what to do now in afghanistan. >> yeah. i mean, the first thing is it's interpersonal relationships. we are not viewed from the outside is a particularly cohesive team. >> military in general. >> not just military. i would tell them to go white water rafting, get three cases of beer. it sounds like a joke, but they have got. when you give the national security council room and you are in their, and you're thinking, i made it. you look around and your not really a team. you are polite polite to each other, but think about it. we are fighting a war. you spend you spend months preparing a football or baseball team, but we take the most senior leaders and put them in a run and expect them to be a cohesive team

without ever doing that. and so i literally would do things that started to build relationships. you want something to fall back on when you disagree on the issues. when mike says something and you're sitting across the table. you know, i know mike and his value set. there is something to fall back on. i see the same thing in board rooms for corporations. if they come in periodically to my you are not apt to get a very effective outcome. i think that is huge. the strategy part is not that hard. figuring out what to do i think you can do on a saturday morning. >> let me just add to that. that. i think this is critical for damn near anything. part of what we have to do is take a big step back and look at the relationships and the way we have had those relationships over the last 30, 40, 50 years and

say, are those relationships still solid, sound? do we have to form new relationships? do we have to change the way we relate to each other? and this is not just in afghanistan but throughout the middle east, the asia theater. >> us with our allies, friends, partners around the world internally is exactly right. the thing i would highlight there is that people need to be better prepared. you need to understand what it is that we are facing, and you cannot go -- and i am being a little bit pejorative, but you can't just go with what you see in the headlines. you have to have a much deeper understanding, not only of your lane, commerce or agriculture or military defense or state or whatever, but you have to have an understanding of each other's, you know, issues that they are dealing with. with. and i think that if we are

lacking something right now, , the ideology, which direction is al qaeda going. it is more. it is china, all of the various competitors. we have to have a much deeper understanding of who is who out there and really take a hard look at our relationships. do we want to maintain that relationship or change it diplomatically, politically, diplomatically, politically, economically, military to military, whatever. we cannot just sit back -- again, i am generalizing, but we cannot just sit back and accept that these guys have always been our friends that is not true today. >> you, being an an expert on those relationships within afghanistan, having run intel, what happens now the mac we are down to about

10,000 troops, it seems to be morphing slightly. but it's a week precedents. what precedents. what happens now? does it go the way of iraq? >> i think that the threat that we face, they are all paying close attention to what is going on in the middle east. that is a given. we have to begin to help the people of afghanistan understand how they will begin to operate and how responsibilities that are going to have to take on. it has to do more with now dealing with this change and what we don't want to do, we

don't want to decrease the confidence of those people. when we look at the evolution of what has occurred in that region, the central asian region, we have to pay close attention to not just how we feel today but what that region could potentially be ten years from now. >> that is what we want to happen and want to have happen. the trajectory that we are on now,, is that likely to be the case? or does it unravel? >> i think it stays. for the next couple of years we are probably going to be a bit status quo. and afghanistan, the president is going to have to step up a little bit.

he is trying to introduce some anticorruption efforts and things like that. again, it is not something that is going to happen overnight. like everything else, it we will take time. frankly, there is a commitment that we have to have from the international community. we allow them to continue to contribute in some way some fashion so that it does not become literally a pariah kind of state such as somalia. >> we are going to go to questions in just a second. so you had a difficult rolling stone article. some of your subordinates were found to be criticizing the administration.

in your case we expected it to be a three-year term. some of the five coming out in the coverage is about disagreements on how much change was being asked for and whether the organization was willing to be pushed that far. what is your experience about the style of individuals who are rolling the dice, changing the paradigm, and the good term change agents and the critics be reveled in rows of his mother people what is happening right now? let's push decision-making down and change the relationship. >> so first of all, i am one that is constantly alerting

individual. if there is anything i learned working for great leaders over my career, maintain your integrity and never compromise or your principles. compromise on issues, but not on your principles. at the same time,, as i grew up over particularly the last decade, you, you know, for me it was to see things that were happening around the environments that we are in and a lot of my experience has been as a senior intelligence officer in global organizations to organizations that had global missions. so i saw these changes and watched the community that i was growing up in that was not changing basically in a way that i felt needed to adapt

to this future that we are facing. i facing. i can get into all kinds of details. on the other hand, the things that you see are happening around you, isis, the middle east, china,, everything going on with this whole snowdon affair, those are things where you take a stand on something and argue your stance. you know, again, you stick with what you believe. frankly, at a certain.in time when as a soldier you say, roger, i understand where i am at. here is my timeline. >> mike and i worked together for almost a decade he was invariably right. we were on the joint staff together. he said, here is my advice to you.

