 Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today here at CSIS. My name is Kathleen Hicks. I direct the International Security Program here at CSIS and also I'm the Henry Kissinger chair. It's with great pleasure today that I introduce our main speaker and that is Ms. Christine Wormuth who is the Deputy Undersecretary Defense for Strategy Plans and Forces. Christine has been the Deputy Undersecretary for Strategy Plans and Forces since August of 2012. In that time since 2012 she's led the Quadrennial Defense Review for 2014 which is what she's here to speak about today. She also has more than 20 years of experience in the defense community both in DOD at the White House here at CSIS as a proud alumni and most importantly she is currently the President's nominee to be the Undersecretary Defense for Policy. After Christine speaks we're going to do a little bit of question and answer that I will moderate here at the table and then following her speech we're going to of course applaud to let her leave and then we'll have the panel that follows on on the budget in QDR featuring our CSIS experts. So please without further ado join me in welcoming Ms. Wormuth here to the stage. Hitch myself up there. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks very much for having me be here. As as Dr. Hicks said I am a proud alum of CSIS and boy this is my first time in the building. It is fabulous. This is a big step up from the old digs in B1 so I'm very impressed and delighted to see how well CSIS is doing. I thought I would talk to you all a little bit today about the QDR report that we just delivered to the Hill last week. Some of you may have had the opportunity to look at the document. I'll try to keep my remarks relatively brief so we'll have a lot of time for a question and answer which I think almost everyone tends to find more enjoyable. I thought before I go into sort of the substance of the QDR document it might be interesting for some of you in the audience to hear a little bit about the process. I haven't talked a lot about that but this was I think as some people know certainly a different QDR from past QDRs. I've been personally involved or observed all of the QDRs the department has done since they became sort of a requirement and I think one of the most notable differences about this QDR was the fact that we had about half the time to do the review that we normally do and I think that was a reflection frankly of primarily the very challenging environment we've had in the department for more than the past year. There's just been a tremendous amount of uncertainty particularly fiscal uncertainty that has led the department to be sort of in a continuous cycle of evaluating and trying to plan starting with when I when I took over the does deposition from Cath I went sort of straight into a program review cycle. Normally that you know wraps up at the end of the year and you have a little bit of a breather but the department basically went straight into planning for sequestration. We then undertook the strategic choices and management review and then sort of segued straight into the QDR 2014 process as well as the then the the next program review cycle so it's been a very challenging time. That said Secretary Hagel felt strongly that it was important to take the QDR review as an important opportunity to step back look at the security environment relook the strategy and and use it as a among other things a tool to lay out his vision for the department because of course also this is the first QDR that has that has taken place underneath Secretary Hagel. To that end he was involved in the process throughout he gave us a lot of upfront guidance the day-to-day process was co-chaired by then Deputy Secretary Ash Carter and our Vice Chairman Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. They were very very involved they also co-chaired frankly the budget review process so there was a lot of good cross fertilization between the two processes. We had between QDR and budget review we had more than 26 DMags in a very brief period of about three months. We had three senior leader councils that that featured briefings on the QDR and that the senior leader council is chaired by the secretary and the chairman and then involves all of the department senior leadership the service chiefs the service secretaries the four undersecretaries and each of the combatant commanders so that's really an opportunity for the department's whole leadership team to get together in person and and review collectively sort of the substance and use that as an opportunity to have good discussions and make decisions. So those I think were sort of important process milestones. Although it was a shorter more compressed QDR than usual it was we tried very hard to continue the tradition of having the QDR be inclusive and transparent and very collegial. We had five issue teams looking at various subjects from the strategy to a team looking at the force planning construct to a team looking at homeland defense issues for example. We had representation from all of the services all of the OSD organization all of the combatant commands etc so we really tried to sort of involve everyone that of course doesn't mean that every organization was happy with where we wound up but I think it's fair to say that that all parts of the building had a voice in the process and that's very important I think to having a coherent process or coherent result at the end that has integrity. So with that why don't I transition into talking a little bit about the substance. Really we tried to outline three broad themes in the QDR report. The first was to describe what we're calling an updated defense strategy. This is a strategy that we believe is appropriate for the United States as a global leader. It's a strategy that we believe helps us protect our interests and advance those interests in the world and helps us sustain our global leadership role. A second objective and part of the QDR report is to talk about how we're responsibly and realistically rebalancing the joint force to be able to address the strategic environment and as well as manage itself in a fiscally challenging environment. The third piece of the QDR report talks about both our commitment to protecting the all volunteer force making sure that we do things for example to be able to continue to recruit and retain an excellent military but also talk about how we are rebalancing the department internally trying to again become more efficient and effective and in particular trying to get a little bit more of our arms around the growth of our compensation packages inside the department which make up a very large share of our budget and we think is something that we have to address in order to maintain a balanced force going into the future. The QDR report also talks and I'll return to this in a few minutes about what we see as the implications of returning to sequester in fiscal 16 on our defense strategy and the kinds of risks that we believe that poses to the ability of the military to execute the strategy going forward. I would characterize the QDR 2014 as an evolution of our strategy as opposed to a revolution in our strategy and this is because frankly I think we had the administration had our strategic priorities pretty much right in the 2012 defense strategic guidance so we really went from the 2010 QDR which was very focused on the two current wars at the time Iraq and Afghanistan to the 2012 defense strategic guidance where we tried to lay out some of the important defense priorities for the 21st century and now with QDR 2014 building on that DSG set of priorities to try to put the strategy in a slightly broader framework and really look forward to the kinds of challenges and opportunities we face in the future. We started that process we started the review process and we certainly start the QDR report with a discussion of what we see in our security environment and I think it's fair to say we see the security environment as being very continuing to be quite challenging. It's volatile. There are a lot of threats out there. We also however see opportunities so this is definitely I think I read another defense official being quoted as saying you know this is not a post Cold War early 90s kind of security environment where we think that we're going to have the opportunity to sort of take a breath. We still see the security environment as being very challenging. The report talks about the continuing importance of the Asia Pacific region for example which again links to our continuing strategic emphasis on continuing the rebalance in that region. We also see a number of challenges obviously in the Middle East. Syria particularly focused on the political transitions that are still ongoing that we think will take some time to complete. We are increasingly concerned with the growing Sunni shea tensions in that region. So there's a lot there that we have to continue to keep our eye on. We're very focused on the continuing terrorist threat which as many different officials from the Department has have observed is metastasizing. It's spreading. Some people have used the word franchising. Certainly while we think that the overall threat to the homeland is lower than it was immediately after 9-11 we continue to see significant threats posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates. So that's something that we're very focused on. We're also looking at sort of the challenging domains of cyber and space. Those are very important capability areas for us and for our joint force of course but we are also closely monitoring the investments that the investments that other countries are making in those two areas and thinking about what kinds of vulnerabilities that poses for us. And then there's just an increasing range of technological developments that are again impacting the kind of operational environment that we face. The continuing growth of A2AD capabilities for example. Things like the advent of 3D printing mini drones just all sorts of things that are sort of seem to be more science fiction five to ten years ago but are now very much becoming realities. So in that context we've tried to lay out an updated strategy that has three basic pillars. The first is protecting the homeland in terms of being able to deter attacks against the United States defeat attacks if necessary and manage the consequences for example of something like a natural disaster anything from sort of smaller disasters to something large like Hurricane Katrina. I think I'd stop there and say that the emphasis on homeland and protecting the homeland is part of the sort of updating to the strategy that we're doing compared to for example 2012 DSG which didn't talk in at great length about the DOD's role in protecting the homeland. The second part of our strategy is building security globally. This is really what we're talking about when we have the department's forward presence around the world things like our building partnership capacity activities exercises mill to mill engagements port visits all of the things of that nature and really the goal of that part of our strategy is to try to deter conflict at the earliest point possible to try to prevent coercive behavior for example and to sort of proactively and positively shape the environment so that we're trying to prevent conflict rather than having to deal with it after it's already manifested. The third and final pillar in the strategy is projecting power and winning decisively this is the more sort of kinetic part of the strategy but what we're talking about here is the ability of the United States military to really go anywhere in the world and project power has sort of been a signature of our military over the years and it's one we think that's very important to maintain whether that's to be able to respond to conflict or whether it's to come to the aid of a country like the Philippines when they were dealing with their typhoon we want to be able to do both of those and if necessary to deal with aggression when and if it happens. So within those three strategic pillars and I think it's important to mention we see these as sort of interrelated and interdependent they're not mutually exclusive so in terms of you know thinking about the parts of our military or the kinds of capabilities that we have in our military they don't been neatly into one pillar and not the other two in many cases the the services play a role in each each of the three parts of the pillars the kinds of capabilities that we're developing and that we have already can play a role in multiple parts of the strategy. Another important part of the updated strategy that we put forward in the QDR report is an emphasis on innovation and adaptability and here we're trying to go beyond I think in the past the department has all has often talked about innovation or efficiency in the context of sort of better business practices how can we you know function more efficiently as an institution here we're trying to think about that certainly but to go beyond that and thinking about how can we build in innovation into the strategy itself into how we try to execute that strategy so for example a big part of the QDR process that isn't frankly highlighted in the document was a very extensive review of our of our operational concepts for some of our war plans to try to really push innovation in those areas we've also done things like looking carefully at the way we deploy forces to conduct forward presence activities can we do that in new ways can we deploy carrier groups for example can we have can we perhaps break off a surface action group to go and do a set of activities much farther away than the than the sort of large carrier strike group for example we're also trying to pursue innovation with some of our closer partners and allies like the UK for example so we've had extensive dialogue with the Brits in particular looking at how we can do more in terms of joint