facebook and you are not going to a bookstore, if you spend all their time reading about britney and not watching c-span and seeing what is going on in the senate floor and elsewhere, then you are piling up heavy opportunity cost for yourself because when you are 30 years old and you work all day and go home, you have a couple of kids, make dinner, do the laundry, get them to bed, you are not going to say now i'm going to get back to federalist paper number 43. no, you are tired. you don't have the time and energy to have that kind of intellectual development. so the more young people spend their hours out of class crafting their myspace page or piling up cellphone minutes, the last time they are studying a foreign language, practicing a musical instrument, learning about the nature of our government -- one quick statistic to end on that with.

the national school board association calculated nine hours a week of social networking for teenagers. last. that has gone up since then. the high school survey of student engagement found that we do represent a high school students to one hour or less reading and standing before class per week. so we have 921 or higher social not working person's home work. that is a distressing statistic. >> mark bauerlein, the book is "the dumbest generation". ..

d.c. is 1 hour and 50 minutes. >> welcome to this fantastic event about a called "america's defense meltdown: pentagon reform for president obama and the new congress". i am danielle brian, executive director of the project on government oversight. i want to thank the 5 organizations that are sponsoring this event, the most important is the constitutional government, where we are -- the organizational home, the home of the recently passed stewart mott, the center for defense information, which winslow t. wheeler is a representative well, as well as drew, packages of common sense, with the executive director and newest member to our coalition, helen.

the interview for policy studies, the executive director, these are a range of organizations who believe in the integrity of government. you couldn't have a better panel of people representing how to fix the american defense system. the 3 people behind us -- the first behind me, the editor of the book, winslow t. wheeler, he is currently the center of defense information, has a fantastic history as the only person to work in congress simultaneously for a democrat and republican, i don't think anyone else has ever done that. and he also worked at the general accounting office. next to him is tom christie is started in the 50s in the pentagon, most recently serving

as director of operational test and evaluation for 4 years in the pentagon. and nt also having started in the defense industry, pierre sprey was one of the original whiz kids who went to be part of the spider mafia, and is part of the fantastic team responsible for the design of the f-16. i am going to sit down because we have a lot to talk about. i want to hear from winslow t. wheeler first. >> thanks very much. it is a real pleasure to be sponsored by the 5 groups that are sponsoring this little event. there are a lot of organizations in washington that pretend to be involved in defense issues. these 5 organizations, in my judgment, are 5 that actually are seriously involved in defense issues. a couple of notes about the book

itself, when this airs on tv it will be available on amazon.com, it will be available on march 20th or so, courtesy of stanford university press. we have the cd-i edition on sale, we will be happy to accommodate you for sales when the presentations are over. we are also making available to you free our military almanac. i have my thumb over the year we put this out, 2007, but there is lots of stuff in here that i think you will find very interesting and relevant and not out of date. so much for that. i want to thank one person in particular for making this book

possible, phil strauss has supported our work at cd-i in a fantastic way and has been a wonderful person to work with. he is not the kind who calls up at the end of the day and says what the hell did you just say in the press conference? it is a real pleasure and honor to work with him. he made this book possible with a very generous donation. if you look at the screen, that is the same cover, pretty much, that university press will offer. the only thing i say about this slide is this is the kind of thing that passes in washington d.c. for modest and unassuming self-promotion. let's talk very quickly about the budget for defense, and what we get for it.

this graph shows, according to dod data in what they call real dollars, the value of the dollar, on the far end, 2008, you will see that number when it is there, the same value of the dollar on the left side, obviously today we are at a higher level of spending, in affiliation -- inflation-adjusted dollars, higher than korea, the first speights, the medium hummed is vietnam's, and the third, fatter home, we are higher than all of those. when you consider the boards we are fighting in terms of people deployed are extremely modest, far fewer than vietnam, far fewer event korea, we are spending more and deploying less, the horizontal line is the cold war average, we are hugely

above the cold war average these days, and yet we have no superpower to contend with. those 120 divisions people said were going to come across the folder gap, they don't exist. a huge the -- a huge budget, here's how it compares to the rest of the world. those 2 large columns on the left are the london international institute, stockholm institute, both of them, if you look on the right, our numbers for 2008. it is not true that we spend more than the rest of the world combined. that was struck couple years ago, but somebody out there has been spending more money. we certainly approximate the rest of the world, we certainly dominate as an individual country, that cia number was taken off of their web site last