don't change don't change the way you lead. i remember that because when you suddenly go to very senior levels, four-star, ceo, their are knew pressures. suddenly you think you have to be a different person because you have to be in the political sphere. so there is this sort of sirens call, should i be something that i have not yet had to be? and his advice was something that i close to my heart. we went we went to afghanistan. it was an unpopular war. it was unpopular in europe, failing inside afghanistan. there was great pressure. do you say what you really think or do you sort of say what you think people want a to year? and we made the decision not to do that. fixing intelligence and the strategic assessment, to call it in a way that i would absolutely be

comfortable now. but that is lot harder than it seems. there are subtle pressures on you to adjust what you say and to pull your punches a little bit, but i was happy when we did not do that. and obviously people ask me, i regret the rolling stone article. i don't really regret anything else. i think that if we had not gone at it with that same idea that we are going to do it right so we can look ourselves in the mirror later i would regret that much more. >> right here in the end. a microphone up there. just a couple of minutes. >> thank you both. the most honest mission of anyone in this room. thank you. >> thank you.

>> the question is, both of you spoke. one of one of the main topics was adjusting to a new world, to the new environment, the delta force, realizing you are managing a team of teens, but is there a consistency to what a soldier would expect when you arrived? became your consistent. for me accountability is one of the words. is there a consistency that travels with you? >> the key message. >> for me everyone in an organization needs to understand what the values are. probably the principal value for me is teamwork. so if i show up to an organization people no.

anybody that tracks what flynn has done in other places, it is going to be to look at the organization and make sure we are ready not just for today but for the future. to to get their the principal value has always been teamwork. you operate as part of the team. >> i think you don't really know that until you are part way through your career. the best the best thing i ever heard was a guy who worked for me,, other soldiers would come and ask them what the deal is. he responded and said, this is the real deal. and that, i think, it was the most important thing. soldiers will forgive everything,, forgive you being incompetent, mistakes, all of that, but they won't forgive you if you pretend to be something your not. >> one more question. we have one minute.

>> thoughts on snowdon and what steps need to be taken to reestablish the moral authority of the us to its people as well as internationally. >> severe damage to the national security of this country and there just needs to be -- back to the things we have been talking about which have to do with relationships. i think that we need to reflect on what kind of relationship we need to have, that the united states needs to have with russia. this case undermined many. we need to focus an awful lot on that. >> thank you very much for your talk. [applauding] >> thank you.

>> the "wall street journal" ceo council also heard from white house cyber security coordinator michael daniel. he talked about ongoing efforts by the federal government and private sector to prevent cyber attacks. this is half an hour. >> good afternoon. i hope you get ready because we we will ask for your participation. rarely spoken about, but over the past year that have dominated the headlines. major breaches. confusion has grown about the relationship between companies and the government ,, to prevent cyber attacks and to respond when they happen. here is michael daniel, special assistant for the president and cyber security

coordinator for the white house. is it our imagination, are the attacks drawing in frequency and sophistication? >> they are certainly growing and sophistication. you raise an interesting question about frequency, and it is one that we actually quite honestly debate quite a bit about whether or not we are seeing an increase in frequency or just our ability to detect them. my personal belief is it is a little bit of both. the rate of cyber intrusion is growing but our ability to protect them. this looks like exponential growth. in terms of sophistication i think it is two factors. one is, they are becoming more technically sophisticated. if you look at the kind of malware that we are seeing, the kind of spear phishing

attack we are witnessing, all of them show a greater degree of sophistication than ever before. what is actually probably more interesting is the organizational sophistication that we're seeing. if your image of the hacker that we are worried about on the government side is the guy in his pajamas, yeah, that is not -- it can be annoying and a nuisance, but that is not who we are worried about. particularly in the criminal world they had taken a page out of the business world and have applied business operations and operational research to how they do their business. so organizationally the hackers are much more sophisticated than their were they were several years ago, and that poses a significant challenge. >> what role do state actors play in this? the iranians attacked a number of us financial institutions, russian, chinese, several indictments earlier this year. how closely as this link?