training how we can leverage the fact that they will be buying joint strike fighters and how we can do more to train for say carrier operations but also to work with them on on strategic planning activities so for example working with the Brits to at the front of our security cooperation planning processes to say how can we synchronize the different types of things we're doing so that both countries get the most bang for the buck in terms of what they're doing and how can we try to sort of avoid redundancy that can happen when you're not talking closely with a partner about the kinds of activities they have in mind so those are some of the things that we're trying to do in the innovation category stepping back sort of big picture our view is that at the president's budget level which is a hundred and fifteen billion dollars more than the bca cap level we can execute this strategy this global leadership strategy although we will experience increased risk in some areas for example in the near term we're going to have some challenges in terms of readiness for example that may that will cause us to have to be somewhat more selective in the in terms of the kinds of activities that we do in terms of engagement but overall we feel like we can execute this strategy at that level the strategy also the report excuse me talks at length about how we're going to rebalance the force to be able to align to these strategic pillars and there's essentially what we're trying to do given the fiscal environment is to reshape the force in such a way that it remains in balance between capacity the size of our forces capability which is sort of shorthand for the level of modernization of our forces and also the readiness level of our forces and readiness in readiness in general has been a challenge for us in the last couple of years in part because we're of course coming out of a decade of very um stressing operations but also particularly in f y 13 when sequestration was in place we took very significant hits to our own m accounts which had a negative effect on readiness so we're in the process of trying to bring those three elements of our force into better balance and to do that we will have to undertake some of the steps that secretary hagel has been outlining in the last couple of weeks such as for example bringing down the size of the army the active army for example to 440 to 450 thousand personnel to having the marine corps be sized at about 182 thousand to um taking some of the platforms out of the air force for example like the a 10 platform so those are things we're doing in order to make sure we have sufficient resources to plow back into modernization for example as well as readiness we also in the report talk in some detail about several of the capability areas where we're making investments particularly in capabilities that we believe are important to be able to execute the strategy and in many cases these were capability areas that we also highlighted in the DSG so for example we will be making investments in our counterterrorism capabilities most visibly the fact that the department has decided to continue to grow our special operations forces to almost 70 thousand personnel we'll be making investments in our cyber capabilities for example the report talks about the fact that by 2016 the department will have three different types of cyber forces that will be that will be oriented on helping combatant commanders for example be able to build cyber activities into their plans we will have a set of forces that are focused on defending do d networks and we will have a set of forces that are focused on defending the nation against offensive operations from adversaries so those are just a couple of examples of the kinds of investments we're making but we also talk about missile defense precision strike isr a number of capabilities again that we feel are very important to our overall strategy the last big piece of the report before talking about the implications of sequester relates to how we're going to rebalance the department itself while we protect the health of the all volunteer force and i think secretary hagel and the chairman feel very strongly that the foundation of our military is the all volunteer force and that ensuring that we sustain the health of our human capital both military and civilian and contractor is critically important so we will continue to make sure that we are focused on doing things like for example continuing to fight the sexual assault problems that we have in the military with a real emphasis on trying to develop approaches that that show measurable progress towards reducing the number of incidents we will be investing continued resources in doing what we can to try to prevent the rising rate of suicide that the military has been experiencing we will be making sure that we have family programs things like transition assistance programs for our folks who are who are becoming veterans taking care of our wounded warriors all of those things are important programs that we're protecting even in an era of fiscal constraint the flip side of that is that over the last 10 years our compensation programs have grown at a fairly healthy rate and right now the glide slope of that growth of compensation will not be sustainable over time for the department if we want to try to keep the overall force in balance so part of what we're doing in the qtr it outlines these proposals in some detail we've put forward with the 15 budget a series of relatively modest reforms to try to slow the growth of compensation so things like slowing the the size of the pay raise for example or making some reductions to our base housing allowance program or reducing to some extent the subsidy for our commissaries those are all things that we think we have to do in order to keep our force healthy overall and I think it's important to note a couple of things on this first of all these are not draconian proposals we worked very hard in the department to come up with a package of reforms that are sustainable and the chairman the service chiefs the senior enlisted advisors all worked together for almost a year to develop this package this was not something that osd dictated from on high for example this was something we said we need to get more control of the growth of compensation and the department turned to the chairman and the service chiefs to work together to come up with a package that they felt they could stand behind and that they felt was a responsible set of reforms so that's very important I think it's also worth noting that relative to other areas of the budget where we decided we needed to make some adjustments the compensation piece had more modest adjustments compared to other pieces so we really tried to be very spare in terms of trying to find savings in the compensation area turning last but not least to what we see as the implications of sequestration on this defense strategy we've put forward again I think a strategy and a plan for rebalancing the military that at the president's budget level we believe will give us what we need to get the job done if we return to sequestration in FY 16 and beyond we believe that the risks to our strategy will rise significantly and I just wanted to talk a little bit about how we see that happening or why we see that happening if we have to go back to sequestration level cuts we will have to reduce the size of the of the force further so for example I'm sure you've all seen we would take the army down even lower to about 420,000 active personnel we would bring the marine corps down to 175,000 personnel we would have to go into the navy and take out one of the carriers we would have to go and more ships we would have to go into the air force for example and take out more platforms so for example the KC 10 just to list one example we would also have to go into the modernization accounts and cut those much more deeply which we think would put at risk our ability to keep pace with a to ad developments for example we would have much more significant readiness problems both in the near term and the long term if we go back to sequestration level cuts so all of those things in combination I think would have a very damaging impact on our strategy on all of the pillars so for example in terms of protecting the homeland against potential strikes particularly if we were engaged in a combat operation overseas our ability to protect the homeland at the same time would be put under strain again because of the capacity because of capacity challenges under permanent sequestration it would be harder to build security globally we would have a harder time generating sufficient forward presence to do all of the partnership activities that we think are necessary around the world because of the readiness challenges and the capacity challenges we would be concerned about our ability to respond rapidly to crises in the way that we'd like to and because of all three issues capacity capability particularly modernization and readiness our ability to project power and win decisively would not be as assured as it would be under the PB 15 level so we think it's very important particularly with congress to highlight just exactly what we see as being the results potentially of going back to permanent sequestration and it's precisely because of these kinds of risks that the president and the secretary decided to put forward a defense budget that is significantly higher than the bca level caps we think that the strategy we've put forward is the right strategy for the country and we think the additional resources are are needed and warranted to be able to execute that strategy so why don't I stop there and join Kathleen at the panel and then look forward to your questions thank you okay thank you very much Christine for that great overview of the qtr I think you said it best that the qtr has been undertaken during extremely challenging times and I say that as somebody who's survived many a qtr myself and I certainly don't uh don't wish to be in your shoes right now given the challenges that you faced um let's start with probably the the harshest criticism that's been put forward to date which is by the hask chairman buck mckinn represent mckinn has said that he believes and i'm paraphrasing here that the qtr 2014 has failed to meet the statutory requirement to produce a strategy that is at low to moderate risk um and in fact he's asked that you um the department that is be required to redo the strategy is indicated he's going to put in a requirement either to the ndaa or separately to have you redo the qtr um i'm interested in your thoughts on his assessment that the qtr does not put forward a strategy that is low to moderate risk and of course to the um wonderful opportunity for you to redo the qtr um yet again heavens um it's on okay okay um we're very aware of of chairman mckinn's statement about the qtr and i think i would say a couple of things about it um in addition well first of all in the low to moderate risk piece i think i would say again we believe that at the president's budget level we've put forward a strategy that allows us that that we can execute with our joint force with increased risk in some areas the secretary has been very clear that he believes we can manage those risks and i think the service chiefs are comfortable with that statement as well part of the issue with low to i mean there's a couple of things one the strategy is not monolithic it's obviously there are different parts of the strategy and some parts of the strategy we can execute at low risk other parts of the strategy i think we would execute at higher risk compared to low risk and i think that gets into the whole issue of low to moderate to high risk and this is something the department has has worked on through uh any number of qtrs and also in other in other forums you know one one man or woman's moderate risk is another man or woman's high risk and so to some extent you know it's a very subjective um set of adjectives i our view is that we can manage the risks at the pb 15 level i think it's fair to say based on the characterization of what we think permanent sequestration would do to the strategy that at that level we would we it would be higher risk and it would be certainly moderate to high risk and it would be i mean the the secretary has gone so far as to characterize the sequestration level risk as unacceptable risk to our national security so i think we'd certainly been it be an agreement there we believe we've met the requirements of the statute i also wanted to address a couple of other i think the chairman's um critique had three parts one part was the low to moderate risk he also um critiqued us as being exclusively budget driven and and then his third criticism was that we were um only looked out five years as opposed to 20 years which is what is required by the statute our view is it that this was like other qtrs that the department has undertaken was a strategy driven but resource informed document and as as illustrations or evidence to that i would point to a couple things first the very first thing the department did as the start of this qtr was to assess the security environment that was really the first important piece we did that in order to determine what are the strategic objectives that we should be pursuing and as part of that assessment of the security environment we looked out 20 years we tried to look at even farther than that we drew among other things on the national intelligence council's global trends 2030 um we also looked out 20 years in terms of thinking about the kinds of investments the kind of capabilities that the force needed so the the qtr does have a force table uh well into the document that has a five-year time frame that has a five-year time frame because of course the planning window that the department uses to develop force structure is a five-year time frame so that part of the qtr does have a five-year time frame but the overall