somewhere on the planet, if they're an american military member, they don't worry about whether or not the satellite constellation that makes it possible is operating well that day. you don't worry about it when you start your car. you don't worry about it when you look at your cell phone to see what the time is exactly from a signal you're getting from space. we operate eight satellite constellations and 77 satellites. we have about 25,000 airmen who do that around the clock every day, all day, and they support military operations all over the world. ..

that question doesn't come up. when you decide to send a b-2 launching from the american midwest to be a show of force in south korea, nobody asked of it comes together. if you think about it, it's pretty spectacular. think about the intelligence, the refueling requirement. how does all this happen. who is doing that? they are just in the background making things happen every single day. there's a great tv commercial where the tagline is these guys are good. you have probably seen that. so are my guys. they are incredibly good. luckily our combatant commanders know that so the demands for what the air force provides is on the rise. unfortunately, the supplies are going in the of attraction. that's a we are facing with the sequester level budgets were looking at in the future and decision we have to make. every recommendation we're making these days does hurt.

is taking capability capacity away from combatant commanders, things they believe they need and things would like to provide that which is will be able to in the future because let's be part of the solution for the nation. we have to get how to wisely move forward, keeping our air force balanced as the downsize overtime. we are reducing capability in everyone of our core missions. that's the reality of it. every single one of them. we are cutting my recession programs by 50%. protecting a couple of key programs would think we have to recapitalize, akc for six thank you, the f-35 and the long-range strike bomber for operations so we have a viable air force tenure soda which is also part of our job. not just been ready to operate today. we're doing everything we can to maintain that balance between being ready to do the nation's business today and being capable of doing it 10 years from now against threats that are clicking more cable in some areas and getting more complicated in others.

even with a balanced budget agreement it's important to remember the reason this seems so dramatic to people is that three years ago in fy '12 f. i just figure out the projected budget for fy '15 for the air force was $20 billion higher than we actually have. that's about 20% of our overall budget. changing from a planned even three years ago that was projected funding at that level to one that is going to be 20 billion a year lower from here forward is a significant adjustment. that's why the changes seem so dramatic. if they are not done it will get worse in the future. it's hard to make a 20 billion-dollar reduction for you without making some significant change. to trimming around the edges as with the together our budget proposal just wasn't going to work. we had to look at dramatic things. my rent mentioned the a-10 fleet. one of those dramatic things was cutting fleets of aircraft. let me tell you why we decide to

recommend that census, already. that decision has come under fire from several sectors but there's a logical reason. let me briefly explain -- explained to. with five missionaries in our air force. we have the same five core mission since 1947 when we became an independent service. we've added space superiority as part of the first one. the way we do that has change. the domains we do the men have change. we do air, space and cyber domain a but we do the same five missions. we do air and space security, global strike, isr, and command control. that's it. we are not obligated. in air space superiority we're taking cuts in the budget. a few years back, the 22 is the hinge been of air superiority for the training of america. not just the united states air force. it's the foundational to the way we fight wars as an american military. without it you can maneuver on the ground, you can maneuver at seat. you have to have a.

oliver warfighters no. it's only one service can provide it, only one has the capacity, command control capability to be able to do this. when we kept the f-22 sydney we are disappointed with some of the kind of airplane to provide a theater of air superiority. until the f-35 is on board, it's the f-15 c. we are cutting f-15s out of her fleet this year as part of the budget cuts but we can't eliminate the entire fleet are we can do the air superiority mission and our combatant commanders won't accept that. fleets save big money. all the back supply chose go all those things that cause a lot of money. if you can't do air superiority maybe it's isr we can eliminate. we have fleets there, too buddy to ask the combatant commanders their newborn shortfall year after year is isr capability. we are taking isr capability in this budget.

they would not support is cutting anymore. maybe we could take it out of global mobility, cut our airlift fleet. we talked about that. i talk to ray odierno and said we're getting smaller. you are going to get smaller as well. can we cut our airlift fleet more than we planned to align with that force size for you? he said we're going to be smaller, we need to be more flexible, more agile. know, i wouldn't support your cutting airlift fleet. so we can't cut airlift. what about the tanker fleet? we look at cutting the kc-10 fleet. look at the impact it would have on the operational centers we face. we've looked at cutting an equivalent number, amount of money from the kc-135 fully. it would take three times as many kc-135 as the same, the number of a sequence to get the same savings because you can't get rid of logistical structure behind if you don't take care of the whole fleet. if you could get rid of the kc-10 fleet, less impactful than getting rid of the 135 come you

can't let do the job. without the kc-10 she could but it would be ugly and would not have any flexibility whatsoever. we found decided the impact was too big on all the services and combatant commanders tempered other options we look at. analyst wasn't a good place to go. command-and-control, maybe we could cut systems there. the only service they can do is air force. missile defense, air operation, isr to become whatever it may be. nobody supports that cutting for the. we're down to the strike platforms. we don't control the policy on nuclear business to going after nuclear platforms is not part of our purview. we need 80 to 100 bombers to do nuclear deterrence and to do any predictable expected campaign kind of flying the bomber fleet and a large conflict which i'd never hope we have to do. you better have a deep the 100 bombers. that's about how many went today. their aging but we've got the right number. we can't go smaller.

our number of squadrons is below the standard requirement today. now you go into the tactical strike platform, be one, f-16. we looked at the agency because we can say $4.2 billion by investing the a-10 fleet. if we say $4.2 billion we also

viable for the long-term? that's what we owe our reserve component. we do have a plan to do that. if we don't do best the a-10 some those units the plan will come unraveled. we will start the planning.

so everything in this entire chain of events is hard. the balance is pretty delicate. the cuts are real and issues are serious. they deserve serious consideration. so let me stop there and i will be glad to talk to you any of those things that i'll be glad to talk to you about the budget further, about the total force integration. we can talk about sexual assault. we conduct or anything you'd like to talk about. if i need help i will call on said mjd who are smarter and much better looking. thank you again for the opportunity to be here. [applause] >> the air force is looking for a guiding concept to build and modernize around, and you've mentioned recently you believe the u.s. air force should focus on strategic agility. in practical terms what does

this turning and how difficult is it to implement in this budget climate? >> thanks, my ring. -- my ring. it's hard to get there. by strategic agility i'm referring to agility of everything from thought to training to education to the decision processes to acquisitions and you operational activity. we have to change the way a little bit that we do everything in order to get to this point. i think it's a long-term journey. all of you know we have a lot of processes inside the department and inside a government that none of us would consider agile. if we look forward to try to solve this in a budget cycle we can't do it. that's the difference. we have to start by making a concerted effort to look at the long-term. for the solution. we are trying to change the way we do strategic planning in the air force. we're standing up strategic planning organization that will focus on strategic planning and long range resource planning but the idea is we will have a living, breathing strategy

document that has three pieces do it. the first one is the call to the future, the priorities for science and technology, for research and development, for development of new concepts, for human capital development, for new approaches to training and educating our people so are capable or capable of being strategically agile. there's a 20 year piece of the strategy which is a master plan a single air force master plan. we have 12 aligned on core function lives. the problem with that is you wind up with 12 different plans. they compete and lots of ways both overt and covert. we need to bring that together into a single master plan where we can make the prioritization decisions as an institution that will allow us to be realistic about funding going forward. that master plan will have a 20 year forward look. it will be bounded by projections of resources. we expect the resources will be at this line we will not build into a plan anything that will push us above that funding line. if we add something in that drives is above the line would

take something out that keeps a balance. the third piece will be a danger balanced budget, balloted of the year. the first five years will become our future years defense plan but we've got to stop pushing costs into the future and discerning money will fall from heaven because that's not going to happen for the foreseeable future. we've got to start balancing our books like you do at home. >> it is well known you are an a-10 pilot with several hundred hours of time in that airframe. has this impacted your response to calls for the a-10's to be replaced by the f-22 or the f-16? is there any willingness on your part to try to keep at least a few of these aircraft around for specific close air support missions overseas? >> yes. we looked at every option we could. here's the problem. i mentioned that you to make big savings unless you cut fleet.

