing a war to major powers and if that's the case and we come in here not with humility not trying to be politically correct almost every analyst I know in the world recognizes that over the next decade maybe two or three the greatest force in the world for preventing and deterring that war from stopping and from guaranteeing that we will win if it happens is going to be the united states navy and our maritime forces and if that is indeed the case this is not some game of horseshoes where close is enough close to deterrent but falling short isn't enough coming close to winning is not enough that's why we don't get the option of asking what navy do we want we don't get the option of asking what nation what navy do we think we can afford to buy but we've got to be able to ask as a nation what is the navy we need what are the maritime forces we need to guarantee that deterrence and to guarantee that we can win if that war happens and the third question I would say that helps answer what that navy looks like or to the next two questions and the third question is how will you use history you know history here is it's a funny thing because history is the only way we get perspectives on the world that we live in because the future is just always just off my fingertips and I can't get my hands around it the present goes through those fingertips so quick I almost miss it but history is the way I get a perspective whether it's 10 minutes ago or 10 centuries ago but the key in the world we live in today is finding truth not political correctness but truth in that history if we want the right perspective years ago I had in my office a scientist and he had spent 17 years researching a cure for an illness that he was passionate about fixing he developed a cure for it but at the end of all the text the testing he found it was too toxic to work and I remember looking at him and looking at his in his eyes and saying how did it feel I wasn't very sensitive I know when I asked this but I said how did it feel to spend 17 years of your life and fail and he looked back at me as if I was the most foolish thing in the world and he said Randy we didn't fail we now have 17 years of research about what not to do so that we can cure this illness and that's the way we need to use history but I'll tell you history is not going to work that for that way for us unless we're the arbiters of truth in that history and make sure we are finding the accurate history to base that on the other question that I think helps us get to the role we need for the right navy is how we will use strategy if that's a big word around these halls and if I were able to take 10 professors and sit them at a dinner with me I guarantee you we couldn't find a definition of strategy and over and over again I will hear some of my friends here when we talk about strategy they'll say that's not what I mean by strategy I mean this so I'm not interested in your definition of strategy I'm interested in how you use strategy and if you use as stock as secretary layman said today strategy as some secret that we hide in a safe somewhere if you use it as some big secret football play that we're going to bring out when we absolutely need it so we can win the big game you have lost the opportunity to change those curve lines because we have got to find ways not just to formulate strategy but to articulate strategy and to implement strategy when I hear people asking me why doesn't congress change those curve lines why don't they do the funding in 16 years I plead it for people please come in my office please put up on a chart what your strategy is what the resources we need to implement that strategy and what the risk are going to be if we don't resource it and I guarantee you these members will come by and support that and they don't do it you know why because one they don't have it or two if they put it up and they're not resourcing it we can find out those gaps and so what I want to plead with you is not to use strategy that way to formulate it articulate it implement it and then to do this inspired in your superiors demand it in your subordinates and prioritize it in your life and then the last thing I leave with you this afternoon that I think is important if we're going to change those curve lines is you need to ask yourself what's the destiny of this country you know we don't talk about that much anymore but years ago I had a world leader I won't give you his name now but he was very important on the world scene he had done a lot with terrorism I was speaking at a conference and he was there and he'd invited me to be at his table and in the middle of it he looked at me and he said you know Randy he said I've seen terrorism more than probably any world leader in the country today and he said I love America I love the United States and he said I really love the Midwest and of course being a good Virginia and I quickly looked at him and said why do you love the Midwest why not Virginia and he said oh I love Virginia he said but I've been to Virginia I've never been to the Midwest and he said I know this morning that in the Midwest there are men and women getting up to take their children to school to go to little league ball practices to go to piano recitals to go to work to do all of those things the weather is probably pretty and wonderful and they've got to be asking this question why us why do we carry this on our shoulders sometimes feeling we do it alone and he said please tell them this it's one word it's destiny he said because whether they like it or not when you're an American you carry with you a destiny and your destiny is not to be the policeman of the world it's not to be the bully of the world it's not even to be the protector of the world he said it's to do good in the world and you do good in the world but the only reason you can do good in the world is because you have the greatest military in the world and I believe if you find answers to those five questions if you believe in those answers if we will take those answers outside of these walls I believe we can turn those curve lines around and we can make sure we're reaching that destiny we were all born to reach thank you thank you very much the our second speaker here is ambassador Eric Edelman who is a