review very much had a 20-year time frame and i would say again that the overall review was strategy driven i think the secretary has pointed out that um you know he's he's working on the real business of conducting and protecting our national security and to develop a strategy completely disconnected from the resource picture is more of a graduate seminar exercise as opposed to trying to figure out what we really should be doing and how we really should be developing our force going forward so our our view is that strategy driven and resource informed is what you need to do to develop a joint force that actually allows you to execute a strategy very good um let's talk a little bit about the sequester level if that should come to pass across the fit up and what that does to the strategy the language in the document and i think reflective of what you've said here today is that risk is increased um at the above bca levels and i'm assuming that means increased over the 2012 dsg so it increased me well it's even increased over the to the extent that um the current updated strategy at the president's budget level has some increased risk associated with it sequestration would be increased above and beyond that right it risks rise significantly with sequestration it was the increased risk increased over what that was the first part um which which that's helpful um so you know you you point to this in your remarks today that with this risks that rise significantly with sequestration for a strategist that certainly brings to mind what do you do about the strategy and you know the question on all strategist minds or how far do you thin that strategy and increase that risk and when do you decide that the strategy itself meaning the objectives and the ways need to fundamentally be relooked where are you on inside the department um how are you thinking about that that potentiality of sequester some might say a likelihood of sequester being in place at least sequester level cuts being in place across the fit up um and the need to relook the strategy fundamentally in its objectives and in its ways that's a great question i think our view was um certainly going into the qdr we a couple of things i would start by saying um we believe that it is in the interest of the united states to continue to be able to play a leadership role in the international community and that it's important to have a strategy that allows us to do that we believe the updated strategy we've put forward is that kind of strategy that allows us to do that and i think part of what we're trying to do in this qdr report is to help a variety of audiences understand just how serious the threats of sequestration are to being able to play that role our view i think our assessment at this time is that we need to continue to try to talk to our audiences and work together to try to find a solution to the sequester mechanism we did get the the balance budget act the ryan murphy act did give the department some much needed relief particularly in 14 much less in 15 but i think we want to try to focus on partnering with those in congress who share the interest in protecting the the national security interests of our country to try to find a solution eventually you know again um particularly someone who's recently gone through a confirmation hearing a good answer is always not to speculate on a hypothetical so i'm gonna largely try to stick to that but i would say you know and i would say this to congress and to the american people you can't live in a mansion if you're working on a middle class salary so at a certain point we are going to have to ask ourselves you know what kind of nation do we want to be and what kind of role do we want to play and and being a global leader does not come cheap so i think you know we're not ready to get to that point yet but i don't think that you can and this is something i don't think i said it when i was standing at the podium while our strategy does have a significant theme of innovation we are not putting that forward as sort of a silver bullet or a panacea to be able to solve our fiscal issues you know there certainly the department should and can do more to operate more efficiently and operate more creatively however i at least am of the view that we don't have that changing the ways we execute our strategy um you can't get all the way there that alone will not solve the problem that we would face if confronted with permanent sequestration level cuts thank you and your your um your great analogy about the mansion on the middle class in club i think up ends the entire premise of reality television and personal finance philosophy that goes with it um there's no one willing to i mean that you know assuming no one's willing to give you a bunch of loans hopefully we learned something from the housing bubble crisis but let's follow on this point you're making about um innovation and i definitely take your point on it it won't get you all the way there but there is a heavy emphasis both in the dsg and now in this q dr with trying to find innovative approaches to balance the books as best as possible or and also to overcome true challenges military excuse me and technological challenges that the united states faces in different regions of the world what's sort of the implementation plan you gave some examples particularly the bilateral cooperation with the brits what are sort of the implementation pathways now that you have to report out the door and trying to find some of these areas for innovation and press them forward within the department well we have a number of different things um as i said we have sort of a pretty robust program with the brits and the australians to try to pursue both um sort of deeper cooperation on the planning front and on the operational front we are also uh we we have been in the process and are continuing in the process we have sort of a blueprint of cooperation laid out with some of our partners in the gulf region for example in that area we are we are focused on trying to work with them to um to invest more in capabilities that we think will be particularly helpful to them for example integrated air and missile defenses maritime security capabilities cyber capabilities we're very focused on working with countries in that region to try to invest in those kind of to some extent meat and potatoes capabilities capabilities that perhaps kind of aren't as bright and shiny as some of the other types of capabilities they might invest in but we think we'll actually do more to sort of help strengthen the foundation of their ability to contribute to their own security um looking to asia pacific we're pursuing a similar kind of um agenda of cooperation again really focusing on investing in some of the very basic capabilities with taiwan for for example investing in some very basic capabilities um to help them contribute to their own self-defense so that's part of the program i think you know we'll continue through the through the war plan review process to look at how we you know are we really pushing out there even in that area i would say however you know i think there is quite a bit of room to be more innovative um but in some cases even though we may need to relook some of our fundamental concepts that doesn't again necessarily mean that the kinds of capabilities that we might need to execute some new concepts are going to be inexpensive so i think that's part of the challenge that we have very good and let me ask one more question before i turn it over to the audience and that's um the hill i think it's evident to everybody in washington and certainly in your comments it seems clear that the department understands as well that the the the greatest partner the department can have in moving forward with this strategy in this budget are those partnerships it can build on the hill what is the a a pathway the approach way that you all have decided to take over the next say four to five months to try to create the kind of um partnership you need to get through the budget you require to execute this strategy well again i'm not sure we have a silver bullet in that area i think we are just trying to continue to have the conversations that we've been having to some extent but i think the qtr amplifies those um points that we're trying to make we we have very much said to the congress that um for example this budget builds in already it assumes that we're going to be able to get the savings it we for example we've asked for another background in 2017 we've obviously asked for this whole set of compensation reform proposals and if we are not able to get those reforms through congress we will have to go back into the budget and find those savings in equipment in end strength in readiness places where we don't want to go and i think what we're trying to do with the hill is build coalitions of members who understand the importance of being able to get these types of reforms through it is an upward climb we are under no illusions of that particularly in an election year um base closure is absolutely essential for the department we have excess infrastructure already that we are paying for that is not contributing to our national security so you know again i don't think we have a magic new argument but part of what we're trying to do is be very honest and transparent about the risks that we face you know to some extent in the past six months the hill has said to us show us what'll happen show us what'll happen help us understand what sequestration really does and i think we are making progress at least based on some of the briefings that i've done and i i don't see the hill is necessarily as much as many in the department i think we are starting to make progress in terms of making clear what the consequences are um but again you know we're we're a piece of a broader picture and there a lot of cross cutting currents that have to be weighted through to get to a solution okay very good here's what we're going to do we're going to have microphones that go around the room if you can raise your hand wait for the microphone to come if i call on you and i need your name and affiliation so right here thank you richard berthand from the british embassy um i wanted to take your mind back to when secretary haigle was speaking i think in this room just before christmas and he set out some of the rebalances that you then addressed in the qdr um specifically around uh the capability and capacity balance and also between the services and i wondered if you could characterize for us how far down that road of rebalancing particularly on protecting modernization and looking at capacity and also between the services you think you've come in this qdr or the extent to which it's an iterative process and you have some way to go thank you sure happy to talk about that um i think one one thing that became clear as we went through the qdr process was the fact that um there's not a one size fits all balance in terms of capacity capability and readiness for example you know the the army's capability to some extent is largely you know is significantly resident in its capacity whereas another service like the air force may be more sort of characterized by its capability by by the platforms themselves so to semington i think it's important to not sort of think about it in an overly monolithic way i think in terms of the choices that we've made through this qdr and budget process we feel like the types of rebalancing decisions that the secretary has put forward would would provide us a joint force overall that would be in balance and that would have the right attributes to be able to fulfill the strategy um i'd stop there not using my own rules right up here in the front row i'm andre silver zone i'm the chief representative in vietnam for a company in detroit this manufacturer to maglev train and in the dnc presidential partners program now my question wonderful presentation and reassuring and and so in east asia as i'm sure you well know the the various countries like the philippines vietnam and and further north japan they're kind of assessing how credible is our ability to deter continued use of violence and maybe worse violence in the future by china even as we try to build it so it sounds from what you've said that we have a without sequestration we have the assets we're building the assets to be able to manage the relationship with china and hopefully they offer peaceful coexistence um but my question is this are you also thinking about or working on other than the wonderful things you said about working with the congress and all um are you also thinking of ways to make our commitment a little more conspicuous than that because most those people they're not going to be sitting in a wonderful session like this and uh make it a little more clear for example why not as a just one small example why not lift the embargo against the export of lethal weapons to vietnam instead of letting rushes supply them all and that's my question thank you for that question it's very nice to get a question about that region um that has inherent in it recognition that we're not uh that the that the rebalance strategy frankly is not a contained china strategy so thank you for that as you said our our goal is to is to what we would like to see is to see china join the international community as a cooperative um partner in that community in terms of sort of making the rebalance more visible you know i think we're um trying to take those we are trying to take steps to do that very thing you know for example we've been deploying the lcs in singapore we are also putting a joint high speed vessel into the region by 2020 we will have 60 percent of our naval ships deployed into the asia pacific region we've put a huge focus on and it's not just platforms i mean we in the department think about the rebalance as being focused on strengthening our alliances and partnerships on strengthening our forward posture and presence in the region so