if we took the a-10 that have been we winged the last few years, but new wings on airplane as part of a continuation of the aircraft if we kept those aircraft, just those and the vested the rest of the fleet we would save $1 billion because it's all the infrastructure that drives the big cost. the difference between 1,000,000,004.2 been insignificant -- between 1 billion, and 4.2 billion. we can't find billions of savings in many places in this budget. this is not about the a-10 not being a great airplane, not doing great work. it's about what can we take operational risk going forward what it can we create savings and how can we start transitioning the air force into thinking about the threat and private we left operate in 10 years. the a-10 will not be part of that solution and a high threat invited. what the budget is doing to us, i mentioned we are cutting capability in every mission area, is eliminating our ability to have airplanes, systems,

people who only operate in a single environment. >> if the air force is prevented from cutting the a-10 what are its second and third options to achieve the same savings? >> any of the options i mentioned before could happen. people are suggesting that we could cut 363 f-16s. if we did that the other nations the air force is accountable for, the major missions we do in the theater of operations and god forbid a big conflict would be almost impossible to achieve because the a-10 can't do those missions. the f-16, f-15, but the ones can do close air support. they been doing it extensively alongside the a-10 in afghanistan and iraq for the last eight to 10 years. thousands and thousands of sorties, very successful sorties. the problem the a-10 can't do the job that those airplanes can do in the rest of the battle for. we save big lives as an air force by a limiting the enemy's

will to continue the fight. by destroying the command and control networks, eliminating their ability to look just to reinforce the fight in the front lines, by keeping the reserve forces are moving forward to rejoin the fight, by a limiting their second reserves so they never engage u.s. or coalition troops on the ground. that's the air force is said big lives on the battlefield. we do it by providing air security i mentioned which gives our forces freedom to maneuver and freedom from attack. that's what air force is to any significant way to shape a battlefield. we also do close air support. we have a number of airplanes that can and do perform close air support very well. >> this year's fiscal 2015 budget much like last year's continues an interesting trend as far as aircraft procurement in the department of defense. the navy is by more aircraft than the u.s. air force, and the army isn't far behind.

the air force is retiring its force structure and not buying aircraft. while planning to combat sequester related cuts what do you say to the air man who joined the air force to fly aircraft? is help on the way? >> you make a sound as if the navy and army are expanding and i don't think that's the case be there. and in a joined the air force joined it because, for lots of reasons initially. they find when they come in the door even if it wasn't the pride that attracted them, it looks them. they get very proud of who they are. they get very proud of what they do and how will they do. they get very proud of the people who stand beside. just like the folks in our other services. i the son services. i dissent was a brain infantry officer. is the same way. he could not be prouder to come to work everyday and work with the people he gets to work with every day. that's what our enemy and are looking for. they're looking for the opportunity to be good at what to do. that's the one thing that will cause them to walk away. one of the things we're trying

to do in the air force is were trying to balance our force at a size where we can't afford to train and operate it. we didn't use the law that was passed. it's a law. in 16 we will return to sequester levels of funding according to the law. if that happens we cannot operate and train our air force at the size we are at now. we got to downsize. our people understand that although it's tough. it's a horrible incitement to be operating in, worrying about will be the next year, who will not be the next year. we're trying t to do force management this year so we can reduce the size as quickly as again and get past this drama in the next 12 to 15 months. whoever is in the air force at the point we start to focus on the future. that's the approach we're trying to take, myron. >> in the longer-term the air force is buying a new tanker and procuring a new bomber in the coming years. it also wants to step up f-35s recapitalization in the coming years by many times the base

rate. and also move to procure the new jstars replacement by the end of the decade. that is an unprecedented modernization occurred in the history of the service. not taking into account the large and growing expenditures related to space. how will the service managed all of this? >> first we have to manage it realistically. one of the keys for strategic agility in my mind is taking on his look in the near routinely and making sure you can afford what you are planning to do. we think the budget was submitted as a step towards managing this in a way that's fiscally responsible overtime not just over the next year or five years. all the things you mentioned are in the current plan. we're not asking for new money for them. we're not trying to raise the budget like to get it. it's in the plan even at these reduced levels. what it means the is in our military judgment those are the things we need to be successful not just today but 10 years from now against the threat as we see it.

what we can do is maintained everything else that we would like to keep going and still be able to make that transition. that's the dilemma we are facing. you want a ready force today or do you want to read and modern force tomorrow? that's the tightrope we are walking. >> general welsh, you mentioned a few times the u.s. air force should begin looking at what it wants in a sixth generation fighter. as in the successor to the f-22. what are the attributes to aircraft like this? is it really fair to call such an aircraft a fighter when it will likely be just as vital as an isr and network asset beyond just a straightforward air superiority fighter? >> maybe not, myron. i don't even know there's an airplane. what we have to start looking at is what does air superiority look like 30 years from now. let's go back to the strategic planning document. i don't know what it looks like

but we better start thinking about it because it takes is a long time to deliver because we don't have that strategic agility and acquisitions before. not just in the air force but in our government. we've got to start figure out what does air superiority mean because it still going to be required 30 years from now. and the air force is going to be responsible to phon phone the mn in providing if our combatant commanders. if we don't start thinking about this at this point in time i think we're being a responsible but i wouldn't try to characterize it or describe it or i have no idea yet what is going to look like, what it even is, whether it flies or whether it's a combination of things. just don't know. >> drones are an increasing part of the air force's mission. yet they are very controversial. what would you say to critics who argue that drones depersonalized killing? >> first of all, remotely-piloted aircraft that we fly out get the party line

in, jarret toback this opportunity to mention it, we don't call them drones. we have an awful lot of people die these things and people operate them are proud of what they do. we don't have anything flying around deciding to fire weapons or drop weapons on something. as a hunk of metal doing its thing. that's not just what happens. we have people in the loop on every level in process of flying remotely powered aircraft. about 97-98% of what we do on remotely-piloted aircraft, maybe hire, is purely intelligence collection. our rpa fleet is that huge percentage. it's less than 10% of our aircraft today. it's not going to dramatically change in the near future. there are an awful lot of things you can't replace about the sensor myron carries on his shoulders but we do shoulders but we do have a platform that the conflict into a battle space and determine and about 22 seconds what his brain tells him is going on. until we have that sensor we will always have men and women in the battle space.

and so we should look at how do we best use unmanned capability in ways where unmanned capability has the most effective. if you plan to collect intelligence over a particular area for long crates of time, then don't limit yourself by the human body in the cockpit. that's where remotely-piloted aircraft have been used extensively up to this point. if you want to track things 24 hours a day, then the remotely-piloted aircraft will work well for you. if you want a quick fiction, it's the wrong type of the county to use today. if you want to get nuclear weapons, if you want to move your families around i'm not sure i'm ready for a remotely-piloted aircraft to do that yet. so the idea is what does the technology allow you to do and then what should you do? that's the debate we have internally on remotely-piloted aircraft. should they get bigger, should they get smaller? what will technology and resources allow will help inform the. we will probably move more freight in the united states of america not in the military side of the house but on the

commercial side of the house. when we do that the ability to move things with remotely-piloted aircraft will start to explode. that will change the game in the rpa business. right now we still can't fly multiple rpas innocent airspace under faa control, not just in u.s. but also national airspace controls in other nations. don't know how to track them can manage, organize them because they're all operated independently by different people in different locations. the faa is working with the military and with states to do that today in multiple locations around the united states. this industry is going to grow. as it grows it what's important for the air force to be at the leading edge of technology. that's what we do. we are founded on technology. with people who are drawn to it. they understand, employed of the wealth and their innovative with it. so that's what interests us most about the remotely-piloted aircraft future. >> in light of the recent gao report on the mental health of drone operators who are

overworked and have little access to psychologists, according to the report, how does the u.s. air force review the recommendations and how will they be implemented? >> the gao report actually, it's a great read because it gives you a good picture of a community. i think they cover 2006-2012 and so the information into is a little bit dated but there have been some changes made during that timeframe that are having an impact now. if you look at the results of some of the focus groups that are counted you'll see some of the focus groups tell you they don't believe there is a problem today in the community. they do have access to medical care and counselors. all that has changed as a result of the effort we been making over the last four or five years. i think we are just protesting. this career field is new. we are just getting started. and the rapid, rapid expansion between 2006 and today in the

remotely-piloted aircraft the business as a result of the conflict in iraq and afghanistan has been dramatic. we didn't have a community of people who were up and operating and fully which are in some of the system and we just transition to rpa. we built this community on the fly. in 2008 we had i believe there were 21 orbits with these are the days of the people associate with them. now we are approaching a new target is a 65. we hope to make that 55 and reinvest in other areas of the fleet. but that's the way we've been growing and that is a huge investment of people and of cash. to try to meet the needs in iraq and afghanistan. and the needs of the characters conflict around the world. all that happened with a group of people who are stressed to begin with, under pressure from this rapid expansion, conducting combat operations. it wasn't a lot of pressure and we have to make sure we're treating them the right way from here forward. i think there's lots of good lessons to learn in the gao report. >> why did the united states