>> certainly when you look out across the array of cyber threats that we are facing, you definitely see a significant chunk of them are state-sponsored. open testimony to congress about the threat that we face from china, russia, north korea, other major cyber actors. in many in many cases the line is often blurred between those individuals that are carrying out an operating for criminal organizations, those were operating on behalf of government must some that are operating with a wink and a nod. so it is very sort of -- rather than being sort of discrete camps, what you have is a continuum of actors that are arrayed,

those that are purely operating independent of government all the way up through state-level actors,, and it is not sharp divisions between any of them. >> you mentioned that you were at another conference happening today between microsoft and the chinese government. what was your message? >> sure. i think that the key core part of our message in our relationship with china is we're at an interesting. and i am sure we are listening to ambassador rice's remarks backstage. clearly that is an incredibly important relationship. but part but part of the message we were delivering is that the behaviors we are seeing are putting us in a position where it is raising friction in our bilateral

relationship. we have had some important recent successes including the climate change agreements, confidence building measures that have been put in place. it it is clear that we can cooperate and get things done, but in the cyber security area, that is one of the great challenges right now. >> are you convinced that the government itself is involved? >> it is clear that we are not getting the kind of response that we ultimately believe we need to have with the chinese government. it is not happening in the way that we ultimately need for it. you know, i will say that we are continuing to search for ways to talk to the chinese government. we have seen some promising openings, and, and i very much i'm interested in following up on that. this is a particularly challenging issue and one in which i expect their to be

continued disagreement for some time and some friction. but i don't think that means we should not look for areas that we can make progress in for example, as china grows in its wealth and stature in the world it, too, we will become a target of cyber crime and theft. theft. they have a clear interest in addressing that. i think that is an area we can actually find some common ground to work together on. >> move closer to home, but before i do that that i would like to ask the ceos a question. if we could get our first question appear, as up your command has your company suffered a cyber attack over the past 12 months? where are we legislatively as we wait for them to answer? the president issued an executive order. the houses passed the measure twice. the senate has, is there any

coat of any kind of cyber legislation? >> one of the things i learned, i don't don't really make prognostications about what congress will do or not do,, but i do think that we continue to work very hard to try to get legislation passed that the president can sign. i do think there is some possibility that congress can reach agreement on some of the less controversial pieces of legislation that they have been working on. i do have to say that it is hard for me to see exactly how they get to closure on several of the more controversial pieces. we are certainly interested in working with them as closely as possible to make that happen. >> okay. in terms of

representatives here, 65 percent of the ceos say there company has suffered an attack. talking to some ceos, there is a sense that companies are kind of on there own. they might get a call from the government. they are left on there own to defend themselves. >> i don't think that is entirely right. i think that one of the fundamental issues that we have to come to grips with when you talk about what we're doing in cyber security, there is a fundamental nature of cyberspace. one of the issues that i face is a discussion about roles and responsibilities and who is responsible for what in cyber security. one security. one of the key issues that i think really emerges, the argument you often will your people make is that cyber states have no borders and that information freely sloshes around the globe.

i would argue that that is not entirely accurate. cyberspace has lots of borders. routers and firewalls and peering points and all sorts of edges and boundaries to network. what i would actually argue is that what they like is an interior. what it means is that our traditional model for how we think about doing security where we essentially assigned the federal government the role of doing border security does not work when you try to mask because there is no iowa. there is no interior to the country. everybody everybody lives on the border. if you take it back, everyone in the entire united states. now you have a situation

whereby it's very underlying nature, and vision that is inherently shared between the government and the private sector. so what that means is we have to work out some new partnerships between the government and industry. these relationships are not going to be the traditional regular relationships that we have had, not going to be the traditional contractual relationships that we have often had with the private sector. so what is it? from a policy standpoint that is probably one of the defining challenges that we we will face. and and actually working out what that relationship will be. we are trying to put in place the mechanisms to interface much better with the private sector and build up our capability in the department of homeland security to interface with our critical infrastructure. within the department of treasury to interface with

the financial sector can do with epa for the water sector and really build the connections on the back of the government to enable us to operate more effectively. and going and going forward this will be something that we we will have to do in deep partnership with the private sector. >> how can you address the reliability issue? they are now subject to 44 different civil lawsuits. there is an issue of trust that needs to be addressed. >> although i would like to distinguish between, the investigations where we're trying to figure out what happened and how, to do attribution of the intruders which is still an incredibly difficult task versus investigations into wrongdoing, i think the