for example with the the work we're doing with australia to have the marines be in darwin that's i think a very tangible expression of our commitment to the region we are still on track to be able to have 2500 marines there in a few more years um we are also though very engaged in in terms of senior leader visits secretary hagel has gone to the region a number of times he'll be going back out to the region this spring in april we have done a large number of exercises in the region in port visits and things of that nature so i think we are very focused on um making our interest and commitment to that region tangible sort of across a wide spectrum of activities platforms posture we're in the we're in discussions right now with the philippines about greater access to that country for example so there's a lot of activity in that area that said certainly i'm well aware that there's um concern in the region about whether we will be able to sustain the rebalance we hear those messages as well and part of why we're as engaged talking to countries in that region is to assure them that even in the face of some greater fiscal austerity than we've seen in the past decade we are very committed to that region and to being continuing to remain a pacific power um thank you mgn for channel with shenzhen media group of china a cup of question if i may um with a tight budget of this year is there any concern from u.s government that japan will resort and self help to develop nuclear weapon if there's no concern uh what is the reason uh from us to press japan to give back the plutonium and what's your expectation about the nuclear summit at haig thank you so much thank you why don't i can really only since this is a um a discussion about the quadranial defense review and i am i'm the desi for strategy plans and forces i can't speak to the sort of last two questions that you asked but i but i can certainly try to speak to the first one i think our view is we are very um as i said committed to the age of pacific rebalance we are our alliance with japan is very very strong we are committed to reassuring the japan and the region and and our view is that there's not a need for any kind of nuclear capability as long as our alliance remains strong which we believe it is let me just to quickly ask a follow-up in the qdr deliberations or as you looked at the security environment did this general concept that there might be nations who as the u.s um reduces its spending or did anything that was seen as withdrawing in key regions of the world to include east asia was there any kind of direct assessment of the likelihood of proliferation i would say it was probably more of a subtext than an explicit conversation i certainly i think particularly you know part of what we did through the qdr process was um particularly for example when it came to assessing the sufficiency and proficiency of the joint force in the future we looked at what we what we call the alt palm force which was you know as some of you may know the services put forward kind of sequester level forces um so as we went through the process we were we were looking at sort of the implications to our strategy of a variety of different budget levels and certainly at the lowest levels i think there was an implicit understanding that the risks of that kind of proliferation or the risks of countries that are scientifically capable enough to develop their own nuclear program which certainly japan is would go up but it wasn't an explicit factor okay let's see um let's go all the way to the left over there thanks uh k brandon with politico could you discuss the disconnect between dod's stated policy uh an army of 450 000 soldiers and an 11 carrier fleet and what's actually funded in the five year spending plan and why didn't the pentagon use the extra 115 billion dollars to fund these priorities thanks sure uh i would largely refer you to the comments that comptroller bob hail has made but but let me reiterate a couple of things first particularly when it comes to the army making those kinds of reductions in end strength is a is a process that takes a while it takes a lot of planning same thing for the carrier in terms of ultimately decommissioning it and our assessment at the time given the level of uncertainty the department's assessment was that we needed to at least plan for those lower levels in our budget to ensure that we had enough time to execute that were to become necessary the um the way we would address it in terms of ensuring if we get a signal from congress over the next several months that they are going to budget at higher levels than the bca cap level we would go back in in the 16 cycle and make some you know we would move some things around take some money out of some of the modernization accounts for example minor procurement and reorient that funding to enable us to be able to to continue to fund the army at 450 for example or the 11th carrier and to that effect the acting deputy secretary has put out a memo to the services directing them to be prepared to do that kind of planning in the next budget cycle again if we get indications from congress that they are going to support funding us at a higher level okay we have just a few minutes left so what I'm going to do is take a couple of questions together which I'm going to ask the questions and not statements so that Ms. Wormath has an optimum chance to answer any and all that she can in there so I'm going to just sweep the room over here to the right Duran the Missouri with inside the Pentagon I know the 2012 strategic guidance talks about reversibility when it comes to the army but the qdr doesn't necessarily I was wondering how do you plan to accomplish that okay thanks very much and there was one right here uh Reese right here thank you very much Michael Sveta from the embassy of the Czech Republic my question concerns the current situation in Ukraine don't you think that the current developments in Ukraine constitute a kind of significant change of the security environment global security environment and don't you think this should be reflected in the in the qdr to to make it a real strategy that reflects the current situation thank you very much okay very good let's see uh right behind you may I'm right here thank you my name is Frank Barone I'm an independent investor so I'd like to talk to you for a moment about some of the issues we see on the investment side we certainly from the outside look at this as being the legal boundaries and so we have a question that says the law of the land is sequestration which we're all aware of we would expect as an external investor that there would be something in the f y 15 plan that's going to assume that you're going to have to abide by that law regardless of all the deviations you've mentioned which we understand I don't know that we see that the second thing I'd like to commend and ask a question for you as I notice a lot of coalition activity that you're talking about and I commend you on the UK we have some outstanding models which have already been developed in the Middle East as you pointed out the integrator and missile defense we also have in the Department of Energy some good correlations with what we're doing with Canada on energy what do we need to do from your perspective to open up fms for you so that you can enable those resources to make those relationships happen particularly between our partners like the UK great okay one more let's go right here thank you Warner Anderson I work in the Defense Department um Secretary Gates Secretary Panetta and Secretary Clinton have all spoken extensively on smart power I didn't see it in the QDR I didn't see it specifically mentioned yet it's in the QDDR I'm wondering if there's a gap I haven't heard much from from the current Secretary about it so is that a an important consideration okay so Christine we have reversibility Ukraine um sequestration as the law of the land a and then b fms reform and then at every csis event we must pay a questionnaire to ask about the csis registered trademark of smart power so that is your final question over to you a bunch of great questions let me talk first about sort of the law of sequester um you know I think people have talked about and certainly the press has written about how this is a very complicated budget that we put forward and certainly the QDR you know speaks to that complicated budget part of I think what we're trying to do in this um complicated environment was to um recognize the fact that sequester that the budget control act is the law of the land certainly we did um for 15 basically submit a budget that is compliant with that budget part of the reason that we put forward the 26 billion opportunity growth and sustainment initiative was because um at the bca or the bba excuse me 15 levels we really could use that additional 26 billion dollars to be able to get over the hump to to fully execute the strategy as we'd like to in f y 15 for example but so part of what we're trying to do is recognize the fact that yes the ryan murphy act passed but you know what happens in the future is still to be determined and what we are trying to articulate is that we believe to execute a strategy commensurate with our role as a global leader we need more resources than than we have right now under the law um you know we are putting forward as a department a written product that describes how we would budget at sequestration levels again I think to indicate that we have undertaken some significant planning at the sequestration levels but we don't feel that accepting those sequestration levels in the future is what's right for the country so that's how I would speak to that um bouncing over to reversibility of the army that's a great question I think you know you might have noticed um some of you who've read the reports this is how I can tell who's really serious about reading QDRs in the chairman's assessment he talks about the need to do a year-long study really looking at that very issue and I think looking in detail at mechanisms to increase our ability to revert to increase sort of our reversibility factor for example I think we do need to do some more detailed homework on that you know there's a number of different ways that you can try to um handle the the size of the army one one is you know if we were to be involved in a large scale conflict we could um depart from the optimal bog dwell ratios for example and for a period of time potentially go to longer deployments than just a year for example we also need however to find ways to access the reserve component more quickly and to be able to train up the reserve component forces more quickly than we have in the past so I think that is a homework assignment coming out of the QDR but it's an important one and one I think that the department has taken on board um smart power you know I think uh it's true that we don't have the phrase smart power anywhere in the QDR but I think we very much embrace the concept of that we do talk in the QDR report at some length about the fact that the military is just one tool in the national security toolkit and we very much see ourselves as part of developing a whole of government solutions to security challenges so we've we very much see ourselves as needing to partner with our colleagues in the diplomatic corps in the development part of the government partnering with folks in treasury for example and USTR that putting all of those tools together I think to try to apply our our power effectively is very much I think um implicit throughout the QDR and it's a big part of how we think about doing partnership um building activities for example going to Ukraine I think I would say as a strategist that um certainly when you develop a strategy you want it to be flexible enough um and and not too over determined because you want it to be able to adapt to real world events that you can't necessarily predict and I would argue that particularly two of the of the strategic pillars in the updated QDR strategy building security globally and projecting power are very much applicable to the situation that we see going on in Europe right now we are and the report talks at some length about about our commitment to protecting Euro-Atlantic stability to working with our NATO allies to being able to um do things like reinforce the aviation detachment in Poland for example to beef up our commitment to the Baltic air policing so um and we have we believe under this strategy and under the president's budget request level of funding the forces we need I think to be able to put forward a full range of military options for any number of situations if the secretary and the president were to want that so so I don't think that the Ukraine situation requires sort of a wholesale redo of the strategy I think our strategy is sort of broadly broadly envisioned and is and would allow us to do the kinds of things that we need to do to both support the government of Ukraine but also reassure our NATO allies um in terms of the situation that's happening on the ground well um we're going to bring this portion of our event to a close um Christine I'm delighted to host you here back in your old home new old home um and it's just incredible to have someone of your caliber um working inside government we're so grateful to have you here um in five years I think strong in this in this latest stint in government in addition to your career time as a civil servant so we really appreciate you taking the time to explain the QDR we're gonna um uh have you exit now so you can get on with your busy day and then if you all will stay in your place we'll move up our panel so thank you very much thank you all all right may I have your attention please that's a polite way of saying it's time for you to stop talking thanks I also want to welcome our viewers on the web it's an increasing capability that we depend upon here to be able to reach folks who might not live and be able to get to this zip code um