retired foreign service officer and career minister from the foreign service he is currently serving as the counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and also as the Hirtog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Johns Hopkins SICE from 2009 to 2013 he was a senior associate at Belfort at Harvard University he's also a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute for Peace for our purposes equally important he has served across a series of different government positions including Under Secretary of Defense for Policy between August 2005 and 2009 he was also the ambassador to the republics of Finland and Turkey and he served as well as the Deputy or Principal Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs for Vice President Dick Cheney so here we have an individual with tremendous breadth and experience and we look forward to his thoughts on these topics Colin thank you and it's great to be here thanks to Mike for inviting me to come up and it's really great to be here both with Sarah and with Randy and I want to return the favor because Randy said some nice things about me I want to tell you that it's very fashionable to pick on the United States Congress I think the approval rating for the Congress now is in the high single digits but we tend to forget that there are some incredibly hardworking members of the Congress who do a lot for the nation and Randy is one of those and I can tell you from personal experience both having had to testify before the hask when he was a member when I was in the executive branch but also in my post-government career in retirement which my wife by the way says I'm flunking retirement because I used to have one job now I've got like three as you heard from Colin but Randy was unique I mean I served on the 2010 independent panel at Congress appointed to review the QDR I then served four years later on the National Defense Panel that Congress appointed to review the 2014 QDR and the chairman of the committee who whose designee I was asked to see me both chairman Buck McKean and Mac Thornberry but only one member of that 50 plus committee asked me to come in and brief him as we were going through our work about how we were doing that was Randy Forbes and I think Randy I think as you all know has done a tremendous amount in the Congress for the US Navy and I think you all are lucky to have him I know at CSBA where he's just joined the board we're lucky to have him so Randy thank you for for what you've done looking at the hour I'm mindful of when I was an undergraduate faculty member who taught a western civ course that met at this hour which was colloquially known as the decline of interest so I'm going to try and at least maintain people's interest a bit and I want to try and answer Collin's question about strategy wearing a dollar sign as Bernard Brody said by pointing out that Brody was not the first of course to note that resources are a crucial way of evaluating strategy in the two great books he wrote during World War II that still I think bear reading today Walter Lipman in war aims and in foreign policy the shield of the republic talked about the dangers of statesmen following strategies that were not adequately resourced and how they could come a cropper by by doing that and Samuel Huntington in the late Samuel Huntington in the early 1980s called this the Lipman test and talked about the solvency of US national strategy and I think we are at a kind of inflection point that's a horribly hackneyed freight and a phrase in Washington we say it all the time but I think we really are at an inflection point when it comes to the solvency of the traditional strategy that the nation has followed since 1945 of upholding a particular kind of of world order as Randy was saying a minute ago and why is that the case well first I think it's because whether we completely recognize it or not we have moved we are moving into a different strategic era the post Cold War era that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 I think probably came to an end roughly around the time of the 2008-2009 Great Recession and it was an era that was notable for first a really huge asymmetric US military advantage we had military primacy across the globe we had well we were spending 14 we were spending more money than the other 14 next nations combined so that military primacy was one fundamental element of that post Cold War period but there was also precious little geopolitical competition the Soviet Union had collapsed China was still very much in the early phases of its so-called peaceful rise and we just didn't have big geopolitical competitors anywhere in fact in 1992 the Defense Department engaged in an effort to create defense planning guidance that basically said we want to keep it that way for as long as possible try and prevent any other peer competitor from emerging on the scene we also had what was called the Washington Consensus or what my former now retired CICE colleague Michael Mandelbaum called the work the ideas that conquered the world there was a general consensus that free market capitalism was essentially the way that nations could get themselves rich and prosper and survive in the modern world there was a general disposition towards greater international cooperation the Russians wanted nothing so much as to join the G7 which became the G8 so they could become part of these international groups and work in a cooperative manner China wanted to get into the WTO and become a part of the international trading order all of those things are now radically changed our military primacy remains in in place in the sense that there is no global peer competitor but we face enormous challenges from countries that have not been involved as general Neller was saying earlier for the last 15 years in stabilization and counter-insurgency missions but have been modernizing their forces and are prepared for a high-end fight and we have not in some areas they have absolute a geographical advantage because they're playing a home game and we're playing in a way game and there is a a mismatch in the capabilities that they can bring to bear and what we can bring to bear for the moment the Washington consensus has begun to fray as many many countries raise