wait for so long to develop technology for a next-generation rocket engine for launch? >> i think when we purchased the engines we are currently using for heavy launch which is the real issue today, the russian designed and built them, i think was a great product. it was cost savings, and efficiency week again by purchasing en masse and they've been very successful. we can't afford to forget that. we just hit 100 straight national security space launches which is a spectacular success story. one of the things we're to be careful about in any decision in the space launch turbine is first do no harm. and make sure as we transition we transition in a smart meaningful dedicated detailed way. i think clearly it's a good time to look at what is the future of heavy space launch and propulsion. we support fully the assessment

that we are undergoing right now to try to determine the best way forward for the. i think the air force and our nation will be well served by this. >> with nasa's loss of the shuttle program, how does america's smaller role in space affect the u.s. air force and its mission? >> our mission hasn't been dramatically affected by nasa losing the shuttle mission. the things we do through space have not changed dramatically over the last 10 years. we've just gotten better at it. we've gotten a little more efficient that we're expanding our knowledge of the actual environment and looking at the missions required for the future. there is a change in technology in space that's going on. is a change in capability by nations around the world. it's going to be important for the united states and the united states air force as part of that to keep up with that technology, growth, and if possible get ahead of it. as opposed to reacting to something that other nations do

in space routinely with new technology development under capabilities that are there. we should be trying to drive the activity. instead of just being in a responsibility that's what we've been trying to do. the costs of platforms that operate in space are growing just like costs, platforms that operate on cn in the air and we've got to factor that in to look into new ways to do business, the way you we've been doing it is not going to continue to be the right way. this idea of miniaturized sensors, smaller packages moving into space, different types of orbits, different approaches whether it's these aggregation or writing passengers on commercial platforms. whatever it might be we've got to be strategically agile enough to think of new ways to get at an old problem. there are somethings we demand full security, full confidentiality, the ability to operate 100% of the time no matter what happens but that doesn't have to be everything every day. costs will drive us out of that

mindset, if nothing else does so we need to get moving in that direction. i think our folks are doing that now. >> lieutenant joe johnson of the air force academy has had to make elimination of about 10 majors in response to the cuts that were mandated under the new fiscal year '15 budget cuts. how did he feel about this heavy-duty impact to the academy's mission? and isn't possible for the endowment, considerable underwritten fund, to help offset some of his academic and outside cutting mandated by the defense budget? >> what a joe johnson has done since she arrived at the academy is she's taken a hard look at the air force academy at what product is designed to produce. we helped her by outlining the requirement for her. what to expect a graduate to be and to be able to do? she has been stored and ever issues calling the essence of the air force academy, and the

idea is to determine exactly what is it that we have to do in incredibly well at the academy to produce that graduate. some of the mage that you are talking about are an effort within the academy to refocus their priorities and to focus resources on things that mean the most in terms of the essence. the specific cuts were not directed by the air force or anyone else and, in fact, michelle knows there were resources that able to help her if she needs them but she's trying to measure own funds and be part of the solution as well which she believes is part of her responsibly as one of our commanders. i completely agree with her. at every level people are making these decisions. this is sequestration. we need to get used to it. >> general welsh, you are one of only a couple of chiefs who graduated from the air force academy in colorado springs. how has that affected your thoughts toward the problem of sexual harassment the academy hahas been experiencing, an empy

field they are progressing towards dealing with this problem once and for all? >> i am a graduate of the cabinet, a proud graduate of the academy but my thoughts on sexual harassment were really formed by growing up as the son of the world's greatest mother and a brother defied incredible sisters. they pretty much shaped my moral fabric on issues related to respect between the sexes at a very young age. my family is a family because my parents that shows respect for each other all the time. we always have. we love each other. we respect each other and the idea that you would not act that way to people of another gender is just beyond my comprehension, quite frankly. so that has formed my views on this much more than being at the air force academy. my expense at the air force academy was without women in the actual -- we didn't have women when i attended. i have worked there since but i was not a cadet in that environment.

but whether it's at the air force academy or an air force wing anywhere on the plan or an account outside the front gate this is unacceptable behavior. it. the difference in the last couple years in the air force in the discussion on this topic is palpable. if you haven't visited an air force wing, talk to the people on the base about the discussions they're having at the lowest levels, then you don't really understand how this environment is changing. trust me, i'm not claiming victory but we will claim victory when we have victory. we will celebrate when the number is zero. and i don't think that will happen in the human domain. so what we have to make sure is that we are doing everything possible to prevent environments the lead to things worse than harassment even but it starts with lack of respect for individuals but it starts with lack of understanding that inclusion is a strength of ours. it starts with lack of understanding that diversity must be a strength of the united states air force. those are the things we are focused on.

we got a lot of visibility and activity in the higher end of crimes that occur but really it starts with human behavior toward other humans. we are spending time and energy on that to include new training programs, basic training, lots of education and not all major air force programs, some of us directed stuff where we will sit and talk to five or six people 30 minutes a month just to talk about what matters to you. what do our core values mean to you as an aircraft crew chief for as a trainer or as a classroom instructor or as a finance officer? and get people to know each other. every airman in our air force has a story. every one of them. the ones wearing uniforms, the ones wearing coat and ties to work. and the stories are spectacular. some of them are inspirational, some of them are a little sad but they are unique. and until we know the stories we just can't take care of the enemy in the way we should. so that's the drive. i tell everybody i meet in her air force, learn the stories.

>> and one more question in this area. senator kirsten gillibrand argues that commanding officers do not have the training to always properly handle complaints of sexual assault in the military. what makes you confident that all of the commanders in the air force are prepared to deal with such cases when they are not trained prosecutors? >> no one, commanding officers in the air force, leaders of industry, nobody is fully prepared to deal with every issue related to this area. there are just too many of them to comprehend. every command in air force is, however, advised by a trained prosecutor. and here is a fact. we polle pulled every court-marl case in the air force for the last three years. this was about eight, nine months ago. over those three years we had i believe the number and i could get this wrong but i'm close,

2411 court-martials. of those 2411 court-martials there were 25 incidences where a commander did not agree with this judge advocate general's recommendations on the proper disposition of that case. in 13 of those cases the judge advocate general as the higher level commander to review his recommendation and the higher level commander accepted the jags recommendation. in 12 they did not. they supported the lower level commander. so in 12 of 2411 cases, which is a pretty small percentage, about .5% actually, we did not have agreement between the commander and the jags on the best way forward. in 12 cases. one of those was a sexually related case. so the idea that the commanders are trained and, therefore, you don't take the right action is an interesting discussion but it's not too. it doesn't happen. it just doesn't happen. and so that logic doesn't track well with me. i tell you what i do like.

i love syndicate gillibrand's passion on this issue. while i don't agree with her on the particular point i love or passion on the issue and the passion of a lot of members of congress. we are making changes. we can make changes in the future with their support. some of them have a lot of experiencing this arena including the legal arena and they have great ideas. special victims council. with the air force is getting credit implementing a year ago was an idea that came from congress, a great idea. it's been a huge, huge program for us. so i think this is a partnership. it has to be a partnership on forward. people tend to focus on the differences but the support we can give each other is what will make it successful. >> how have the iraq and afghanistan wars affected the air force's role? >> actually they haven't changed our role at all. we've gotten better at supporting a low intensity

conflict in the counterinsurgency fight just as all the services have because that's what we've been focused on. we have made huge developed and tactical airlift and airdrop. most people don't know the precision and drop capabilities have come leaps and bounds forward in the last 10 years. we used to need about a 600-yard square drop zone to drop things into any battlefield invited. now we can land something on this head table. it's pretty incredible. we have the ability now to move patients from battlefields in afghanistan to full trauma care centers in the united states who the trauma director of trauma at the ucla medical center told you when to he wouldn't move from room 110, 111 because it can stabilize them long enough. the medical advances in battlefield care all the way to critical care transport to revolutionary surgical techniques and new technology have been absolute stunning. i think over time will just be a signal achievement of people in the air force, and the entire

joint medical community over the last 10 or 12 years. the core missions of the air force haven't changed at all. we are still doing them all. you are just not reading about them. they're happening all the time but it's the light switch. we're still doing all those other things all over the world. >> put into scale the herculean effort put before the air force in drawing down from afghanistan. what if there is a full withdrawal by the end of 2014? does the current infrastructure there a bow for this or would you need to build it up? >> we have the ability to do the drawdown. the plan has been in place. general dunford has done a fantastic job in putting together a transition plan that covers lots of different options. we have airman in the middle of this retrograde plan to get hud's mythic equivalent out of the country, where do you stewart, how do you sell it if that's the game plan.

