the opposition to the war for the simple could cause the leadership of the country to modify its political objectives and the corollary to this is the objective in war might not just the military objective, it might be political objective. objects would be very much sympathetic to the notion that even if you lost all of your major battles, if you protected the resistance and caused domestic difficulty in in the attacking country that you could preserve your sovereignty. so obviously this idea to the present day is quite large. >> when did on war become popular in the u.s.? >> on war is referred to in the textbooks that the u.s. military

academy during the second world war. it's interesting in that no mention is made of the phase of the public's by any other means. where it really becomes required reading as the text in the u.s. military is probably in the 1970's especially after 1976 when the michael howard and peter translation of "on war" is published and the translation that while not perfect is much more accessible than previous translation and at oxford in 2005 to the conference german scholars observe that germans prefer to read clausewitz in the english translation rather than in the original because they thought it was clear and i can't vouch for the truth of that but it is an interesting observation. >> since 1976 when you say that it became more used in the military academy, three major wars have been fought. the gulf war, the iraq war mecca

and the current war in afghanistan. d.c. traces of on war and in those? >> more in the breach than the observance. again, on a recall and 2003 vice president cheney said everyone knows that the offensive is a stronger form of war and in fact everyone might know that but that category who argued precisely the opposite and for reasons that i think are applicable to that particular case and other cases. clausewitz is convinced that time works for the defender and not the attacker and the strategy of attrition on the part of the defender will ultimately cause an attacker to modify his political objective. this is with a strategic

perspective because its own company prussia was the greatest power in europe and it had financed and if there will be hope for the prussian national survival particularly after 1806 when it had been completely smashed by the french military victory the had to come up with a theory that would strategically encourage the leadership of its own country. i mean, i don't know if he is absolutely right but he had three good reasons to or do what he did about defense. >> jon sumida, have you had a chance to discuss your book in front of military class's? >> yes. i teach at the school of the advanced lock law fighting come and live lecture that the pentagon, and at other military institutions. i've been gratified by the response that is much more favorable than i would have anticipated. i was asked by the editor at the

university press of kansas why thought the reaction to my book would be, and i was pretty certain because it cut across the interpretation on war that it would not be entirely favorable but my eighth reply was the week after my book was published on would be burned up the stake at the army war college, and the week after that my ashes would be dissolved and the dissolved ashes would be shot into space by the air war college and the marines would make it required reading at the kansas, a new approach to on war and he's also a professor here at the university of maryland.

this is book tv on c-span2. we are the university of maryland talking with professors who are also authors. we are now joined by professor philip joyce whose book is called quote code the congressional budget office honest numbers, power and policy making." professor, when was the cbo formed? >> the cbe was formed 1974 and was in fact a reaction to the perceived excesses by the nixon administration and on the budget process and as a part of that they also created the budget committees and a budget resolution they were going to be equal players in the budget process they needed to have their own budget agency as opposed to relying on numbers that came to the executive

branch and that is the reason for the cbo. >> i think it has been phenomenally successful in its success is measured by the fact that if you talk to most people in the media and indeed most honest with you on both sides in the audio of congress they would say the congressional budget office are released concerning the budget probably has the most credible numbers most credible information out there and that was not a foregone conclusion. it wasn't something that necessarily wasn't destined to happen and if you had said to someone in 1974 okay we are going to create a nonpartisan agency in the middle of the most partisan environment imaginable, is that going to work? i think an awful lot of people would have said no. that was made to work and i think they worked hard on making it work but i think on that is where they certainly must. >> what is the cd go's mission?

>> this tdo's mission is to provide nonpartisan information on the economy and the budget to 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 to individual members of the public and the media now have the products they did not have before because of the internet and other sources, and i think increasingly the mission has broadened to include serving the public in addition to the congress. beat the nonpartisan nature of the cbo's work is very crucial and the law that created the cbo said only that the director on the cbo staff should be appointed without regard to the party affiliation, but the first director who was alice rivlin

who is a giant in public service and strong in the age of 80 really create culture that was moved from just the direct staff being appointed without regard to personal affiliation to doing their work in a non-partisan manner. >> who appoints the to victor? >> appointed by the director of the house and the president 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 chair and a ranking member of the house and budget said committees who are most responsible for selecting the director. there's been eight directors of cbo since the formation, four of them have been nominal democrats, four of them have been nominal republicans. but they all have is that they her as alice rivlin described

herself card-carrying middle of the road. he would consider them to be relatively moderate members of their parties even though they are nominal republicans. >> was the current director? >> to current tour is doug elmendorf. i think this is his third year. he was very active in what most people who know about the cbo know about director elmendorf about him was that he was sort of all over the place on the date on the obama healthcare reform. when the cbo became the crucial arbiter of whether the health care reform or support from the deficit. >> you write in your book because of c.o.d. put off action on the health care bill. if the health care reform hadn't been viewed as something that had to at least be deficit neutral, then i think cbo