year. i gather they got embarrassed that he threats were inflated enough that their numbers were too people need. those are the numbers they displayed last year before they removed it from a website. how do we compare to the so-called bad people? those numbers on the left, $122 billion for china, $70 billion for russia, are probably highly inflated. i have seen numbers for china down to $60 billion. the numbers for russia have gone down significantly recently, allowing to the collapse of oil prices, driving the defense budget in russia, the value of the ruble has been going down significantly, that number today would be significantly lower

than is on that chart. nonetheless, you add all of those actors together, and you get a grand total combined of 1 third of our annual defense budget, gives you a sense of the disproportion between what we spend and what others spend. we literally have a set of defense managers who feel they cannot adequately defend you at a level of spending 3 times the amount of all of the bad guys they can hope to find in the rest of the world. tom and terry are going to talk about some of these issues in more detail, but this is a top down look at what the money has been buying since the end of world war ii. on the right side, you see the

army budget in the same inflation-adjusted dollars, the trend line drawn to the middle is picked by the computer. as you can see, it has been going up over time. it is significantly above the historic trendline. book at the graph on the left, forces in terms of division equivalence, it has been going down significantly. we now have 10 division's worth of brigade combat teams, the smallest since the end of world war ii. we are trying to add 60,000 new personnel to the army, that is not even the showoff in the army's personnel, brigade combat

teams data, same thing in the navy, more money means less combat ships. same thing in the air force, the air force budget is all over the place, but at a constant level of spending. the air force structured the number of combat airplanes, fighters and bombers, significantly down, at a post world war ii lowe, a level of spending that is above the historic trend. our forces are not just shrinking or aging, this is congressional budget office data. i should point out that the data to the left of that line is data. those are actual counts of

armored vehicles, the data in the column at the center is the army plan for the future, better described by the word fantasy. it never happens. the data on the right, on that side of the screen, is not fantasy, it is delusion. that is certainly not going to happen in our lifetimes, maybe not ever if things stay the same. notice the line on the top. that is the average age of those vehicles, it has been getting older, the plan you see in the center column is if everything goes perfectly, no cost overruns, we buy the exact quantity, it will get better for a couple years, then the plan is for everything to get worse.

even in their fantasy period they get significantly worse if everything goes perfectly. same story in the navy. average age of the ships is getting older, the fleet is shrinking, the plan for the navy is everything goes perfectly, that plan has already totally fallen apart. if everything went perfectly, it would have gotten worse. same thing in the air force. the air force can't even put together a short-term plan where they pretend that things get better. that fantasy on the right hand side, it is absolutely guaranteed that that airplane will not come in at the cost and

numbers that they are pretending, it will not rescue them from their aging problem, nor from their shrinking problem. we can talk about this later, but there are solutions. thomas christie and i talk about how to address these problems at great length in the chapters in our book. i will give you an example for the sake of illustration. the first one, getting rid of the pork. in addition to the $800 billion that congress add to the defense budget since 2001, despite the wars in iraq and afghanistan, congress also added $770 billion for the non war parts of the budget to attempt to address the shrinking, aging problem that it didn't address.

one of the ways we waste and all that money was congress blew away $70 billion on pork. notice also at after the reforms that the democratic congress instituted in january 2007, you can argue that things either didn't change whatsoever or they got worse. they pretend they have transparency and earmarks, not really. to provide the descriptions of these earmarks that they pretend is a great effort that transparency? it is the author of the year mark. o.j. said he didn't kill his wife, so i guess he didn't. the amount of pork coming out of the bills, and the

appropriations committees, is as big as many in the past, on the order of $7 billion a year. if you want to address that kind of problem, you have to get serious about it and do things other than pretend you are being, quote, transparent when you are being anything but transparent, you are just adding another layer to the deception. that is what is going on in our acquisition. thomas christie and pierre sprey will give you examples of that. we can talk about real solutions when we get into the questions. i am going to set up the screen for tom's presentation and get out of the way.