we have an ability to search airlift under u.s. transportation command's leadership to move equipment and people rapidly. the big issue for the air force is will we be allowed to continue training the afghan air force. the aviation industry in afghanistan is an opportunity for the country. it's an industry that could be an currently successful and meaningful for them in the region. it hasn't been robust in the past. their air force will lead that effort. they're adamant will lead that effort and we have a chance to return them to a level where they can be fully operating sustained air force overtime with the building not just a thought airplanes which they do very well but to manage infrastructure and systems and logistical training of those things i think it helps the country's ability to develop and aviation industry over time. that's why we would like to stay engaged but if we come out by the end of the years year, that effort will not continue. >> your biography does not mention any reference to your

time serving under the ncaa director leon panetta. usurped him during the raid on the bin laden compound in abbottabad, pakistan. the recall any of the details as to how this race was decided on and what the decision process was to keep the photos of bin laden under the shroud of secrecy? >> i'm sure you brought papers. >> no. [laughter] >> in fact i wasn't there when the raid occurred. i left a while before then. >> been do you think is rated and aftermath permanently hurt our military a little and diplomatic relationship with the government of pakistan? what do we have to do to repair this relationship? >> i'm just not a position, myron, to understand the damage to relations with the government of pakistan. i'm really not in that

information network right now. one of the things we do in the military that is would try to make connections with our service counterparts. i do know the pakistani attaché here in the u.s. i have met with the pakistani ambassador coming to me in the next couple of weeks. we are trying to arrange a visit for me to visit pakistan, meet with the energies and if identity is so i can begin here. one of the great things about the military is there really is a common understanding between nations, people do the same things, whether it's banking finance, militant whatever. with ever adamant it's anything. we just kind of connect. i'm certain j.j. will take the same thing. there's a connection that happens very easily. so while we may not be a military may not be the pillar of an international relationship or a bilateral relationsrelations hip between the united states and some of the country we can be part of the connective tissue and we would like to be that with pakistan. >> several weeks ago secretary

james and is the announced the dismissal and retirement of 10 command level captains and majors from the malmstrom air force base missile command. for cheating on a routine periodic proficiency test. what has happened to the testing regime and what changes are being considered and implemented to make sure this climate of cheating does not continue? >> the people who wer were relid and to resign for all lieutenant colonels or colonels. it was the wing commander in the group commander, deputy group command and squadron commanders of the missile squadrons at malmstrom. none of those people were actually involved in the cheating. the concern that they didn't realize the cheating was occurring. each of the squadrons had about 40% of the people involved in this to include a large number of instructors on base. so basically the commander of the 20 air force lost confidence in his commanders to manage the

environment integrate an indictment that was required to be successful and to maintain all of our core values as they moved forward. the changes that had been implemented have been intimated at that level. the secretary and i are not telling them what to do. the commanders involved, general weinstein, jenna wilson, put together a command directed recommendation. they put together some formal focus groups. they formed a effort called the force improve the program whether brought people from every part of the nuclear community together with experts and advisers from outside including people from other services and from outside the military to look at every part of the enterprise and see if there is a way to start making changes that will have meaningful affect. over the last six or seven years we've done 20 different studies. the air force didn't just start focusing on this about two months ago. of those studies we've taken about 1056 i believe is the number recommendation that have been completely implemented.

want to do things that was not highlighted is this idea of cheating. but some of the other issues that we found in all these focus groups and the look that jenna wilson has taken were identified before and we have made partial movements to fix these things but not extensive enough. we now have 300 additional recommendations from this internally developed focus group effort and we are going to march down the solution sets one at a time, figure out where we can put resources, and we should put resources, where do we have the most impact. a lot of the smaller things that are activating people that made a frustrated in the community are being changed. we are trying hard to eliminate an idea you can never make a decision. your most senior boss always has to be the one that makes the call. a lot of things at the lowest levels of authority and we're trying to push there. we look at the environment for training, testing as a small example. we have made the monthly test the crew members take pass-fail

as opposed to score them which is the underlying concern that crew members if you don't score when it% you are seen as not being confident enough to move on to other jobs. the only assessment your commander has of you is your test score remark which is a productive environment. so that's already been changed and will be a lot more changes as we move through this but the goal is, number one, taken on this look in the mirror. admit where we are and then let's change it again. let's just change the game. our people deserve better than that. the people who cheated, the people who are breaking the law, breaking our policy intentionally, they don't have a future with us. that's not how we operate. >> peering into the crystal glass, are you seeing signs from congress that sequestration levels will not return in 2016? >> i am not seeing any indications of that.

>> what is th the air force's backup plan if it loses access to the gps constellation? >> one of the great things about the gps constellation is it does bring a lot of redundant capability. it is dispersed enough and very difficult to remove the gps constellation. we are, have been looking at partnerships with other nations also have navigation type systems. we are also looking at technology into future that uses different ways of precision navigation, things we think will be useful whether the gps system signal is denied a whether the system is compromised or whether we can't develop coalition or allied partnerships that allow us to use their system everywhere in the world we don't have immediate access. lots of efforts going on but i'm confident of the future but we have to have a very many of things to choose from if we want to guarantee the ability to use it. we become reliant on it. we have to be able to navigate precisely, to operate the way we

are operating as a u.s. military around the world. >> we are almost out of time, but before asking the last question we had a couple of housekeeping matters to take care of. first of all i'd like to remind you about our upcoming events and speakers. may 27, donald trump, chairman and president of the trump organization. on may 28, ben carson, no surgeon and author. next i'd like to present our guest with a traditional national press club mug. general, i don't think we could call it air force but it is a nice blue. [laughter] >> thank you so much. >> how about a round of applause for our speaker? [applause] >> thank you all for coming today. we are a journey.

>> you forgot the last question. >> excuse me. i made, i thought we had a perfect breakfast, and i forgot the last question, which i'm sure the general will want to respond to. as an a-10 pilot, what's the most annoying thing about flying commercial? [laughter] spend i better think about this one. you know, actually there is nothing in knowing about flying commercial. as i get older the problem is it's just not as comfortable. [laughter] >> thank you so much. [applause] >> thank you again. we are adjourned for real this time. [inaudible conversations]

>> tonight at eight eastern on c-span the national museum of women in the arts host a discussion on women judicial leaders with supreme court justice ruth bader ginsburg and canadian justice rosalie abella. tonight at eight eastern on c-span. on booktv primetime tonight, the civil rights movement. >> what we're seeing right now where we are embedding capabilities more and more into our environment, some technologists disagree on this but i personally consider the smartphones that we all carry around with those at least 70% of the market by pollution carries around with us to be a

trademark example of the internet advance. we are becoming human centers because were all carrying around an extra in a powerful computer in our pocket but it takes the form of different sensors that exist in the physical world around us that takes the form of radio frequency identification leaders that we pass underneath when we access td pass on the new jersey turnpike. weather sensors ar that are all around us. certainly surveillance and cameras that collect data and then send that summer else. this is all part of the internet. is basically the embedding of computers into a real world. on "after words" the deputy editor of the futurist magazine patrick tucker o on a world that insists that your every move saturday night at 10 eastern and sunday night at nine. and online our book club selection is bing west, the wrong war. join the discussion at booktv.org. and allies sunday may 4 look for next in death just, former gang member turned author and poet.

