officer. after the war he is disappointed to head the prussian war, were college. and from 1818, 1831 he is spending most of his time writing about his experiences in the great wars. he dies from caller in 1831 and his collected writings invites are published by his wife posthumously, in the first four volumes make up the book known as onboard. on more is a famous book regarded by many as the most important book ever written on armed conflict. it is currently standard reading and all the war colleges of the nest is armed forces. >> and your book is called "decoding clausewitz." wide? >> well, it is called "decoding clausewitz" because i think that

"on war" has been misunderstood, very badly misunderstood. and it's not like it has just any common book that we misunderstand many books, but this book because of its place in american military education, for it to be misunderstood has real-world consequences that are very considered one of the biggest misconceptions about clausewitz is he is the proponent of the offenses. and when, in fact, a very reverse is the case, that he is the great proponent of the defense as a stronger form of war. and in particular, he argues that it's dashed if the defender is willing to resort to guerrilla warfare there's no such thing as a decisive victory or the attacker. >> what does that mean? >> it means that clausewitz believes that your main army can be defeated, your country can be occupied and your capital enhance of any but if you have

the will to resist if necessary, army their own population, that in the end the attacker would be compelled to modify his political objective, and you can reserve your sovereignty. >> is that not the way that clausewitz is taught today? >> that's usually not how it is taught. it's frequently, not always, but quickly taught as the proponent of the offensive and decisive battle. he is often characterized as the rationalize of the napoleonic method to four. when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. user proponent not of napoleonic efforts but those who oppose napoleon. he is after all a prussian. he's not a frenchman. >> professor sumida, clausewitz is known for saying that war is merely a continuation of policy by other means. >> welcome he did say that but it's often given a meaning that

at the very least, the storks called what clausewitz was trying to say. is usually intended to mean that when you go to war you should have an edge evil -- achievable political. number one, that phrase is accompanied by other phrases which clarified what he meant in certain instances. he not only said that war should be an extension of politics or policy by other means. he also said that policy politics affect the attacker, or the defender. and he also argued that politics policy does not just mean foreign politics or international policy. it also means domestic politics. and the significance of that is that clausewitz believe that domestic politics could actually shape wargames, that is opposition to a war for example, could cause the leadership in

the country to modify its political objective. and the corollary to this is that the objective if war might not just the military objective, it might be political objective. clausewitz would be very much sympathetic to the notion that even if you lost all your major battle, if you protracted the resistance and cause domestic difficulty in the attacking country, that you could preserve your sovereignty. so obviously the applicability of this idea to the present day is quite large. >> when did "on war" become popular in the u.s.? >> well, "on war" is referred to in textbooks at the u.s. military academy during the second world war. it's interesting to end tax but no mention is made, the phrase war is an extension of politics. what really becomes required

reading in text and u.s. military is probably in the 1970s, especially after 1976 when the michael howard and peter parade translation of "on war" is published. this is a translation that while not perfect, it's much more accessible than previous translations. and effect at oxford in 2005 in the conference, a german scholar observed that germans preferred to be clausewitz in english translation rather than in the original german because they thought it was more clear. i can't vouch for the truth of that, but it's an interesting observation spent well, professor sumida, since 1976 when you say it became more use in the military academies, three major wars have been fought. the gulf war, the iraq war and the current war in afghanistan. pc traces of "on war"? can you see traces of "on war" in those wars?

>> again, i recall in 2003 vice president cheney said as justification for the invasion of iraq that everyone knows that the offense is a stronger form of war. and, in fact, everyone might notice but that category would include carl von clausewitz you argued precisely in the opposite. and the reason i think that are applicable to that particular case, in other cases. i mean, clausewitz is convinced that time works for the offender and not the attacker. and a strategy of attrition on the part of the defender will ultimately cause an attacker to modify his political objective. and this is of course a perfectly consistent with the strategic perspectives because his own country, prussia, was the weakest power and and france as a next-door neighbor.

if there's going to be any hope for prussian national survival, particularly after 1806 when it had been completely smashed by french military victory, clausewitz has to come up with a theory that would strategically encourage the leadership of his own country. i mean, i don't know if clausewitz is absolutely right, that he had very good reason to argue what he did about defense. >> jon sumida, have you a chance to discuss your book in front of military classes? >> yes, i teach at the school of advanced war fighting which is advance go for the a spring core and i've lectured lectured at the pentagon, and at other military institutions. i've been gratified by the response, much more favorable than i would have anticipated. i was asked by the editor of mike briggs at the university from kansas, what about the reaction to my book would be

picked and i was pretty certain that because it cut across so much of the interpretation of "on war" that it would not be entirely favorable, though my reply was that the week after my book was published i would be burned at the stake at the army war college. and the week after that, my ashes would be -- and the week after that the fumes from the dissolved ashes is shot into space by the air war college. and the week after that the marines would make it required reading at the school of "decoding clausewitz" published kansas, a new approach to "on war." is also a professor of history at here at the university of maryland. >> we would like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv.