and in keeping with that when we get to our question period I'll invite those of you who are on the web to send a question by email and if I like them I'll ask them but uh or maybe maybe I'll ask me even if I don't like them depending on who they're directed to um also like to remind you to silence your cell phones if you're in the room here with us I'm David Burto I'm the senior vice president and the director of our national security program on industry and resources uh and it's a great privilege and a pleasure to be able to follow uh Christine Warmuth and her discussion and her response to the questions as well uh however it's our belief that there are still a few unexplored and unanswered questions that remain to be looked at today um I have a great panel here with me I have only one slide that I'd like to put up if you're watching on the web you should be able to download this slide in the upper right hand corner of the screen and if our new technical capability actually works you may even be able to see it uh when I call it up of course those of us in the room won't actually know if this is happening or not but so I'm going to click to adhere on the uh on the screen uh here in the room this is a lay down of what we know and what we suspect so there are on the left hand side just two lines uh the these are the enacted budget levels for fiscal years 12 13 and 14 at the bottom kind of the red line with little spots of blue dashed in it is the base budget and at the top kind of the green for uh for deployed if you will is the base budget plus the overseas contingency operation fund or OCO that's for 12 13 and 14 then when you get to 15 which is the line kind of in the middle of the chart you diverge and you have three different numbers if you will the very bottom the dashed red line is the 496 billion dollar base budget laid out last week by the defense department described just a few minutes ago by secretary warm with as uh compliant with the revised budget control act or the bipartisan budget act or the Murray Ryan or Ryan Murray act whatever you want to call it that number 496 billion the next number the blue line and do d has now gone to red line blue line um that is the total budget if you will in the base budget that includes the 26 billion dollars in the opportunity growth and security initiative or the oxy as we are affectionately referring to it and then at the top is the notional line because we don't actually know the overseas contingency operation fund level for f y 15 yet we won't know that until we know what the final disposition of our afghanistan presence is but the placeholder that do d is using now is 79 billion and so that number right at about 600 billion is the 522 billion plus the 79 billion of the total budget proposal as we know it today then to the right we get into the projection land so this is more what we suspect if you will again the dashed red line at the bottom that is the line set in the law as was referred to earlier by mr maron i think right that this is the law um i would note that the budget control act uh was passed in august actually past july 31st signed august 2nd 2011 but it and it has been the law of the land but it has changed twice and each time it changed it changed on the very eve of its implementation and so to assume that the law is going to stay the law historically says has not happened but to assume that you know when it's going to change or how it's going to change historically we don't have a clue all right so those are those are important considerations i think to keep in mind here nonetheless do d's made it clear that he needs more than that and that's the blue line we know what's in the 26 billion the services have pretty much laid that out uh and a lot of it is readiness and a lot of it is what secretary bill perry referred to back in the early days of the post-cold war era as long term readiness meaning modernization procurement and investment in rd t and e um what we don't know is what's in that 115 billion between the blue line and the red line for 16 17 18 and 19 uh we have some idea of what the totals are we don't have the service by service breakout we're not quite sure what would be included in that uh in that number if you will we also have a placeholder for oko of about 30 billion dollars a year we have no idea what that number would lay out if you will so this raises up in many ways more questions than it answers if you will um will the oko be the escape hatch or the safety valve for the congress in f y 15 what kinds of signals would do d need to have uh that secretary woman referred to earlier that would allow it to begin to plan for a number above at or perhaps even below the revised budget control at caps uh what constitutes unacceptable risk and what would be the nature of the fix to resolve those there are a host of questions that we could raise here fortunately i don't have to answer those questions i have with me uh four of the best minds in in washington all of whom happen to reside here at the center for strategic international studies i'm gonna turn to them here's kind of the process that we're gonna use to follow i've asked each of them to provide some commentary on their own we're gonna start at my left and work down the table for about five minutes or so then we're gonna first offer the opportunity for each of them to ask one another questions uh one or two of those i actually have one in mind already but i haven't told them what it is yet and uh and then we're gonna throw the floor open for questions from the audience and questions of course from our our viewers on the web so first i'm gonna introduce them all and then we'll just go go down the line to my immediate left to your right if you're looking on is a dr clark murdoch dr murdoch is a senior advisor and the director of both our defense national security group and our project on national uh on nuclear initiatives he is also directly responsible for recruiting me to csis some 13 plus years ago you'll notice we fixed almost every problem that was in existence back then and then we have new ones uh next is dr marin lead who is a senior advisor and is a part of the harrell brown chair on defense policy studies uh then to her left is uh stephanie sanik costrow a senior fellow here in the international security program and then to the far end of the table sam brannon also a senior fellow at the international security program so i'll turn the floor over to each of them in turn dr murdoch uh thank you i've been involved in just about every qtr there's been in fact involved in qtr's before they were qtr's uh bottom up review secretary aspin's first one then there was the exchange over uh colin powell's base force uh and i want to say from a personal perspective you know there is something very very much unique about this qtr it packs quite a wallop and i can speak to that in a personal sense i've taken punch after punch uh and i'm here bearing the bruises from taking on this particular qtr and that'll be my last punchline from that one as well um there's just two comments i want to make about uh this qtr the first thing is is that despite what chairman mckayin said uh this qtr did exactly what it had to do and that is to address the sequester and fiscal crisis people recall back in the 2005 2006 qtr it pretended that the war in iraq wasn't going on and was heavily criticized for it a qtr has to take on the most pressing defense challenges and security challenges facing the department at that time and there is no question that the challenge that is facing this department is how to sustain a strategy one that has deep roots uh in uh this administration and previous administrations how to sustain it under increasingly dire fiscal circumstances uh i've been working on a project here at csas we call it the affordable military which is a word that appeared a lot in this qtr and in the budgetary documents about what is affordable when we look at the current trend lines and that is of the budget coming down under the sequester cap so under the budget control acts and of the internal cost growth the internal inflation brought on by about seven percent per year increase of the cost of personnel pay benefits o and m uh an acquisition by the time you get out to 2021 which is the last year of the sequester of the budget control act you almost have no money for modernization you have a tradeoff that if you want to restore modernization to the typical 32 percent that it consumes the defense budget you have to give up 560,000 people in in strength that's a tradeoff and those are huge tradeoffs and i don't think we've quite uh in the community but i don't think the department either has quite come to grips with how severe these tradeoffs are between continuing to do business the way we do business today the internal cost growth of and exacerbated by the drawdown that we are now engaged in this qtr and i think the budget requests that are coming to the fy15 budget request is starting to recognize that reality and coming to deal with it but it is the crisis we can't talk about 2020 until we know what we're going to look like at the end of the budget control act during that time the second comment i wanted to make is again a brief one i'm troubled by the word rebalance i'm particularly troubled when it's taken from one area and then applied to several other areas as well but i'm also troubled by rebalance seems to indicate that there is a balance out there that there is some kind of natural you know reading that we're going to go to that the real stat will go back to where it's supposed to be um there isn't a natural balance there is lots of different distortions we can do to ourselves and have done to ourselves as part of this drawdown uh that's coming and so i'm concerned that when i look at the underlying strategy back in um in the 2010 qtr i think the phrase was used we want to maintain capabilities against a wide range of contingencies and then currently it is capabilities against a full spectrum of conflict and this is the underlying that we've got to be prepared across the board to sustain global leadership well that's not setting priorities if you're trying to prepare for the widest possible contingency range of contingencies you may just spread yourself thin enough so that you're not adequately prepared for any of them and so it strikes me that while we want to sustain leadership we also when we use the words as is used in the current qtr we are going to be selective and tailored in the way we engage with the use of the military you can't prepare for everything and then be selective and tailored on how you engage so i think we have to make more hard choices about what we're going to do and what we're not going to do and not prepare for the things we're not going to do dr lee uh thanks david uh thanks all for all of you for coming today it's great to see so many familiar faces in the audience and kath thanks for bringing secretary warm with here i am somewhat reluctant to be critical of of what the department has done because i both sympathize and empathize with the challenge that they had i remember when they started this uh the endeavor of the qtr it was very hard for me to conceive of how you even took the task on of designing a strategy when you didn't know how much money you had um so they you know made up some numbers that they wish they had and and hopefully hopefully that's that'll be the way it pans out although i think we've uh had discussions and will continue to have them about how likely that is but um and one of the things i found most intriguing in the whole document was the statement that it reflects the bipartisan budget act but it doesn't accept sequestration levels thereafter and so i wonder if that was some sort of executive privilege or something like that and well how available that is to the rest of us as citizens whether i can just pick laws that that i can ignore but i suspect probably doesn't get all the way to me unfortunately but um i just want to make a couple quick remarks about sort of the ends ways means of the strategy as i see it um the qtr in my mind does a does a pretty good job of describing the world um in in in all of its complexity in my mind it under sells and or under appreciates a couple important dimensions i could only find one real discussion point about urbanization in the document and that was in the context of climate change to me the challenges that urbanization poses to the operational environment and the capabilities associated with that are significant and very much underplayed in this document i also think the strategy very much favors nation states and that's a traditional bias of the department sort of well acknowledged but i think again it it does not give sufficient weight to the the equally challenging and and i would argue more likely and not lesser included case of dealing with very messy non-state again highly likely to be very urban challenges so if it's if it's a barbell we've only treated really one end of the barbell uh on the ways part of the equation it's obviously as i think secretary warmeth acknowledge relies very heavily on both prevention and deterrence by others and by us um i think on with others there's a relatively small set of countries right now that have sufficient uh capability and capacity contribute in any significant way to that and while we are certainly have a strategy to try to build that that takes some time and a lot of the people a lot of the nations that we are able to rely on right now and particularly ones that we've that have developed capabilities in the last decade or so it's been it's been a 10 to 20 year process to get them to where they're dealing with their own threats in in really positive constructive ways and so again i think that's a there's a time dimension to that challenge that is perhaps not as explicitly acknowledged in the document as it might be i also think for for the us component of that strategy i view it principally as as capability