his work on gang life, always running. booktv every weekend on c-span2. >> if you were to come up with the most influential people in the world, who would be on your list? "time" magazine has done so and ben goldberger is joining us on the phone from new york. is the nation editor for time.com. thanks for being with us. >> guest: good to be with you. >> host: let me ask you, who made the top 10 announced earlier this morning. >> guest: we don't rank of the list. it's sort of one of the fun parts is you can do it yourself but it is a list of the 100 most influential enough so in no particular order. i can say there are four covers to the issue and they are beyoncé, robert redford, mary bara and jason collins. the first player in one of the major use pro sports leagues to

come out as gay. >> host: let me ask about robert redford, best known for his acting capabilities but also a leading activist when it comes to global warming and the infinite. why did he make the list? >> guest: keys on their certainly for his acting. without a doubt he's been outspoken incredibly uncalled environmental activist. but this is the 30th anniversary of the sundance film festival and he is there because it the way we take for granted now he is the godfather of independent film in america. the vast majority of all these incredible features that come out the last decade and popular local movie houses would not have existed had he not created these incubation platform for them through sundance. >> host: "usa today" is out with a story looking at the "washington post" saying that it is re-energize with jeff now as the on of the "washington post." why did he make the list? >> guest: he is one of these figures similar to present obama dibut you can make a strong case for every year. amazon remains incredibly

influential and every year they seem to dig deeper and deeper into our lives whether it simply -- their new latest gambit to deliver by drones. his purchase of the post is really what catapulted him to shoot because you have this venerable generalist institution that was listing off a bit but in purchasing it not only did he in -- put a new energy and vitality. where's seeing the fruits of that but a renewed sense of purpose. >> host: that story on the future the "washington post" is available online at "usa today.com." let's go to other names on the list. probably no surprise that pope francis is on the list and in tn political circles democratic senator kirsten gillibrand and republican senator rand paul. >> guest: indeed. the children peace is wonderful. al d'amato, former senate from new york wrote it and it's more an appreciation. one of her earliest forays into

politics was as an intern in his office. though they were on other sides of the aisle he said should make a great president and he does anyone to underestimate her. >> host: hillary clinton once again on the list. speculation continues on 2016. more immediately to comparable comes out in june. >> guest: and the book is like everything she does right now being read as something of a precursor to a run or not. she's on there for a number of reasons, of course her accomplishments as secretary of state. the list is an attempt to look forward as much as it is to chronicle the achievements of the past you. in doing so we're very much anticipating the will she or won't she sort of shadow boxing that has the entire political class at something of a stand still. >> host: walk us through the history of this list. when did "time" magazine start developing a? >> guest: we began in 2004 and the idea was very much to chronicle the most influential people of the rather than say

the most powerful. while that is perhaps a worthwhile exercise, strikes us as boring and quite predictable. you have the leaders of the nation should expect all the central bankers. this is an attempt to get an influence in a number of ways, the athletes, the actors, the musicians, economist, scientist to create a snapshot of those who are shaping our world, shape the world in the previous year and that we think will do so in ways we can barely get predict. each year we have done it. the process begins around november. we reach out to our correspondents and editors all over the world and asked him to be getting ideas. one of the great things about it is that as it's gone on now and we are in many years in, and number of time 100 alumni pitch in with her own suggestions and many of them wind up writing about previous winners and so when. so it's kind of a fun rolling club in a way.

>> host: john kerry on the list, present obama also on the list but who surprised you the most? >> guest: that's a great question. you know, i really do like jason collins entry. that's because if you look merely at his stats and there's no way he would qualify. i think the average is something like two points a game at the end of the bench for the brooklyn nets. been having the courage to be the first man to come out in a major pro sports league in his flows will be felt for generations to, far beyond the stats on the back of his basketball card. >> host: so you get to select the 100 but you also have a viewer paul and i think at last check about 3 million people have weighed in. >> guest: yes. at a wonderful way to reach out. we absolutely attention to it but as we said at the outset, it's another fun way to sort of gauge influence in a number of places but it doesn't have any bearing on its final decision that we make on the list.

>> host: last question. i'm not sure you give an answer this, but if you wanted to put someone on the list that did not make the time 100, from your standpoint who would it be? >> guest: that's a tough question. i'm going to have to pass if only because there is always next year that folks at wrigley are fond of saying. >> host: wrigley field commemorates its 100th anniversary but as somebody said that, anyone can have a bad century. thank you very much for being with us from "time" magazine. >> guest: great to be with you, steve. >> free prom was supposed to to the stage at the annenberg center for commuters and journalism in california earlier this month. the panel discussion focused on challenges national study whistleblowers face when they seek to expose wrongdoing and violations of law. and the university of southern california in los angeles this is about two hours and 10 minutes. >> should mention just life was

also in the administration and the justice department as was her speaker, our first speaker. played a leading role in pending stone as alert, did her undergraduate a brat and graduated from yale. i love having her here because i'm all for models of people who don't sell out. so much of what we teach is selling out. we test people so that they will be able to make a lot of money, go on to great success here. ..

in partnership with my organization government accountability project for hosting this event. the government accountability project is the nations leading whistleblower organization we have been around for 35 years and have represented whistleblowers from all segments of the government as well as private corporations and other entities. recently in 2008, i began the national security and human rights program which ended up representing people in those communities and i quickly realized that those are the people who have virtually no

protection. i think in our country right now we are at this crossroads. we are the first amendment is under attack and that implicates both you as journalists and us as whistleblowers. i was a whistleblower before i went to work for gac. a lot of people want to know what a whistleblower is in the government thinks it gets to decide who is a whistleblower. the government in this case often the wrong doer, does not get to decide who is a whistleblower and who is not. a person becomes a whistleblower by operation of law through disclosing fraud, waste, abuse, illegality or danger to public health and safety. the term leader is often used anonymously with whistleblower that these are quite different activities.

because a leak for example when richard armacost leaked cia undercover operative valerie plame's name that serves no public purpose whatsoever. that was done purely to punish ambassador joseph wilson. whistleblowing on the other hand is done to serve the public interest in the public's right to know. so when i began this program i was used to representing whistleblowers who often experienced retaliation such as being demoted or transferred to a meaningless position are having their security credentials pulled. but that has escalated astronomically because in 2010 thomas drake to the right of me was indicted under the espionage act, one of the most serious charges you can level against an

american. he became the second person in u.s. history to be indicted for espionage for nonspidey related activity since daniel ellsberg to my left the pentagon papers whistleblower, who did much of the same thing as another plan of mine is doing today with the help of journalists like yourselves. you play a critical function. that is why journalists are considered the fourth branch, the fourth estate in our government. we the whistleblowers are considered the fifth estate. we are indeed the last final check when pillars of our tripartite democracy are not working as they have been failing over the last decade since 9/11. we have an executive that has

expanded by an order of magnitude. we have a congress that has been largely complacent and complicit and we have the judicial branch that hasn't been able to cure the most critical cases involving torture, surveillance and drones because the united states asserts a state secret privilege or standing to shut down those cases. so when you have two important branches of government not optioning you the press play a critical role even more, and that is when we need whistleblowers even more. but since 9/11 that people who are out to expose government incompetence, ineptitude and things that embarrass the government get hammered but god forbid we should discover disclose government illegality has been the hammer will really fall on you and you will face dean imprisoned for the rest of your life.

this is not hyperbole. this is not exaggeration. i just wanted to set the stage and each of us in turn will talk about our own stories and our own role in this work that's been going on which journalists have been the saving grace for a number of us and they have also been all too willing to cooperate with the government in other cases. so with that i will pass to bob. >> i thought you were going to go much longer than that. i wish you would talk a little bit -- what impressed me so much about your own work and you are actually a whistleblower is one john locke and -- john walker lindh was caught up with the taliban and i looked at this guy's story and the picture in the paper and clearly he had him beaten and he'd been

tortured and without feeling any sympathy for what got them involved in all of this i thought you know if there is a tradition of everyone deserves a legal defense and a tradition of due process applies universally this is the guy that was going to challenge that tradition. what i find so amazing about your career is that in the justice department you decided that he deserved legal representation. why don't you just tell us a little bit about that case and how it ended your justice department career. >> well i worked at the justice department as the ethics adviser and i happened to be on duty that day that i got a call that we had captured our first prisoner in the afghanistan war john walker lindh quickly dubbed the american taliban and i was told unambiguously that he had a lawyer and the criminal division wanted to know about the ethical

propriety of interrogating john walker lindh without his attorney. my office got that kind of question all the time. that was routine question and i advised no, you can't question and interrogate someone if they are represented by counsel. meanwhile there was a famous trophy photo of him, blindfolded, gagged and with epitaphs written all over him. it was very much foreshadowed what later happened at abu ghraib. clearly this was an individual who was being tortured though i am under a gag order and can't go into that aspect of it too much. but suffice it to say the fbi ignored my advice, and interrogated john walker lindh anyway and wanted to know what to do. so at that point i said not to worry, we can seal off the interrogation and use it for

national security and intelligence purposes but not for criminal prosecution. which is exactly what the justice department turned around and did. again i didn't say anything. there was a press conference held by the attorney general announcing the charges against him and a reporter, one of you, asked hey it looks like he is being mistreated here. in this photo he looks like he has been tortured. what happened? the attorney general said his rights have been carefully scrupulously guarded. i knew that was a lie but i didn't do anything. he had another press conference two weeks later. john ashcroft. during that press conference another astute reporter asked, i thought he had legal counsel and the attorney general said, if we