and this is booktv on c-span2 people are at the university of maryland talking with professors are also office. we are now joined by professor philip joyce whose book is called "the congressional budget office: honest numbers, power, and policymaking." professor joyce, when was the cbo for? >> cdo was formed in 1974 it was, in fact, the reaction to some of the perceived excesses while they're actually accesses by the nixon administration. as part of an effort by the congress to try to reassert its role in the budget process. and as a part of that they also created the budget committees and the budget resolution. but if they're going to be equal players in the budget process they really needed to have their own budget agency as opposed to relying on numbers that came from the executive branch and that's really the reason for the cbo. >> if you do say yes or no, as the cbo been successful? >> i think it's been

phenomenally successful, and i think it's success is mostly measured by the fact that i think if you talk to most people in immediate cut in a deep most people if they're being honest with you on both sides of the aisle in the congress they would say that the congressional budget office, at least concerning the budget probably has the most credible numbers of medical information out there. that was not a foregone collusion but it was not something that necessarily was destined to happen. in fact, if you had said to someone in 1974 look, we're going to great and nonpartisan agency in the middle of the most partisan environment imaginable come is there going to work? i think an awful lot of people would have said no, but it was made to work and i think they worked hard on making it to work, but i think on that it has been successful. >> what is the cbo's mission? >> is to provide nonpartisan information on the economy and the budget through the congress,

and really increasingly to the public as well. that was not as anticipated when the cbo was formed, but there's lots of access the individual members of the public and immediate now have the cbo prostitute in the have before because of the internet and other sources and i think increasingly its mission has broadened really to include serving the public in addition to the congress. the nonpartisan nature of cbo's work is very crucial, and the law that created the cbo, it said only that the director and the cbo staff should be appointed without regard to partisan affiliation. but the first director who was alice rivlin hoosiers a giant of public service council is still going strong at the age of 80, really created a culture that was very much moved from just

the direct a staff being appointed without regard to party affiliation, to doing their work a nonpartisan manner. >> who appointed the director? >> the director was appointed i should buy the speaker of the house and the president pro tempore of the senate who is all c-span viewers know is the member of the majority party, with the greatest amount of seniority. but practically speaking, it's really the chairs ranking members of the house and senate budget committee who are most responsible for selecting the cbo director. there have been eight directors of cbo since its formation. four of them have been nominal democrats, four of them have been nominal republicans. what they all have in common is that they are as alice rivlin was described herself, card carrying middle of the rota teq said there people who are considered to be relatively moderate members of the parties even though they are nominal

democrats, nominal republicans. stancu is a current director? >> douglas elmendorf. he was a very active. what most people who know about the cbo know about director elmendorf probably know about him was that he was sort of all over the place during the debate on the obama health care reform. when cbo was really, became sort of the crucial arbiter of whether the health care reform would actually add to the deficit or subtract from the deficit. >> professor joyce, you might in your book that because of cbo they put off action on the health care bill for your? >> that's correct. if the health care reform had not been viewed as something that had to at least be deficit neutral, and i think cbo would not necessarily have had as important a role as it had. but what you say that one of the things you are concerned about him and really president obama

himself elevated cbo to this stature by saying that he would not sign a bill that added to the deficit, that really meant that it was a much higher hurdle for bills to get over if that had not been true. and certainly there were delays at various stages of the process because the congress was waiting to find out whether, whatever their latest version was, could sort of pass the cbo test spin and doug elmendorf used to work for dick gephardt, didn't he? >> i'm not sure of that. it's possible. >> is there a professional staff as well as cbo that goes through administration? >> yes, there is, although interestingly it's not a professional staff like you'd find in most federal agencies. well, in two respects i suppose. the first is its dominant ip chief economist which we cannot find in your average federal agency. but the other is that the cbo