wouldn't necessarily have had as important a role as it had but once you see one of the things you are concerned about and really president obama himself a will dated to the stature that he wouldn't sign a bill that added to the deficit that really meant it was a much higher hurdle for the bills to get over and that hadn't been true and certainly there were delays at various stages in the process because congress was waiting to find out whether whatever the latest version was the sort of pass the test. >> he used to work for gephardt, didn't he? >> it is possible. >> now, is there a professional staff as well that goes through administrations? >> yes but it is not a professional stuff like you'd find in most federal agencies in

two respects i suppose the first is that it is dominated by a ph.d. economist who wouldn't find the average agency but the other is the work it the pleasure of the director that is a director could come and just clean house on day one if they wanted to come and in that respect the relationship of the stuff and the director is like the relationship of a congressional staff member of congress. no director has ever come in and decided to clean house on day one because there is a lot of expertise obviously that presides in the cbo staff so the practice has been for the cbo staff to stay from one director to another but that's really because that's what the directors had chosen to do. there was actually one case when june o'neil who was the director appointed just after the republicans took back to congress in 1994, the sword of

assumption was she was going to come and clean the place out and the house republicans at least the leadership in the house very much wanted her to do that. they assumed because the staff had been there for a long time under democratic rule they must mean they were given comfort to the democrats. the senate republicans particularly pete domenici didn't want that to happen and she did not do that much to the surprise of some of the house republicans when she came in. >> how big is the congressional budget office and what is the budget? >> it is about 250 people. i think the budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25, $30 million. that is a ballpark but it's not a big agency and it's in fact something that has an awful lot

of influence than you'd think an agency to hundred 50 people would have. >> now why was alice rivlin so important and the early days of the cbo? >> i think she was in part because she had a clear vision of what she wanted the agency to do, and she set out to make the organization in that image, and she was pretty stubborn about it in the sense that she had a vision that was pushed by members of congress to move in a different direction and she was pretty clear about the direction that she wanted to go. 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 cbo is to take something that was supposed to be non-partisan and the middle of this partisan environment and

this organization starting from scratch and necessary the model to go for long you've been told as their director of cbo and make it responsive to the congress in a non-partisan manner. in the first place, you've got to figure out what that means and choose very clear. she brought people together to talk about how will we know if this has been a successful organization but then she had to go out and hire people and find these people who she thought could work in the organization that would realize this kind of vision and that was an extraordinary thing to do. she was there for the two terms and that has made a difference that she was there for eight years so by the end of the eight years it really was relatively well-established. however, it was still possible the second director could come in and change things.

the second director was a republican and his name was rudy. alan greenspan of the time called him a republican alice rivlin and he behaved that way. that is he came in and he pretty much reinforced the things she had said and once that happened then the next director that followed him and did pretty much the same things they were sort of off and running in the sense that once you create a culture you sustain it over ten or 15 years. now, you know, it is pretty well ingrained. >> professor joyce, has it been used as a political football in the past? >> absolutely. the one thing you can say about organizations that produce the information is they can't beat anybody interpret that 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 this is a bad policy or good policy that's happened with the clinton health care reform in 1993 and 1994 cbo came up with an estimate that said the clinton health care reform rather than saving money which the clinton administration said would actually cause the money that was one of only many aspects people could look at to import whether there was a good or about reform but the people that oppose the reform grab on to that particular conclusion and try to use it to their best and which was to try to see if they could kill the clinton health care reform. >> this is book tv on c-span2 and we are talking with professor philip joyce here at the university of maryland about his book, quote crowed the congressional budget office." recently with the super committee how is the cbo joost?

>> it is in two ways, actually one way it should have been used in two ways. the one way that was used was to try to help the super committee to set the parameters of what they were going to do. so director elmendorf went and testified multiple times before the super committee on the nature of the problem that was facing the country and what kind of things we need to happen, would be a reasonable trajectory for getting the deficit down and behind the scenes they work with the super committee answering questions so there's an awful lot of work the cbo does that is not visible in the sense that they are providing advice when asked to the congressional staff mostly staffed committees. now what would have happened if the super committee has been successful is that the cbo would have had to score whenever

legislative changes to super committee came up with to determine whether they actually met the target that was set for the super committee. the super committee needed to come up with a deficit reduction at least $1.2 trillion over ten years in order to prevent the automatic sequestration across-the-board cuts from taking effect. if the had gotten that far, which we now know they didn't, they would have had -- the cbo would have had to judge whether the specific changes a came up with attacks under the spending side actually met the targets and if you didn't meet that target then one of two things would have happened. they would have gone back to the drawing board or added things that would have brought them up to the target or the difference between what they did and the ultimate target would have been subject to this across-the-board cut which is now what is going to happen unless some change is made. >> what do we mean by scoring? >> cbo is required to do cost

estimates of every single piece of legislation that goes all of the congressional committee before it can be considered on the house of the floor or the senate and it's an important role in the sense that what existed prior to that point there was no way in doing these kind of cost estimates in a way that he would find mrs. early trust for the prior to the creation of cbo. what would happen is that you would either have the president's office of management and budget would do some kind of a cost estimate, but that was not immune from influence in terms of whether the president actually liked this particular bill or didn't like this particular bill or worse yet, you might have the sponsor of the particular piece of legislation being the one to the cost estimates, said the every incentive to suggest the cost was lower in fact than it would be in reality. and cbo clearly does not get those kind of cost estimates