were aware that he had a lawyer he would have been provided that lawyer. again, a complete lie but i didn't act or do anything. it was the prerogative of the attorney general to say what he wanted to. however, the criminal prosecution continued and i inadvertently learned from the prosecutor that there had been a federal court order for all justice department correspondence related to john walker lindh's interrogation and he said he had two of my e-mails. i was immediately concerned because no one had told me about the court order which discovery orders go far and wide within the justice department and i knew i had written way more than two e-mails. ding a naïve 29-year-old i went and checked the hard copy file because back then we kept things

in analog form as opposed to digital because we barely had the internet in 2001. and when i checked the hard copy file my heart sank because there were only a couple of pieces of paper in what had been an inch thick file. i consulted with a colleague of mine who had been with the department for 25 years and he said very matter-of-factly this file has been purged. that was inconceivable to me because the department was simultaneously prosecuting arthur andersen at enron for destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. i wasn't sure what to do but i knew i couldn't be a part of this. i called tech support and i was able to resurrect more than a dozen of the e-mails including the ones that documented the fbi

committing an ethics violation in its interrogation of john walker lindh and i gave them to my boss and said i don't know what's going on here. i'm not going to be a part of this and i resigned. i thought that was the end of this ordeal for me at the criminal prosecution continued and there was a suppression hearing coming up. the key to john walker lindh's case was the validity of the confession he gave during the interrogation i advised against and i heard the justice department continued to say that they never thought he had a lawyer. which said to me that the justice department didn't turn over the e-mails. i didn't think they would have the temerity to make a statement like that, that he never had a lawyer if my e-mails had reached

the court. i try to get copies of my e-mail. i had taken home a copy in case it disappeared again. i tried to give those to the judge but i know longer worked at the department and no longer had standing. this weighed on me -- this weighed on me a lot because someone might die and face the death penalty because i hadn't turned over information or the information i tried to turn over didn't reach the court. i struggled with this and one morning i heard michael isikoff who was at that time with "newsweek" repeating the party line that he never had counsel and i picked up the phone and called him and said, yes he did and i had the e-mails to prove it. i gave the e-mails to isikoff. he wrote an article that i think was the beginning of the end of the lindh case which quickly

settled in john walk or lindh pleading guilty to two minor administrative infractions and again i thought that my part in this was over. but i didn't realize that by going to the press i was unleashing the full force of the entire executive branch and when i say that i mean that i was put under one of the first federal criminal leak investigations. in reality there is no such crime as leaking. i was referred to the state bar in which i'm licensed as an attorney and for good measure i was put on the no-fly list. after that and many years in the wilderness fighting this, i decided to dedicate the rest of my life to representing whistleblowers. i knew when they would come in and say you will never believe what the government is doing to me, i could look them in the eye

and say yes, i can. so i was representing whistleblowers, usually the retaliation was getting fired or transferred, demoted, having your security clearance pulled. that kind of thing but then one day i read about a guy named thomas drake who from everything i could tell in the article had gone through every conceivable internal channel to blow the whistle at nsa but he was getting indicted. he was indicted under the espionage act which is the most serious charge to be leveled against an american. right now i thought tom's case was a one-off. it wasn't. it has turned into a brutal war on whistleblowers and that includes espionage act, prosecutions more than any president before obama and more

than all presidents combined against people who were not spies but were accused of mishandling allegedly classified information. this implicates journalists because you are in every single indictment in these cases. >> so let me introduce an old friend daniel ellsberg. when tom spoke he mentioned daniel ellsberg

we had no way of knowing what was really going on in our name because it was all all -- but the pentagon decided to do a study of what this war was all about. and this study which daniel ellsberg revealed by tony rizzo to the people in government and they will tell you all about it

and two newspapers really was a lesson to me. the people's right to know because what this was was nothing more than an honest history. it was writing history and it was information that you needed to have to be able to make intelligent decisions about an event that ended up according to mcnamara the secretary of defense causing 3.5 million and the chinese to die as well as almost 59,000 american soldiers so here you have this horrendous development. there is a defense department study that says what we are being told about this is bogus and this guy releases those documents and now he is considered something of a hero in the establishment circles because they used him to say snowden is the bad guy. his ellsberg is the good guy but i remember the time when he was on trial at the federal building and it looked like they were going to put them away for a

real long time. daniel ellsberg was a figure getting much less support than he deserved at that time. >> thank you. listening to bob that makes me wonder how much did you learn from the pentagon papers? the material wasn't actually in the pentagon papers and they had looked into it and you have more than they had in many ways about the origins but on the other hand you had quite a bit but then the pentagon papers that were top secret. when was the study, 65? >> i went in 64 and 65 in the study, it was interesting because the study was published by robin hutchins. >> what year did it come out? >> 66 -- 65 but woe is amazing about when i delivered my study there was justice douglas and henry luce. this was the establishment organization and this goes to the question of how do you prove

something. they'll told me i was full of it. this can possibly be and they all have their friends so my point is the public debate was always a loser because we were not given the information that we validated. that is what you supplied. >> well people on the left had been, like that the time, had been saying when it came up this is a news to us. this is what we have been saying into a large extent that was true except they weren't being heard very much and those who heard them like myself had to ask well can this be true? who are these guys? what do they know, they are not insiders and it was so different from what we were hearing what the president was saying what the motive was and what the aims were. what we were doing was so different that it was hard to believe. i remember by the time i read your piece which i wouldn't have seen it in vietnam. i was in vietnam from 65 to 67. i probably saw when i came back

and 67 and i remember thinking by that time i was ready to believe at that point having been there for two years. i remember thinking if i had read this before 1964 or when you are working on it i never would have gone to vietnam. i would not have brought out the pentagon papers and i wouldn't have gone but had i read it in 65 i think my reaction probably would have been can this be true? what is this? with the pentagon papers showed was that people inside were not saying something different from what the radicals were saying. they were saying much the same. they were saying totally differently in the public. in other words they were lying and they knew they were lying. and actually to some degree some of them showed a good deal of realism about what was actually happening in vietnam, contrary to the impression they were giving. i remember there was a cartoon where one of the panel says well

i did this and johnson didn't know it and you knew it and you knew it, we all knew it and how could johnson know this? the answer was he did know it. he was just lying to us when he said he didn't but the implication then is the government is able to keep secrets very well and the secret they kept was what they were up to and what they thought the prospects were and what the costs were pretty much. they were simply lying about it and they were able to keep secret the fact that they did know that much about it and the prospects were as bad as they actually were. and it's hard to believe they could have gotten us into vietnam specifically had that intrepid -- had that information been available in 65 and there are two ways that might've happened. bob scheer putting out in a pamphlet probably doesn't do it. you have to think of somebody else or i could have put it out.

i was just a staffer at the pentagon but i have the documents in my safe at the time. 64 and 65 and had i put them out at that time i actually believe it was very unlikely that johnson could have escalated the war in 65 and 66 the way he did because he had a senate that was very skeptical of it. couldn't believe that he was lying to them about his intentions as blatantly as in fact he was and there was no whistleblower and i wasn't one. senator morris was one of the two people who voted against the tonkin solution which gave the president a blank check for going ahead. he told me and 71 when i put them out, if you had given this information to me on the committee in the foreign relations committee in 64 the

tonkin gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee. and if they had brought it to the late for a voted would have lost. at the time when he first told me that i thought well they would have found another excuse. the tonkin gulf was a clear set of lies and in particular we had not in fact been attacked and he got a declaration of war out of it that they would have found some other false attack, something else. then when i thought later it took me a wild to realize it but what if i put out everything that was at my safe about the planning for escalation that was going on before the election or during the election campaign with his rival general senator on reserve, general goldwater who was the senator on the foreign relations committee. he was saying we should escalate and the president was saying we seek no wider war and i had a safe full of documents showing the planning for a wider war as soon as the election was over it

was actually carried out. could johnson have gone ahead in spite of that? i don't think so which means on the one hand i, but not only by, dozens maybe a hundred people at least had access to documents of that nature. any one of us could have averted that war if we had told the truth knowing that our president was lying at the time to the congress and in the campaign. second, no one asked anybody else in the press and what's the truth? they weren't looking critically at the what the president was saying into this day they weren't making an effort which was rebuffed somehow to get the truth about what was happening. and the upshot of that is to this day we don't have nearly as many whistleblowers as we could and should have.