staff actually work at the pleasure of the director. that is, a director could come in and just clean house on day one if they wanted to. and in that respect the relationship of the cbo staff to the cbo director is sort of like the relationship of the congressional staff to a member of congress. no director has ever come in and decided to clean house on day one, because there's a lot of expertise obviously that resides in the cbo staff. so the practice has been for cbo staff tuesday from one director to another, but actually because that's what the directors have chosen to do. there's one case when juno knew who was the cbo director was appointed just after the republicans took back the congress in 1994, this sort of the center was that she's going to come in and clean the place up. and the house republican, at

least ownership in the house very much wanted her to do that. they assume that because the cbo staff had been there for a long time under democratic rule that that must mean they were giving comfort to the democrats. the senate republicans, particularly pete domenici who was the top republican on the senate budget committee did not want that to happen and, in fact, she did not do that, much to the surprise of some of the house republicans. >> how big is the congressional budget office and what is your budget? >> it is about 250 people. i think its budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25, $30 million. that sort of a ballpark. but it's not a big agency. and, in fact, it has an awful lot more influence than you think an agency of 250 people would have. >> why was alice rivlin so

important in the early days of the cbo? >> i think she was important because she had a clear vision for what she wanted the agency to do. and she said out to make the organization in that image, and she was pretty stubborn about it in the sense that she had a vision, she was sometimes pushed by members of congress to move in a different direction, and she was pretty clear about the direction that she wanted to go in. and when she did that she began to create a culture in the organization. and that i think is one of the most interesting parts to the of the story of cbo, is to take something, not only the fact that it was an agency that was supposed to be nonpartisan in the middle of his very partisan environment, but also the fact that you have this organization that starting from scratch. you don't have a model necessarily to go from all of

you been told as the new director, create amortization and make it responsive to the congress in a nonpartisan manner. so in the first place you have to to get what that means. she was very clear, she brought people together to talk about how we know if this has been successful, but then should you go out and hire people. she had to go out and find these people who she thought could work in an organization that would realize this kind of vision. and that was an extraordinary thing to do, and she was there for two terms. i think that made a big difference, that she was there for eight years. so by the end of eight years, it really was relatively well-established. however, it was still possible that the second director could command and change things. the second director was a republican, and his name was rudy pinner. al greenspan at the time called him a republican alice rivlin. and he behaved that way.

that his company b came in and he pretty much resource passionate reinforce the things she said. once that happened and then bob reischauer was the next director followed him and he pretty much the same things. in their sort of off and running in the sense that once you create a culture, you sustain it over 10 or 15 years, you know, now you know it's pretty well ingrained. >> professor joyce, has the cbo been used as a political football in the past? >> absolutely. the one thing you can say about organizations that produce information is that they cannot make anybody use that information. they can't even make anybody interpret the information accurately. so whoever it is might be a supporter or an opponent of a particular policy can clearly use a cbo cost estimate, for example, to say that this is a bad policy or a good policy. that certain happened with the clinton health care reform in

1993 and 1994. the cbo came up with an estimate that said that the clinton health care reform, rather than saving money, which the clinton administration said, would actually cost of money. that was only one of many aspects that someone could look at in order to judge whether that was a good reform or a bad reform. but the people who oppose the reform grabbed onto that particular conclusion and tried to use it to their best end, which was to try to see if they could kill the clinton health care reform. >> this is booktv on c-span2 and for talking with professor philip joyce here at the university of maryland about his book, "the congressional budget office." recently with a supercommittee, how was the cbo just? >> the cbo was used in two ways. actually is a use in one way. it should have been used in two ways. that one way that it was used was to try to help the

supercommittee to set the parameters of what they were going to do. so, director elmendorf went and testified multiple times before the supercommittee on the nature of the problem that was facing the country and what kinds of things would need to happen, what would be a reasonable trajectory for trying to get the deficit down, for example. and clearly cbo staff behind the scenes worked with the supercommittee answering questions. an awful lot of work the cbo does that is not visible in the sense that they are providing advice when asked to congressional staff, mostly to these committees. now, what would've happened if the supercommittee had been successful is that the cbo would have had to score whatever legislative changes the supercommittee came up with in order to determine whether they actually met the target that was set for the supercommittee. supercommittee needed to come up

with deficit reduction of at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years in order to prevent the automatic sequestration, across the board cuts, from taking effect. if they had gotten pepfar, which we now know they didn't, they would've had come cbo would have had whether the specific changes that they came up with on the tax side or the spending side actually met that target. and if it didn't meet that target then went to things would've happened to be either would've gone back to the drawing board and sort of added things that would've brought them up to the target, or the difference between what they did and the ultimate target would have still been subject to this across the board cut which is now what is going to happen unless some changes made in. >> what we we mean by scoring? >> cbo is required to do cost estimates of every single piece of legislation that goes out of congressional committee before it can be considered on the floor of the house or the