right all the time. no one would get the cost estimates right all the time. i think that the influence is that people realize they don't have a particular axe to grind in the debate that is they are trying to do what they can to come up with the cost estimate they can and they are not trying to hold the piece of legislation get pastore help kill the piece of legislation. >> canada limited will were cbo got it wrong and where they really got it right? >> one example where they got it wrong and everybody got it wrong which is in 2001 when president bush came into office one of the things cbo does is they do projections of the outlook for the federal budget and those projections have sometimes covered five years but increasingly they cover ten

years so what happened when president bush came to office is there was an estimate from cbo that said that what is left to its own devices under the current law to the budget surplus over the next ten years would be $5.6 trillion that is truly an with ticker a t but it was a projection based on the information they had and as if anybody should know the further out you make a projection of anything, the less accurate it is going to be. so, that is the midpoint of the range and it was a pretty big range. but it did support that it was important for the congress and the president to cut taxes at that point. and the tax cuts that were enacted were helped by the fact the was a projection which clearly was wrong.

there were predictions coming from elsewhere that were as wrong as well that comes from the things they didn't predict that the recession that started soon after that and it also didn't predict september 11th, which no one really did come and there were fiscal facts coming out of september 11th. now turned into something that cbo got right and i think this also illustrates the limits of any analytical the 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 had gotten in a situation they didn't have enough capital and the needed to come to the federal government for a bailout. their position through this is that will never happen, and a part of what happened with the financial crisis in 2008 and beyond the federal government

actually had to take over fi in the may and freddie mac the cost of 200 or $300 billion the this was a case where cbo had a right not that this would inevitably happen but that there were particular things that congress should do in legislation in the order to protect the federal government against the potential that something like this would happen. >> the federal budget process is broken down in congress and you haven't pressed the appropriations to read a lot of continuing resolutions. what has been the role if any in that process? >> i think that the rule is to support the process. one thing i was uncomfortable talking about the success of the cbo because it is in the middle

of a process no one would say is successful and i think part of that is just the limit of what any organization who is to provide information can do so with the cbo has been doing in this process is what the cbo always does after they consider legislation and provide them information on the effect 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 the congress does not want to do. one important thing alice rivlin did when she sat at the organization and this really was pack the working definition of what it means to be non-partisan is the congressional budget office will not make recommendations. and was described to me once as someone said if you ask cbo how much something costs they will tell you how much something costs. if you ask if it's a good idea they will tell you how much it

cost. so even though i would agree with you or anybody else who says it is dysfunctional i'm not sure how much they can do about that other than to try to eliminate the effect of the failure to engage in the various kind of policies whether it be deficit reductions. >> we have a general course on the public budgeting which covers all levels of government and our masters and public policy program and i teach that course which is required as many of the students and then we actually have some semester long course believe it or not on the federal budget so i also teach a sinister along the course on the federal budget which makes the students more eliminated and disillusioned than they were at the end. >> and you worked at the

congressional office at one point. >> i did their work to the office from 91 to 96 and really reason i wrote the book was because how pressed i was as someone who can from the outside when i worked there i wanted to give this some time. i didn't start right away i waited a number of years because i wanted to have enough distance i thought i could be more objective but nobody had written a book on cbo, and i know a lot of the people and i was pretty sure that i could get the directors to talk to me but moreover thought was a story that needed to be told and there's something like four books on cbo and gao and i thought was a sort of a travesty that at some level there wasn't a book on cbo. it became easier actually to convince publishers who were important to the book enterprises that such a thing

was an important thing to do once cbo was so heavily involved in the obama health care reform because there was a whole sort of beginning part of the pitch which is why should anybody care i didn't have to make it at that point. >> i read in your book and hopefully i'm quoting it correctly the congressional budget office is where legislation goes to die. >> senator wyden said that from oregon seductively the history of health care reform is bills go to the congressional budget office about the sort of irony that actually there was a health care reform after that point that was enacted but what he had in mind was mostly the clinton health care reform of 1994 where it certainly became a part of the lower that was the cbo cost estimate and the report on that particular legislation that killed it.

there were a lot of things and that was certainly one of them but i think anybody that lived through that episode certainly came away with a perception that cbo is a powerful organization that could kill something if it was something that could be on the basis of the economic budget analysis. >> new gingrich recently said last month that cbo is a reactionary socialist institution. >> he did say that. and given the statements that can be extreme from time to time i think one of the most important things about that to me is when i talk to people in the cbo who had a close contact during the time he was the speaker of the house what they said to me is the things that actually made him the angriest were the periodically he would

have bills that would add particular procedures to medicare, to have them on medicare and they would score those as money and his argument was these will save lives, how can a cost money? it can be true simultaneously at something costs the federal budget money and also can save lives. the other thing that, you know, some republicans -- and i don't know if this is what he had in mind often it upsets them about cbo and he doesn't sort of believe that cutting taxes -- when you lower tax rates it doesn't lead to so much growth is not a loss in revenue. and the fact the cbo says the obama health care reform would actually m