bob suggested to me earlier practically everyone who had that documentation should have realized that the constitution was being thwarted and violated. congress should decide whether we go to war nothing less we been immediately attacked which we claim to be in tonkin gulf and that was the lie and later in the year they weren't pretending really the attack on the united states and yet we were moving a headline to congress clearly unconstitutional. each one of those in the executive branch had taken the same oath and i'm sure tom did which is to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies foreign and domestic and i think we all let that time my colleagues and i all violated that oath we had taken and i

don't think we have asked ourselves what it would mean to obey the oath and to disobey the oath. it didn't come up. we were beyond the constitution. we worked for the president and there was a war. he decided we should have a war that was calm -- unconstitutional. what was the trend without going to congress and of course our present president like toward libya and have the consulate of the state department say it's not a word because no americans were dying and we were killing but not dying so that's not a war. the former dean of the yale law school in the case of libya. what i'm saying is whistleblowers have the ability to avert a disastrous, hopeless bloody war and not only that one iraq could have been stopped that way by any way by anyone of

a thousand people who knew what we were getting into. not one of them told the truth nor did -- actually there were in that particular case, there were a couple of reporters walter pincus and a couple of others and some dissenters talking about the black of evidence for wmd. but the suppose it, the leaks, the talks -- top-secret leaks of judith miller and michael gordon that there were wmd and there were cylinders and there was dealings to get yellowcake for saddam that got on the front page basically of the new york times and helped get us into the war. so the reporters in washington failed across-the-board on iraq in exactly the same way they had failed years before on vietnam and the people in the government

all failed to carry out their oath to the constitution all without any exception known to me except for a few anonymous sources during that period. a very great failure. the government can't keep secrets, does keep secrets even when thousands of people know them and know that they are critical to a deadly war going on and given its ability to keep secrets then the incentives to refrain from crimes and lies and unconstitutional work is very much eroded. they are without accountability and they can go ahead and they do. the price of that is wars like vietnam and wars like iraq and i think actually it's leaks about sy hirsh in particular and others about the military

resistance to nuclear weapons and other attacks on iran that he began leaking in 2006 and leaked again about syria this week about false flag operations in syria apparently done with the support of the turkish government about the sarin gas in syria. thanks to those leaks we are not at war in syria right now and in other words we need a lot more of them and we need more effort by the press to look for them and to do it. >> i want to pick up on that. the fact of the matter is we get most of our news on national security and foreign policy from leaks. >> true, i mean true. we get false stories and plenty of false stories. >> you mention judy miller but they are not just leaks uncomfortable to the government or what the government is pushing and i want to give this to thomas drake. you have been in those official circles and what i wonder in

those circles and let me get the background. he spent time in the air force and navy that one of the interesting experiences you had was you actually were in east germany if so you became familiar with the horrors of the official propaganda system and so forth. you understand the need for information for a free society and you had been in the nsa and unlike snowden as a contractor but you also then rose to a high official position. surely living in washington you are probably aware the norm is the leak. i will just throw it out there i remember when i was reporting at the "l.a. times" in covering the labs and development of the star wars system and spare me if i tell the story again but i think it goes to the point. i was on psa now southwest

airlines plane going from l.a. to san jose and edward teller the father of the h-bomb and was very instrumental in getting ronald reagan behind star wars and they were going to get an x-ray laser. coming off this plane i said hi. i said where are you going and he said i'm going to the sanford arms control program. i said make sure said tell us you about great results we had on the cottage just. we got lazy. well that was if it were true the biggest change in the military balance. it would have been the elements weapon. it was the thing any enemy would have most wanted to know and hear was edward teller telling me, certainly a suspect character that no one should trust in those circles, telling me this, the result of the test the very name of the test had to be secret results and so forth.

when i got up to stanford to the arms control center where condoleezza rice was a member there i mentioned it and he freaked out. this is the highest secret and i can talk about this and so forth. but they routinely give information of that sort. in the case of thomas drake what got you in trouble which is so interesting here is that it was a very important story but it was boring from a kind of cops and robbers or national security thing. it really had to do if i understand it correctly with efficiency, wasted resources and an important issue of privacy as well.

a lot of the high school. i was 14 and i mentioned that as transition to answer your question robert has dan ellsberg was a key individual in my

understanding in what can go wrong with your own government. my civic awakening as a young adult place in the 1970s. the pentagon papers leaked by dan ellsberg. sy hirsh and all that meant. the horror of vietnam as a continued to unfold, watergate, woodward and bernstein. think about it. that's where they got their beginnings and their fame to say it that way in terms of reporting. it was a really cool profession to be an. and then i saw the president of the united states resign his office and get when i became eyewitness to just a few short

decades later, in fact in reality it was only about 26 years later, makes the nixon era look tame by comparison and much of what was actually illegal and dan ellsberg speaks quite eloquently about this during the 1970s in terms of government activities and violating the law became legal in the post-9/11 world much of its secret of course. i mention all of that because that's the context in which i came. as the context of which i was brought up. vermont used to be a republic for 14 years until it joined the union. in 1791. and we have to remember the beginnings of this country and the first amendment of which i

else metlay had to confront after 9/11 as to what was happening to our country, the first amendment is the cornerstone of who we are as americans and if you don't have the first amendment everything else disappears. if you don't have a press, everything else becomes propaganda. information controlled by the government. it's important to note that vietnam, vietnam's lessons were actually learned quite well by those in power. they actually said that books published about this that if we ever find ourselves in conflicts of this nature in the future we have to control the message. because the fact remains that vietnam was really the first television war that was brought right into the living rooms of americans. we got to see it all played out over number a number of years.

all of that is that drop. we also have to remember something else because history is really important here. especially for the professions you are looking to go into because you are reporting on the news. you can't understand the news without also understanding that history. one of the things that becomes so in your understanding about that period is that there were congressional hearings. just look up the church and pike committee hearings, extraordinary hearings. detailing comic cataloging all whole series of violations by the government but i'm not here to give you a litany of all those violations and all that wrongdoing. one of the things that came out during the 70s, which is often forgotten by the apologists of the national security state in the post-9/11 era is that nsa

and the cia and the fbi are routinely violating their rights of americans with impunity. nsa formed the deepest of secrecy not by congress but by the virtue of a presidential signature in 1952, a military organization headed by a three-star general, now a four-star general. he had been routinely violating the rights of americans on a program called operation shamrock, the first massive surveillance program truth be told. i'll tell? is coming into the united states and exiting the united states were routinely collected and copied and given to nsa and guess who is providing them under the greatest secrecy? the very corporations like rca

opal for example as well as several others turn this over to the government. total violation of the fourth amendment of the constitution. i am saying all of this. look up operation iraq to nsa using its extraordinary power back in the 60s and 70's to spy on americans that they didn't like that pose threats to the state or activists to journalists and reporters providing in the public interest critical information about what was going on inside the government, finding themselves on the other hand of an nsa surveillance them with the technology of that day. i say all that because a lot of performers were instituted in the 1970s including something called the foreign intelligence surveillance act passed in the

carter administration. remember during this period also establishing don't forget to standing committees on intelligence that were supposed to provide oversight so they wouldn't get out of hand as had been demonstrated by these revelations and disclosures and of course down and ellsberg living history right here in front of you turning over the pentagon papers in the public interest because the american people have the right to know what their government was doing in their name. now accelerate to 9/11. i will ask the question rhetorically where were you on 9/11? what were you doing on 9/11 because for many in this room including my own son who is 18 and a freshman at virginia wesleyan, 9/11 he doesn't remember this pre-9/11 world. the only world he actually knows is what occurred after 9/11.

some of us actually remember nine/10. some of us would like to return to nine/10. my first ammo job was 9/11. i did not know when i was sitting in the affairs office listening to my immediate supervisor attempts to explain why nsa needed billions of dollars to meet the challenges of the digital age a program which i actually blew the whistle. i didn't know what was about to happen while i was in that room and while i was in that room both towers were hit. then the pentagon shortly thereafter. and yet that was a trigger event almost 3000 people were murdered it was a trigger event in which i'm going to say this in the strongest possible language. it was the reality of what i

confronted, the horror of what i confronted that my own government unchained itself from the constitution. a silent coup against the constitution placing itself, granting itself authority to engage in emergency powers, emergency powers. we had been operating in that mode ever since truth be told. and a series of decisions were made as a result of the failure of 9/11. we have to remember 9/11 was fundamentally a failure but it was used because the government is too big to fail. it was used as an excuse to engage in a whole series of activities and operations. they were in total violation of what we actually stood for and none of it was necessary. none of it was necessary.