>> just go up and down. >> okay. i find myself wedge between 2 bomb throwers over here. i guess i am supposed to be the guy who presents a calm and influence on the wild man here. is there really a problem? i'm going to talk about acquisition. 40 years of acquisition reform and what do we have? yes still taking 30 years to deliver less capability than what we started out with. and would never force you look at, we have huge shortfalls in modernization. i use several reports. those reports highlight the

planned/reality mismatch. i pressed the wrong button. take a look at the analysis of the year and a half ago. the number of programs, they look at 2005/2007, the programs grew from 75 to 95 in that timeframe, the total planned costs, $1.6 trillion for those programs. but the next line tells the story. costs have jumped 40% on those 95 programs from the original estimates, an average of 40%. acquisition costs have jumped by more than 20%. the number of programs that have grown by more than 25%, the

share of those programs, half of those programs have jumped by 25% in their costs, and the average delay in delivering combat capability is up to almost 2 years now. what caused this? i will call on my compatriot who for many years railed about these problems, i took these right out of his defense facts of life that he did 10 years ago. what caused this problem? why are we where we are? fundamentally flawed assumptions in the whole process. future budgets are always going to go faster than they have in the past, investment budgets will grow even faster is and that, which allows the decisionmakers to stuff more programs in different end that you really can't afford.

operating a support budget, that is going to grow slower, because our new weapons are more reliable and easier to maintain. that is hogwash. we have heard about f 15s verses have 4s, it hasn't happened and won't happen. weapons system procurement costs will decrease in the future because we have these huge production rate that combined with a steep learning curve and everything gets cheaper. none of this happens. the issue we are talking about is certainly not new. i served on several of these crazy study groups, we study it every 2 or 3 years. what is wrong with the process? we come up with a bunch of recommendations and nobody pays attention. the process fails, the

acquisition process, thanks to the appetites of users, this conspiracy between the r and d community and industry, quantum leaps in capabilities, we have consistently approved what were unattainable, much less risky technical and operational requirements. we allowed a bunch of unrealistic assumptions at the outset of these programs to make the programs look affordable, we consistently approved by ins in terms of cost and schedule as performance, and totally ignored our own rules that say we have to use independent cost estimates. we did not foresee or refuse to admit to technical and operational problems in the future. we did not fund up front technology demonstrations, prototypes, or other means of mitigating this. we did not adhere to our own

directive. we went schedule based verses event based on many programs. we waived critical test events time and again. and we emphasized performance at the expense of suitability. this is a chart that shows the army obtaining results in a 10 year period from 1997 through 2006. we have a requirement on the bottom, between a deterrent and the actual -- on the y axis, 2 thirds of these programs did not meet their criteria. 2 thirds. and over half of those that didn't, didn't even meet half of their criteria, and yet these programs were pushed into the field. bleeding in to what jerry is

going to talk about, we can talk about how we ended up with these dwindling forces in each of these categories a novel talk about the air force and its aging fighter pilots. how did we get there? the air force banked on the top line that it could not have reasonably done. in the early years of the reagan administration, hundred fighter attack aircraft, we grew the fourth to thirty-eight wins, then we went on a procurement holiday. the f-22 was coming and we going to wait for it. so we banked on those 2 programs that we really couldn't afford from the start. we should have known.

these are the number of aircraft fighters -- you notice the vietnam war on the left side. then we built up -- i always tell you this, we bought more aircraft in those years than we are going to for the next 20 years. so you see on the bottom, on the right, 2003 to 2008, 20, f-22s a year verses the 400 aircraft we bought in the 70s. the pitt the average age. we were looking at 10 years, the average age, we kept it that

way. the average age on the top has gone from 38 to the mid 80s down to 10 active wings. if the structure is half of what it was. the air force says we are striving to get between 15, and 20. another look at procurement of aircraft. on the top, we see the numbers of aircraft on the bottom half, it costs $1. billions of dollars on the

bottom, the reagan administration, we spend between $6 billion, and $8 billion. how do you do this? the cost is on the bottom, almost the same amount of money that we had spent for 20 airplanes a year, we were buying 200 some just 20 years ago. >> is so much more capable. >> of course. >> there's a big argument about f-22s, which is costing an arm and a leg to operate. the air force ones to buy more, $200 million a coffeepot. we are also counting on the joint fighter to save us.

this is a look at what this program is going to cost. we are looking at 3 different independent estimates of the underfunding of this program. we need $5 billion more, that is near term, $33 billion more for procurement. the navy's independent team is even higher, we need even more money. the program is going to slip at least 2 years, then we have the defense contract, no way is this program going to deliver on time, much less on budget or solve the air force or navy's problem. i say we have had enough reform.

no more acquisition reform, just take the existing processes you have, make it work and discipline it. i don't know how many times i sat and watched results presented to the decisionmakers. we are not going to go forward any more, we're going to put it off and what happens? you go forward. here are the directive you have, realistic budget projections, top line as well as individual weapons systems demonstrate that the technology before you go into full-scale development, this is the biggest problem, when you going to that stage of a program, and we fail to had met we are going to have problems, build and test programs, and you know what