senate. and it's a very important role in the sense that what existed prior to that point, there was no one doing these kinds of cost estimates in a way that you'd find the the necessary very trustworthy prior to the creation of cbo. what would happen is that you either have the president's budget office, would do some kind of a cost estimate, but that wasn't immune from influence in terms of whether the president actually likes this particular bill or didn't like this particular bill, or worse yet you might have a sponsor of a particular piece of legislation into want to do the cost estimate. they have every incentive to suggest that the cost was lower, in fact and it would be in reality. and cbo clearly does not get those cost estimates right all the time. no one would get those cost estimates right all the time. i think that the influence is that people realize that they

don't have a particular ax to grind in the debate. that is, they're trying to do what they can do to come up with the most accurate cost estimate they can and they are not trying to either help the piece of legislation gets passed, or helped to kill the piece of legislation. >> can you tell us what example where cbo got it wrong in one example where they really got it right? >> i will take one example where they got it wrong, and everybody got it wrong, which is in 2001 when president bush came into office, what one of the things the cbo does is they do projections of the outlook for the federal budget. those projections have sometimes covered five years, but increasingly they cover 10 years. so what happened when president bush came into office is that there was an estimate from cbo that said that left to its own

device, that is under current law, the budget surplus cumulatively over the next 10 years would be $5.6 trillion. a trillion with a t. that was really as all cbo estimates are not a prediction but it was a projection based on the best information they had. and, in fact, as anybody should know, the further out you make a projection of anything, the less accurate it is going to be. so that was really the midpoint of a range and it was a pretty big range. but it did, it did support those who thought that it was important for the congress and the president to cut taxes at that point. and i think that tax cuts that were enacted were helped by the fact that there was this projection which clearly was wrong. now, there were projections come from ellsworth that were wrong as well get among the things he didn't predict is it didn't predict the recession that started soon after that it could

also didn't predict september 11, which no one really did. and there were fiscal effects coming out of september 11. in terms of something a cbo got right, and this is something i think also illustrates the limits of any analytical agency, cbo, for many years, probably 15 years, was producing reports and analyses that were warning about what might happen if the government sponsored enterprises, fannie mae and freddie mac, ever got in a situation where they didn't have enough capital and he really needed to come to the federal government for a bailout. their position throughout this entire time is that will never happen. part of a happen with a financial crisis, 2008 and beyond, the federal government actually had to take over fannie mae and freddie mac at the cost of two or $300 billion to the

federal budget. and this was clearly a case where i think cbo had it right, not that this would inevitably happen, but that there were particular things that the congress should do in legislation in order to protect the federal government against the potential for something like this could happen. >> philip joyce, the last couple of years, much of the process is broken in congress. a lot of continuing resolution. what's been cbo's role, if any, in that whole process? >> i think cbo's role is really just to support the process in a one thing, i always, i was a little uncomfortable talking about the success of the cbo because i'm talking about the success of enormous fish in the middle of a process which no one would say is successful. and i think part of that is just the limit of what any organization whose job it is to provide information can do.

so what the cbo has been doing in the process is what the cbo always does, which is that as the congress considers legislation, it provides them information on the effects of that legislation. it doesn't really have any role to play in terms of trying to force the congress or get the congress to do something that the congress does not want to do. one very important thing that alice rivlin did when she set up the organization, and this really was the working definition of what it means to be nonpartisan, is she said the congressional budget office will not make recommendations your and i was described to me once as someone said if you ask see how much of the cause, they will tally how much something costs if you ask them if it's a good idea, they will tell you how much it costs. and so even though i would agree with you or anybody else who says it is dysfunctional, i'm not sure how much cbo can do about that.

other than to try to eliminate the effects of the failure to engage in various kinds of policies whether the deficit reduction or something else. >> what do you teacher at the university of maryland? >> we have a general course on public budgeting, which covers all levels of government in our masters and public policy program, and i teach that course which is required of most of our students. and then we actually have a semester long course, believe it or not, on the federal budget. so i also teach a semester long course on the federal budget in which simultaneously makes the students probably more illuminated and more disillusioned than they were. >> you worked at the congressional budget office at one point? >> i did get i worked from 1991-96. and really the reason that i