the varied best of american ingenuity had already been ready to go well before 9/11. we would never have had to go to the gartside as vice president president cheney himself said on public broadcast television five days after 9/11. so what did i confront? i confronted within days of 9/11 the power of nsa being turned on the united states full power. nsa was supposed to do foreign intelligence but apparently now the united states was a foreign nation for all intensive purposes. in my moment of truth occurred three weeks after 9/11 when i confronted the lead attorney at nsa and the office of general counsel. i said, what are we doing? it's the prime directive of the national security to say you do not spy on americans without a

warrant. we are a 25 year regime modified 25 times to keep up with the technology and now we are just separating ourselves from the fourth amendment? there is an entire directive, a regime in which i was fundamentally accountable and had been ever since i was in the military flying reconnaissance. we couldn't just collect even incidentally collect. if you did there were special procedures involved. all of this is tossed out. i wasn't just looking at -- coming off this thing called the constitutional republic or the constitution pio is actually looking at an entirely new vehicle that i did not recognize an alien form of government and remember i had taken in both before this four times to defend the constitution. i am now eyewitness to subversion of the constitution and 9/11 was a trigger for billions and billions of dollars being poured into nsa.

failure was really profitable. in fact my immediate supervisor as we went around the campus complex attempting to console the workforce. they knew that we had failed the nation. they knew that we were also responsible for not keeping people out of harm's way. just read the preamble of the constitution. the two responsibilities we had failed except one asked what would 9/11 mean for nsa. 9/11 direct quote is a gift to nsa. we would get all the money we want and then some. congress really provided blank checks to nsa for the next several years. that was the fraud waste and abuse and then i discovered there was critical intelligence that had been capped by nsa and

never shared with the rest of government. the real truth here is what i was confronted by in terms of what the government chose to do. no public debate. no need for the public to know. in fact they were doing everything to keep us away from the public so what do you do? i chose, my colleagues resigned from the agency that i worked from and i chose to stay on and fight. i made a conscious choice i would fight for them because that moment of truth set into motion my whistleblowing within the system for a number of years and then ultimately leading to a fateful choice in the press of what i would do. and here is where i looked at

dan ellsberg in terms of history because back during the nixon administration for president actually had said and this is the famous david frost interviews that if the president says it's okay it's legal. here is what the lead attorney at nsa told me. you don't understand. this program is all legal. it was approved by the white house. ever since i heard that the hairs went up on the back of my neck. we are the executive agents for the program and the program was stellar. the secret surveillance program. it was a dragnet surveillance program. he cannot understand snowden, you cannot understand any of the disclosures today without understanding the foundation of the surveillance programs. so i went through all channels. i ended up becoming a material witness for two, 9/11

investigations. i gave them thousands of pages of material evidence and now i wish i had kept that evidence. dan and i have talked about this. just like he shared with you he wished he had disclosed the pentagon papers years earlier. it might have stopped the war and prevented it from occurring. i'm a material witness for two, 9/11 witness investigation. and giving him all this information that was censored and suppressed. the only evidence that i had any contact material contact with those two, 9/11 congressional investigation was the fact that i was interviewed. their people right now and there have been for a number of years trying to track down where all of my material witness evidence both verbal and undocumented form and everybody is playing.

i wonder why. buried in there are things i disclosed publicly later. very good and there is the reality of the foundational programs of which been hearing so much about since june of 2013 thank you ed snowden. buried in there is the evidence of nsa critical intelligence that could have prevented, stopped 9/11. nsa conveniently said general hayden how convenient it was during later on during the 9/11 commission hearings. an essay hiding between -- behind the shadows of nsa. this is the stark reality of our government turning into something other than what it is supposed to do. as i recall from the nixon era

the cover-up is often worse than the crime. i am eyewitness to high crimes and misdemeanors and they are all covering it up and millions are being spent because there was a really big failure. it takes a lot of money yet none of this needed to happen. in fact the very best technology had already been developed. in fact as i discovered when i was in the program we actually were able to look at the critical database of nsa. we discovered pre-and post-9/11 intelligence. information had never been shared and information they needed to know they had. and they fundamentally protected the fourth amendment rights of all u.s. persons and u.s. corporations. so i went for all this.

they actually took it portion of thin thread and without any controls at all know for the mimic controls everything was just taken wings all e-mail address is in internet usage. i have been ching all the disclosures from edward snowden. i'm up where there's far more going on inside the government then what edward snowden himself was disclosing to journalist reporters to date. this is really really disturbing knowledge and history about our own government. trailblazer was launched with great fanfare a year and half before 9/11 ostensibly as a flagship program to deal with the digital age. nsa was going deaf. it was literally being drowned in all of this data.

they are in violation of the federal acquisition violations. they just want to spend a lot of money and they decided to buy the solution. it had already been made. the military-industrial complex lookup eisenhower's farewell speech before kennedy became president in 1961. the department of defense inspector general investigation on trailblazer i get all the way to 2005 just after the fall of 05. there's a new director at nsa triggers a final report from the department of defense. i was a chair with us on that one as well. on teen thousands of pages of evidence given to them on all that was going on with trailblazer is it related to it. i wrote it led her to general alexander my final whistleblowing act at nsa. i lost my job.

i ended up being -- to an office that i had no responsibility no money and no one reporting to me ended up at the national defense university and i made a fateful decision because in 2005 it was important to summarize for you what actually took place in terms of press reporting. it was fundamental to begin to unravel precisely what the government had been doing in such deep state secret will all those many years since 9/11. james risen eric would allow and "the new york times" had held onto this for 14 months prior to this 2004 presidential elections. at blockbuster article revealed for the first time ever that program with the government called a terrorist -- to find the sources of that article and i knew when they

launched the investigation that i would become a prime target. why? because the set of people that knew about the secrets of the program's stellar wind in particular were extraordinarily small and because i had in a program manager of thin thread although it had been completely shut down and put into the body watching indiana jones. imagine thin thread which is really software -- remember the famous indiana jones movie where there's the box going into the government warehouse? that's the last time i saw the then thread. the digital warehouse indiana jones warehouse. so i knew that i would be a target of the government in this investigation. it was reported in i'm going to keep emphasizing this how absolutely crucial the press is an ultimately revealing the truths even the most disturbing

of truths about her own government. reported in 2010 that this criminal leak investigation apparently was so crucial to the government to find out who had provided information about the secrets of the program to "the new york times" if they put five full-time prosecutors on it and 25 full-time agents and i can tell you from my own ordeal that they actually borrowed agents from the mole hunter unit which is the elites buying hunting unit in the fbi. that's how serious they were about finding the sources for "the new york times" article. no, they thought i was one of them. so, this happens in early 06 and i knew and i have always known this, there was a third rail option. the third rail option that you

never touched at nsa because you never say anything if you work for nsa and especially to the public, especially to a reporter and especially if it's not preauthorized. i knew i would be in administrative violation. but worse i knew i could be easily, easily placed under investigation for leaking classified. that i knew but i chose to go anonymously to a reporter and share with this reporter from "the baltimore sun" who have been writing a series of articles on nsa what i knew about the intel cover-up, the failure of the multi-million dollar fraud, waste and abuse in the secret surveillance programs i was placed under direct

investigation in the spring of 2006. i know that because they were trying everything they could to get into my computers at home. and my colleagues, former colleagues as well as the person who'd been the nsa oversight manager staffer of the house intel committee they were raided in july 2007 by teams of the di agents in four months later i was unceremoniously raided my cell. the house was tossed and they thought that i was the leaker to "the new york times" because there was no evidence. because there was no evidence that meant that i had done it. remember the absence of evidence? so i am now target number one. during my cooperative period with the fbi and they are now saying that i had gone to a

reporter with all this stuff in there accusing me of having gone to the near times and asking me specific questions about what i had shared with reporters and asking specific questions in particular not about the fraud waste and abuse but about the secret surveillance programs. they were hyperabout protecting that program and everything that has ensued since. in april of 2008 just imagine yourself looking across the table from a chief prosecutor being threatened with the following statement. mr. drake, how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison? unless you cooperate with their investigation. i said i will not depart from the truth and i cut off all contact with the fbi.

i hired a private attorney, spend lots of money over the next two years, was charged in secret. in march of 2010 and then i was publicly indicted in april of 2010 facing 35 years in prison, five counts of espionage and one threat against justice someone for making false statements. now i'm on the front page of just about every newspaper in the nation because it was extraordinarily rare. i was ers whistleblower since ellsberg charged with espionage. no attorney would represent me pro bono. those who are willing to do so the firm said if you want to represent mr. drake u. you will have to leave the firm. we have government officials. we have senior contracting officials that we represent

conflict of interest. i was cleared indigent before the court and i had federal public defenders appointed to provide my defense. .. >> i would have the blood of american soldiers on my hands. the level of classification of e