questions about the international trading order about the rules who sets the rules etc and we have a return of geopolitical competition and in fact we have a rise of alternative models to the Washington model we have a rise in in many countries of authoritarianism and you just heard Misha Oslin I say I think say correctly that we we need to think more about populism both in Asia and in in Europe where it has arisen and created other political challenges to the to the global order the declining military primacy of the United States are shrinking advantage over other countries has all sorts of corrosive effects to global order first there's a question around the world right now about whether the United States leadership remains committed to the global order I think certainly you know secretary Mattis secretary Tillerson HR McMaster are committed to the global order the president's commitment frankly is I think a little bit more open to question at least among allies and and so I think that's an issue the the declining primacy is an issue for our ability to assure our allies that we will be there and be able to defend them and make good on the security commitments that we have to them if we if we get into a fight it's a problem for deterrence because of the regional mismatch I discussed a second ago we have to worry I think that our adversaries may think they could have imposed a fair comply on us in their region before we would have a chance to respond it's it's a problem for actually being able to defend them if push came to shove and we actually had to execute our war plans some of you may have seen it just in the last two days general Dunford has talked about the fact that in the within the next five years unless we change the curves that Randy was talking about we will not be able to project power in many parts of the world because of the capabilities our adversaries can bring to bear and the difficulties we would encounter if we if we tried to to do that so and it's I'd add one more thing which is it's disempowering to our diplomacy and I speak now as you know former 30-year American diplomat and one of my favorite quotations is from you know George Kennan who when he was speaking to a national war college audience in 1946 said you have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and constructiveness of diplomacy if you have a little quiet force in the background and that's certainly my experience my professional experience as well so we have a range of commitments around the world to defend friends and allies we have treaty commitments to our multilateral treaty allies in Europe in NATO we have treaty commitments to our bilateral allies in in Asia Japan the Republic of Korea we have some commitments to provide for the defense of Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act and we have a number of special relationships that we've undertaken in the Middle East over the years with Israel with Egypt with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia we have far flung commitments and the question is are we adequately resourcing a military to be able to both deter conflict and if deterrence fails to be able to to fight and defend our allies and I think the answer to that is no certainly I think that's the answer that Secretary Mattis and and General Dunford gave last night in the testimony that most of you have a life and we're probably watching Cleveland and Golden State play last night for those of us who don't have a life we watched the hearing which went from seven to about 1130 or I think it was 1130 I actually fell asleep but but that was the answer that that they gave and the question is what will it take to to build that back now the president and particularly relevant to this audience I mean a lot of what it will take is is rebuilding our navy I mentioned the two independent congressional panels on which I served which looked at this question I mean and interestingly in the 2014 panel we said having talked to the two previous cno's who told us that with the current vector of shipbuilding the navy was not even going to be able to maintain its presence mission that is to say the mission we have today of reassuring our allies and deterring just by presence and we concluded that the navy needed actually to be somewhere we came up with the magic numbers of 323 and 346 where did we get those numbers from that's sort of you know what kind of analysis did we do because it was just a panel of 10 people and we didn't have a very big staff and we didn't have a lot of time to do the analysis well we let other people do our analysis for us so we started with secretary Gates's FY 12 budget which was the last budget the department of defense was able to do before the budget control act started to impose all sorts of arbitrary caps on the budget and the the shipbuilding budget in that budget called for 323 ships we then went back to the bottom up review that was done in the 1990s which was meant to take place in a much more benign security environment which called for 346 ship ship navy so we said okay well somewhere in between there is probably the right number well now we've got more analysis and science behind it because the congress in its in its wisdom in the last NDAA commissioned three different studies one by the navy one by an independent think tank which was done at csba on the architecture of the fleet and one done by an ffr dc which was mitre and the number that everyone seems to have come up with is about somewhere in the range of 350 to 355 and the president in his speech in philadelphia calling for a rebuild of the u.s. military lo and behold called for a 350 ship navy question is can you get there from the budget that's been presented to the congress of 603 billion dollars and the answer to that is no so somehow some way if we want to maintain the solvency of our traditional strategy we're going to have to figure out a way to get out of this conundrum of the budget control act and the caps and fulfill what is actually the congress's primary obligatory responsibility under the constitution the constitution says that the congress must actually provide for the common defense it may do a lot of other things but defense is the first order of business thank you for those remarks