capacity and will and if you look at it in those three three dimensions our capability is uh declining particularly if you think about it in a readiness context our capacity is clearly falling and there's a huge question about will um and so if those three aspects together i think we're not necessarily um dealing as explicitly as we could about uh what what that does to our ability to prevent and deter um and then with respect to means again clearly a much more articulate and clear um discussion of what sequestration would mean for the department but as we've talked about a little bit already today doesn't say what we would do for mysteriously protective if the law stands and so to some extent i guess i i see it as a perpetuation of the chess game with the defense department remaining as a pawn in that game so i'm not sure that we've uh done much in that in that means part of the calculation so in my mind there there are big questions still out there about the roles of the active in the reserve components um we again we talked a little bit about the how of innovation what does that really what does that really mean and then i think there are questions about special operations forces and general purpose forces uh roles and missions between them how the special operations component of this evolves over time um reversibility not just in terms of access to the reserve components but how much reversibility do we want how quickly do we need it um so um again we've talked about a lot of that and then and then with respect to the ukraine i was interested that it took until the very last question uh first hour before it would come up but i think it's much broader than just being able to um provide some level of forces in some short period of time it's a question that i think none of us can answer right now about whether the security dynamic in europe has shifted in a significant significant way as a result of that we don't know that yet but if it has then i think what the qtr alludes to continued force reductions in europe and are those still viable uh in that context again we don't know the answers to that so i think those are some of the questions still on the table thank you miss costrow thanks david um david mentioned that i'm a senior fellow in the international security program and at the very end of my brief remarks i'll talk a little bit about one area of policy that gets me out of bed in the morning and that's building partnership capacity and i can give you my sense of reading both the qtr and the budget proposal um what i where i think we're sort of going on building partner capacity but i'm also dual-headed here at csis i'm also the acting director for homeland security and counterterrorism so when i was asked to speak at this event i wanted to take a close look at the qtr and the budget request from that context what do they say about homeland security what does it say about um counterterrorism efforts and i was pleased to see that the qtr did reflect the very good work that went into the 2012 defense strategic guidance in that dsg document they talked about 10 priority areas uh one of them was protecting the homeland and that has morphed into one of the three pillars of the qtr so in the the pillar context you're you're looking at protecting the homeland which will include deterring and defeating attacks on the us and supporting civil authorities against or with countering um addressing the effects of either an attack or a natural disaster the second pillar being building global security global security and that's talking about preserving regional stability deter adversaries support allies and partners and talk to them about addressing common security challenges and that will get me to the bpc piece i want to talk about later and the third pillar being to project power and when decisively and that's where from my perspective i looked with interest at disrupting and destroying terrorist networks and so from a homeland security counterterrorism perspective i was very pleased to see in the beginning of the document emphasis on both homeland and terrorist networks i too was a little bit disturbed it was whereas reversibility was the key word for the the dsg two years ago um rebalancing and its fuzzy uh interpretation thereof was rife throughout this document and i think reversibility was uh amended to uh adaptability because that also appeared well throughout the document but on the homeland front i agree completely with the qtr's take that um there's an increased likelihood of attack it doesn't go into what kind of attack i think when we look at um the shootings that have occurred over the last few years um as well as soft targets um smaller attacks uh things that you know that it's always particularly from a congressional perspective if they see an event you know it's a terrorist attack take the navy yard example um from last year it was a terrorist attack when it ended up being a quasi insider job and so i would have wished that the qtr talked a little bit more about the range of attacks they're talking about increased likelihood of it's not the big september 11th showy um large scale attacks it's really the smaller type and i would really love to have a conversation with dod officials when they talk about increased likelihood of attacks i agree that it takes an active multi-layered approach maintaining steady state force readiness and a resilient infrastructure i know where the word resilience comes up it comes up one sort of maybe twice in the qtr but it is sort of the catchphrase for the natural disaster community as well as when you're talking about the psychological effects and other infrastructure effects of terrorist attacks resiliency comes up quite a bit and so i'm again a little disappointed that the qtr and the budget neither one really talks about resilience but then i went a little bit deeper in reading um this is not a qtr i just scanned like the last qtr um i have to admit um no offense cap um but you know looking at what they were considering homeland defense equities you know it's limited ballistic missile attacks nuclear deterrence cyber deterrence and with the approval of the president even disruption in the dial um within the cyber realm direct air and maritime attacks and pushing threats beyond the borders so that was one pillar the second pillar they talked about global security it really was just sort of name the region and what we're trying to do there it had very few specifics which i found a little bit disappointing because if we're trying to as as martin sort of said you take ukraine as an example if we're talking about regional stability i would hope that we would have a strategy that could flex with that a little bit more and the power projection pillar and i'm trying to speed this up david so you don't cut me off um they talked about it's not just power projection and wind decisively it's about rebalancing efforts towards building partner capacity especially in and fragile states and working with regional partners to disrupt dismantling defeat al-qaeda and its affiliates other extremist threats um remaining vigilant to foreign terrorist organizations and the threats that they pose so at the end of the day my takeaways from a homeland security and counterterrorism perspective is that the q d r paid quite a bit of pages and language and whatnot on the homeland security and counterterrorism threats but without sufficient detail and i look to the budget documents and again they're merely overview documents at this time but i found very little to support that they're actually putting their money where their mouth is i hope that when the department releases more detailed justifications that i'll be able to see um and track more closely exactly how they're prioritizing um my interest areas um but uh and the last thing i wanted to say was about building partner capacity there's one line in the q d r that i welcome everyone to question and it is this in the towards the end when they're talking about special operations forces growing to almost 70 thousand um they talk about the the unique ability of special operation forces to sustain persistent networked distributed operations um i would argue they are not the only element of the us military to be able to do that anymore um that might have been true a few years ago but i think when you look at new legislative authorities that help with general purpose forces then engaging with local communities that you will see that um kind of coming to the fore the quest the sentence that i wonder about is it says quote demand for us forces to expand the counterterrorism capabilities of allied or partner forces will likely increase in the coming years i hate passive sentences who's going to increase them is it something to come back and commander wants to see is it something that the leadership at dod wants to see uh is it the partner countries who say well maybe we can get a piece of american equipment advice training but what is the real there there in terms of have we been able to measure the success of past ct capability um building or you know this is one thing that they seem to be hinging a lot on demand will increase and therefore soft has to increase as a result and i i don't necessarily buy into that again i look forward to documents and justifications to help support that statement um and my last bit david is i always consider the chairman's assessment at the end the best part of the qtr and this year was no exception mr brandon so far we've had more questions raised than answered um so you you have you have five minutes to solve that all good good well i was i was going to say in in thinking about this this is the third in a trilogy of defense strategies the first being gates 2010 qtr secretary panetta in 2012 and now secretary hegel 2014 so we will measure them against the star wars trilogy so the first one is the new hope then the empire strikes back and at the end skywalker has his hand cut off sequestration turn it over to secretary hegel and we'll see if if return of the jedi occurs in this one um but but honestly i think what what's really interesting is these are three strategies and they are wartime strategies only where that war is occurring shifts from iraq and afghanistan to essentially afghanistan and now to afghanistan drawing down in the principal front really being the the combat with with congress and marins point about the next move in the in the chess game so it's really over to congress in many ways after this qtr to uh say how they're going to deal with issues like uh military compensation like a new round of brak uh whether they're going to allow army aviation restructure to occur on the on the grounds that they put it down on so this is really uh i mean we're we're going to see how this how this plays out in in coming months and weeks but it's it's hard to argue that the department hasn't put out a very compelling vision of what the cost of sequestration would be i mean with when when secretary hegel announced the uh the f y 15 budget about exactly what happens and what else gets cut out uh at that level and maybe there's not an articulated strategy and and maybe you could argue there should be but it but it really is it is congress's move now i think people have have uh critics writ large generically have have talked about disappointment and no big tradeoffs made there wasn't an aircraft carrier traded for anything there wasn't a huge part of the the army traded for anything so this was a gradual strategy and i think you heard under deputy under secretary warmeth talk about uh the the the fact that this is evolutionary it's not revolutionary and i think it is important to read all of the documents combined and when you don't find something in this document uh it probably is one in one of those previous documents it just hasn't been highlighted and i would say there are a lot of useful clarifications in this document but strategy is really kind of at the margins because the central issue is the resource issue that's the greatest threat to the united states identified in this q dr is the united states in in the failure to fund uh the force and there's a there's a huge cost this idea that the us will no longer exert global leadership so i think it's fair to say ukraine isn't adequately treated in the document but uh the united states ability to to deal with a range of future ukraines is addressed in the document and i think on that on that level um the this this other popular uh discussion point before this q dr the summer was that we're entering an interwar period like we had between world war one and world war two that analogy could not be more incorrect i think if anything you're seeing continual force demand out for the next 10 years and that's an environment in which you can't rest you can't cut back on your forces if you do you need a fundamental reset um and i think you you saw a preview in syria this summer and in the middle east uh today of what happens when the united states steps back from one of these major regional crises um and i i think you know not to not to go into depth on on that issue but i i viewed it at the time as potentially a chance for others in the region to step up and step up they have but they've only increased the chaos in the region so u.s leadership is is critical um so finally a few things that i'd mention uh as maybe missing in this document that that i would encourage the department to to flesh out as they do their follow on internal implementation i don't feel a lot of jointness in the documents uh i think uh clark murdoch has coined the phrase that if air power is a compound word it's a political statement and air power is a compound word here c power is two words uh so just looking at little things like that and how the forces are going to work together um there's a lot of language that doesn't necessarily show an interest in some of the joint lessons learned from the past 10 years of warfare and that gets to um a bob gates quote i'm i can't believe i'm the first person to quote bob gates on this panel but the next war itis uh is setting in this idea that the that the future environment is going to be so different that you're going to need radically different capabilities just is not true historically that's not true and that's a point secretary gates made in a lot of much more articulate ways than than i did um and and finally i think there's a lot of concerns stated about sort of 2025 plus and the ability of adversaries to negate u.s technological uh edge but right now it's just lip service there's not a lot of specifics on that and i would point to unmanned systems in particular which which had sort of a mixed track record across this some really good decisions from the army to to keep manned unmanned teaming as they draw down their overall attack helicopters and and bring apaches into the into the active and think about how to use some of their existing large inventory of unmanned systems um some uh frankly uh not explicable decisions like the fact that is our demand is still huge out of the co-coms and yet the air forces is cutting down on combat air patrols even as they convert to an all mq9 reaper uh is our fleet uh so just just a few hanging issues that's just just one example uh but but definitely some some homework to be done thank you sam um you actually did answer some of the questions there i appreciate that i would invite viewers on the web to uh send your questions by email you can send to me at dber teau at csis.org i would like to make a comment and then ask a question to each of the panel members and and then we'll open the floor to additional questions um when we use the word budget of course in in washington it really means different things depending on where in the cycle you are this is the president's budget it's the budget proposal uh to the congress uh the next budget document uh by law would be the house and senate budget resolutions uh we have some indication that there will be a house budget resolution the degree to which it's consistent with or compliant with the budget control act caps remains to be seen we have some indications that the senate will actually deem last year's ryan murray agreement to be the senate budget resolution so they'll set that level that would then be the basis of allocations uh under section 302 b of the budget reform act for the appropriators uh more than likely those allocations would again be consistent with the budget control act uh caps do d though has said over the last couple weeks that this budget they've laid out shows how bad it would be if they had to stay at the cap level at the sequester level as they like to call it so my question to you that's actually a three-port question has do d made the case that this is bad and and unacceptably bad if you will uh per secretary hagel can congress from all this information what we've seen so far and what we expect to see can congress see clearly the impact of those lower dollars and uh and therefore what we would not be able as a nation to do and if not what else does do d need to do to make the case um so and i would particularly like you know three of our panel members here had substantial careers uh on the hill before they came to to csis and uh through the executive branch in some cases and so i'd particularly like your perspective but uh let me throw it open you can start the clock you want to go first sure uh is do d made a good enough case yes will congress see it no what else can do do wait until after the next election i'll try to be almost as brief um but hopefully more positive and hopeful no i don't think i will be i i think do d has made the best case they can um to me this gets back to a fundamental challenge of um there isn't a broad consensus on either the u.s. role in the world um or on even if people agree on what that role should be how you best accomplish it so uh that the executive branch has laid out a vision of that it's not broadly accepted therefore i think you're going to continue to have a disconnect in congress has been shockingly in my mind united on both sides they all say that even though they don't like it they don't see a way out of pca so um i personally would be surprised if if any of that is achieved so uh what else can they do i know they can keep talking i don't think it'll matter has do d made their case i actually don't think they have um if you look at the entirety of the q dr they've devoted four pages plus three lines to saying how bad sequestration will be in its own chapter now granted it's sprinkled how bad sequestration will be throughout the document um but they're not it's it's almost like the executive branch and the legislative branch are talking past each other they don't understand each other's objectives and neither are willing to meet um halfway which means at the end of the day they're going to get what they get and then we'll see what the real implications and effects are um what can do d do more of um i think when you're looking at congress they're not entirely believing of the department when the department says something they don't necessarily think it's true um so more examples getting the full range of the of the do d support network to to approach the hill it's not just the executive branch why don't you bring in some of the associations and others um somehow get them all on the same page and then talk about it so no i i don't think do d has made the case because i don't think they understand what congress is looking for i have no insight into into congress's thank you but i will i will say on the on the do d side what what will probably be helpful is behind the scenes talking to the people who did the the scenario work and the and the force planning work and really ran the models that told them that we are on the edge of a cliff which they they all strongly believe and and to to be able to articulate how uh you know a korea scenario stacked against a homeland event stacked across in iran contingency how that actually looks and what that does to us forces and what that does with fewer us forces i think would be a pretty compelling argument all right thank you this is where we'll open it up to the floor our procedure of course is you raise your hand i'll recognize you you'll have a microphone which will come to you i'm going to start at the back and work my way forward so let's uh let's start right here identify yourself please and your affiliation and then ask your question thanks um hello i'm matthew levincher i'm the director of the national security studies program at the george washington university um my question is about procurement reform um which doesn't seem to be a hot topic in this q dr uh and specifically i wanted to point to something that uh david kill cullen um a well-known counter insurgency expert uh has talked about in terms of the urbanization of warfare and the emergence of urban of mega cities um he has no he notes that in i think it's in syria there are some of the insurgents patched together um these little tiny cars put some armor plating on them attach them to game video game consoles and cameras and mounted machine guns on top so they had for like three or four thousand dollars a tank that was six feet wide and so it could it could navigate in uh in the streets of of environments like that and my my concern about procurement is that we seem to be operating under this model where we say well in 2022 we'll get the f 35 just right and here are all the capacities we're gonna need in 2022 i mean google did not exist 15 years ago right i mean so how can we be assuming that we will know exactly what capabilities we need um 10 years out for our major weapon systems and it seems to me that that one approach to addressing this question would be to come up with cheap iterative you know rapidly adaptable systems uh and i'm just wondering if there if uh if you if the gurus at csis have given any thought to this issue um i don't know what the gurus think but uh we we actually have a project underway uh that will produce some results later this year that's looking at one variation of the question not necessarily as it applies to major weapon systems only matt but uh but more broadly the do d uh and that's do d's ability to identify and then take advantage of technology developments that's occurring in the global commercial arena uh historically uh if you look at the the history of defense technology development over the last 70 years by and large it's been focused on stuff that do d buys and pays for either directly through rnd contracts or indirectly through investments by major defense firms uh with the anticipation that do d will need it um as little as six seven years ago the director of darpa was saying publicly 95 percent of everything he cared about was still being bought and paid for in the defense budget it's unlikely that that's going to be the case for the foreseeable future that 95 percent of what do d cares about is going to be bought and paid for by the unless that's a tautology and we just make it be that way but the reality is that innovations occurring all over the place these are difficult things for both the defense department in particular and the federal government in general to take full advantage of because we offer such a great deal to any technology innovator who's not already a defense contractor right you can offer us your equipment and your new technology and we'll be happy to buy it from you but of course you'll have to give us your intellectual property and then we'll reserve the rights to give that to your competitor when we'd like to compete um you'll have to probably comply with cost accounting standards and truth in negotiations act and a handful of other modest investments in your capacity to do your own bookkeeping um and we'll let you sell it to anybody as long as you apply for a license first and we'll probably say yes and it may not take us but a year or two uh and so under those circumstances of course almost any global commercial company would say god i'd love to do business with the government please let me have at it so there are a lot of issues that we've got a wrestle with there if you will applying that though to individual weapon systems and and platforms i think is a much much tougher uh set of questions and i think that we will continue to be uh in a dual situation where the platforms themselves will evolve at the same slow pace that we've seen in the past what probably bears more to the question here is modernizations and upgrades inside those platforms and the ability in fact to take the google development that you couldn't see 15 years ago and fold it into the next upgrade and i think our capability there is actually substantially better uh than it was in the past and we're building some of that capability into new systems so i'm fairly optimistic in that regard what i'm not all that optimistic about is that we can do it remarkably cheaply um because the idea that i can give you more and faster and cheaper all at the same time is proved to be quite elusive i don't know if any others want to comment or expand upon that so i thought i saw a question on this side of the room but maybe it was only uh somebody who was ducking um all right in the front here then all right i will i'll get to you in just a minute uh thank you i'm jennifer uh uh from shenzhen media group of china uh question is still about uh uh nuclear security uh we know japan is technically capable of going nuclear which will the cheapest way of increasing the military capability so u.s. quite support japan to develop nuclear energy but we know any country that has nuclear power has a potential to make nuclear weapons so what's your take on it thank you are you asking what's our take on that yeah is there any concern from your perspectives we've uh the united states has been one of the leading nations over the last several decades of trying to prevent nuclear proliferation most recently uh it points to consistently and in northeast asia consistently to us extended deterrence and us assurances to its northern east asian allies as one of the bulwarks of non-proliferation during that time so the united states has been concerned about non-proliferation for a long way but i would argue um that the nation that really should be a lot more interested in non-proliferation northeast asia is china if china is the cause of the security anxieties is making its nuclear capable uh neighbors in the near abroad to use the term out of uh out of the russia context worried uh about whether or not they may need nuclear weapons perhaps the chinese ought to be thinking about what are the kinds of things we can do to perhaps ease the consider security concerns of our neighbors and lead them not to want to pursue nuclear weapons which are well within their capability during the cold war uh the united states uh while being initially reluctant did accept an independent nuclear france an independent nuclear uh england united kingdom because it buttressed deterrence against the soviet union i don't blame the united states for those decisions i blame the soviet union like to add one other factor that i think the this q dr in particular and to a lesser extent the budget just simply because i can't quite see the details in the budget yet puts a great emphasis on um reliance on partners and allies as part of the global security framework the extent to which that reliance in the uh total sense of the national security arena uh is successful that's the extent to which extended deterrence works better and you need less of a of a push towards developing independent nuclear capability i don't know if any other panelists would like to add to that uh frank let me uh take yours and then i have a question from the web which i'll go to hi frank finale uh david i would like to broaden your question to be what more can the administration do to state the case for the higher do d spending you mentioned the opportunity growth and security initiative of 26 billion but that's 26 billion within an 85 billion dollar administration request i mean defense is over 50 percent of the non of the discretionary budget of the united states it's only 30 percent of that o gsi and so the question is it's 115 billion plus how much else for non defense discretionary and so what would your opinion be of what the administration can do to show that do d is a priority here ah i would say that almost every day i fail to give thanks enough that i'm a security expert not a health care expert um but uh but the the nature of the debate if you will and i think it's reflected in the comments to my earlier question here about the fence is this is not just a binary discussion of how much money we should be spending on national security there's a much broader set of questions that work here and at their core there are only two one is how much government do we want a need and need to have and the second is how do we pay for it and i think that it's pretty important to look at the context of the way in which the defense budget is being examined as part of that broader discussion if you will um i would reflect back to the last time we had this uh discussion at the national level and it probably started with the 1980 election and frankly took about 15 years before we got it resolved to the point where uh we had pretty much not only reached agreement on what kind of government we needed to have but it figured out how to pay for it and then we had about five years of of surpluses and then 9 11 happened and we started all over again so i think it's useful to keep that perspective both in terms of the overall dimensions and in terms of the chronological dimensions uh that that come into play here which may be why clark's comment they've got to wait until after the 2016 election may not be pessimistic it may actually be optimistic i would add one thing to it uh when i made my presentation i pointed out that given current trends by the time we get to 2021 the end of the budget control act all money will have been consumed for modernization by other forms of the defense budget if you look at the federal budget itself by the time we get to 2038 2040 current trends continue there will be no room for discretionary spending it will be all mandatory spending given the way the trends are going right now defense and national security in general there's two debates there's a typical gun guns versus butter and then there's entitlements versus guns and guns are losing both of those debates right now during that time so national security is gradually being disclosed and out of the discretionary budget along with all discretionary spending let me work us back down to a much more pedestrian level question and then i see i have two more here from the audience this comes in from the web and it particularly focuses on the army and the funding of the army the army insurance level is actually funded below the q dr level of 450 000 at about 420 and the question is what's the budget difference and what are the risks so let me turn to our army expert on the panel here dr lead i was actually going to turn the budget part of that question over to you because i've forgotten since i did i left a while ago and and can't remember the cost of 10 000 in active duty and strength set i'm sorry so hopefully you remember it better than i do but with respect to the risks associated with that again as we as we've talked about today obviously we're highly subjective word and concept but but the fundamental risk associated with it is really one about availability right and how much within that active duty construct you have forces that are at various stages available you have the institutional army and the operational army and then within the operational army not all of that is ready to go at any given point in time and so it's a it's a question of how much force you have available and then as as secretary warren talked about the time the time in which you choose to employ it and the rotational basis for all of that and all of that is fairly fungible so quantifying the risk is is a sort of situation specific it's certainly i think i believe that the army leadership has said getting um to the 490 000 that was planned last year uh as the army and strength number they were able to do uh without taking big four structure cuts and to get from 490 to 450 they've had to take uh not just end strength reductions but structure reductions if you get down to 420 um you are taking some much more significant structure cuts um and then you get into are you going to take it out of combat units versus enablers and and how that all manifests itself so that's a long way of saying the risk is inherently annula depends on how you take it um we don't know how they would take it uh but it would certainly affect capacity and and the question is um how how much and of what types of force and and uh and that answer gave me time to search my own brain in terms of the dollars associated with it and i'm looking at ryan kraut who's my uh lead research fellow on this project i think when we did the uh the four think tank reduction drill we had that option and my memory is 10 000 army in strength active duty was around 600 million a year uh in associated costs but when you added in the overhead associated with that it's pretty close to a billion uh so you're probably looking at 30 000 of 3 billion a year at a minimum um and if you put that into that 115 billion dollar gap i would also note back to that chart that i showed with that 115 billion there's another level of optimism associated with that built into that red dashed line number is an assumption that do d will get to pocket all the savings and spend them on something else from all the proposals for military pay and benefits reductions that historically so far congress has not adopted that adds back about another 34 billion so we don't really have 115 billion dollar gap we have 115 billion plus 26 billion in f y 15 plus another 34 34 billion over the fit up we've actually got about 180 billion dollar gap on a 2.5 trillion dollar base if you will and that that's getting up into the seven and a half percent range that's starting to be a fairly substantial number in terms of the difference i've got two questions here in front let's start on row three and then move up to row two so you can just pass the mic forward after you're finished tom geiser national defense university presumably the challenges that we've described today would be reflected in an updated national security strategy are you aware to what extent that these efforts have been synchronized with uh those attempts to update our national security strategy to ensure that they're in alignment thank you i'm not aware of synchronization or the absence of synchronization but it'll be the very first question we try to ask when we see that national security strategy after it comes out and look for the same panel to be reassembled to provide commentary on that very point thanks tom we were assured that the national security strategy would be out well before the q dr patrick patrick garvey with triple canopy one of the things i love coming over here for is hearing the perspective of former do d officials who know what these people are thinking when they write because you've all been there and done that and and as you've all indicated in your response that you recovered in your response to david's first question you kind of indicated universally that there was this half-hearted attempt at making the case um for what the world with bca caps might look like they have to know what the congress is looking for which makes me believe that they know what the congress is looking for but they're not they're only half-hearted in their in their desire to make a worst-case scenario i mean if you're if your strategy yet on the whole is passive and you're not going to use the force to implement a foreign policy then how can you advocate for a larger force in the budget itself as i understand it right now and there is some confusion about the f y 15 budget request uh the army is funded to only 320 000 over the five four hundred and 20 000 over the period so you have to find the money to add back to the 440 450 that they would like to have the marines to 175 the uh i can't speak to the to the air force the air force is not funded for the a 10s although they didn't even mention a 10s in the qtr uh but they didn't mention the kc 10s they apparently not funded for that either so there's a number of unpaid bills that are in the budget uh my feeling is is that uh unlike a couple of my colleagues here is that for a defense document they were fairly clear about what would happen if the bca levels were imposed from f 16 on there would be a loss of of modernization it'd be a loss of programs it'd be a loss of force structure and these are pretty deep force structures in a relatively brief period of time that having been said the other part of your question gets at the issue of under what circumstances to use military capabilities to do things and the qtr said as i pointed out in my opening comments that we would be selective and tailored in our engagement with us forces there's a lot of ambiguity there's a big debate that goes on when you're do you use red lines and be explicit or do you be ambiguous about what you're going to do we've seen how well red lines have worked recently and you know as others have pointed out when red lines are there people poke them they want to see how soft they are they want to do this so there's an art to it it's not just the science of how many forces you have i wouldn't characterize their arguments to the congress as half-hearted i guess i would i don't accept the proposition that there's anything that the defense department could have said that would have necessarily answered the congressional mail again i don't accept that there's a that congress is is waiting with pen in hand to write a bill as soon as the defense department clarifies that you know the sky will fall again i don't think there's an argument that they could have made that's going to change the fundamental dynamic on the hill so to me it's not they it's not that they don't understand it's not that they're misguided or uninformed or don't read the newspapers or watch tv it's that and and you will know congress moved the goalpost right last year they said oh you haven't told us enough you haven't told us enough and then they come and say okay well here's here's what it would be and immediately get blasted by saying okay well that that doesn't that we we're not gonna we're not gonna deal with what you told us anyway so you've articulated the risk and we don't care so um again i don't i don't put uh much fault on the defense department for not being explicit enough because that's not the fundamental uh solution to the more basic challenge of what does the congress want to do about discretionary spending in the context of mandatory spending right so the defense department can't deal with that i mean this is it's not it's not about defense i have a different perspective on this which is again i wouldn't characterize it as half-hearted either i just don't think and i don't i don't agree that you know members of congress don't read the newspaper i i think or members of the administration or the executive branch don't read the newspaper the thing is i don't think when you're thinking logically when you're a defense department official and you're thinking logically about how to make your argument i think the defense department has fallen into the trap of making an argument to themselves um and not understanding because there is a credibility gap and because they haven't been able to um for whatever reason create enduring relationships with key members on the hill i mean they have to a certain extent but when it comes to this issue i don't think they've gotten i'm not talking about co-opting members of congress i'm talking about working with them to understand what is your perspective and what can we do together as partners and even christine warmest mentioned it earlier is that now the step is to go and engage congress well yes thank you for rolling your eyes i should have been a little bit ago um so i don't think their effort has been half-hearted i think it's been um very logical from their perspectives um but you have to understand as you well do patrick that not all members of congress are equally on board with the defense department logic um because they they see different they have different perspectives on it and the lack of credibility and the lack of relationships really damages the case just two quick points the the first one is obviously anything that's said in front of congress is said to allies and adversaries alike so i think in in both the document and in the statements that we've seen from senior defense leaders a lot from the from the joint chiefs of staff i mean standing up all of them and saying that there's a remarkable degree of risk that the united states is at risk that there's going to be a diminution in in our ability to defend the nation that's about as clear as you can get publicly without going into the specifics so i hope they follow up with the staffs and members and others with those specifics and that they're they don't they don't hold back and i think you know it is a step forward i think in in in the chess game albeit dod is still a hostage in this to some degree but for the white house to have allowed a a q dr that is this forthright is is a change uh in in tone um thanks folks you all have been most generous with your time this afternoon you've given us two hours we are clearly not exhausting all the possibilities of discussion on this topic and and i think as both more information becomes publicly available and as the dynamic evolves will revisit it again and again i want to thank you all for your attendance here this afternoon i'll ask you to join me in thanking the panel and with that we're adjourned