liability question is one that has a public policy geek, someone who spent a long time, it's an interesting, thorny problem, the right amount of protection to encourage companies to engage in the kind of behaviors that we want without actually having it be so broad that you effectively incur a moral hazard in the space. and i think working that out is going to be extremely challenging to write in our discussions with the help, and particularly challenging issue. i do think that we are working on a couple of other efforts. we efforts. we are really trying to get the insurance market, working a lot with treasury to figure out how to get the

cyber insurance market to take off. some of the actuarial data has been lacking. the underwriting has been lacking. so one of the ways we would like to deal with some of that is to have a much more robust cyber insurance market. >> another question, should government do more sharing more information? one question, if the senate does not pass a cyber bill in the next two weeks is there a fear that you we will eventually have to start over? >> in some ways the answer is yes. we will be starting from scratch because it's not like everybody has erased from their brain the way what has come before. we will look to build on our previous work in this area. >> okay.

97 percent would like the government to do more. a lot of momentum, the momentum, the president's executive order in early 2,013. how much more difficult has that made it? is the nsa just a bit of a toxic actor? the head agency. >> there is no question that the snowdon disclosures made our lives more difficult in this space. ..

>> i think as we look at how the government is structured, one of the other lessons we have been taking away is trying to put one agency or element of the federal government in charge is not going to work either. one of our challenges has been how do you build organizations that are agile and processes

that are agile enough to encompass that. it is the same as the business world and where you discover a dead or organizations that do more in and and things like that and you have had to try to build and to large corporations the ability to work across and so we are trying to do the same thing. but we are having to catch up and do the same thing and i think that the same lessons are needed to be applied in our area as well. so when i look at what we have to deploy on teams, to deal with this incident, we are going to pull from this, the secret service or other law enforcement officers, and the intelligence community because you need all of those skill sets to really look at what are we doing in terms of network mitigation and network defense and in terms of the investigation would we know about the bad guys. we need all of that information in order to be a good job.

>> is the nsa playing a smaller role than before the disclosure? >> i would say no. the other agency was displaying a bigger role and increase their capability in many ways. the fbi is continue to grown its capacity in this area and the dhs has also with the immigration center, they have really stepped up and has a much more robust platform to participate in things. and then you have the other agencies who didn't realize that they were security agencies such as treasury that had realized the deep importance of this and i don't think you could get jack lew to talk about the financial sector right now. and so i would say the same thing that is true over at hhs, those are two agencies that have

become deeply amassed in the cybersecurity. >> you're one of many companies that has a pretty hybrid tech and you face a decision of cooperating with the government or do you not. what mistakes you see companies make and if you cooperate with them, but you won't find as much, that that is as bad as it is having these agents all over, is that the better way to go then trying to handle it on their own? >> i think a couple of things that i can say is that we are very much on the government side from the white house tide and we are wanting to build on industry and more information and more insight into what is happening is always better and we are always encouraging of companies to come and talk to us about what is going on. but even if you don't have some sort of interaction with dhs or

interactions with the cybersecurity firm and others, there is a plethora that are very good and kraut strike and others that can help you think through and make sure that you have your plans in place and you can execute on a response of a recovery plan. all of these are aspects that are important. the most important is that companies respond proactively and aggressively to cyberintrusion. soon after they have a choice whether or not to cooperate? >> there is always a choice in that matter. sometimes i would say that for those that are in critical infrastructure we might be a little bit more interested in pushing in some cases and there is always a choice. >> any last questions for you before we go to the cybersecurity? it is a problem that my company can manage or would it be a

bigger problem than my company can manage two just before we go to questions, politically this is an interesting issue and we have the democrats and republicans and there are elements that are very reluctant with privacy concerns to push this through. did you talk about how you're trying to address that? >> the political landscape is an interesting one that is different and it doesn't fall neatly along party lines in many ways. but the issues related to this, to how you handle the privacy concerns, there are a lot of different opinions and i think that trying to work our way through sort of the complex issues around it are quite challenging and part of it is

because of the multidimensional nature of cybersecurity. and it's not just an economic issue a privacy issue, you can't neatly buffett it. you will always make it more politically challenging. >> i would like to open it up to questions. >> right over here. >> i file filed my tax return on october 15 and some have already filed their us. i'm not sure how they did it. >> to get a refund, what did you do? >> it have been to a few people. and i think that there's no question that one of the lessons that we have learned over the last couple of years has been no

part of the federal government and no part of our economy is immune to the cyberthreat. and if i compare this to when when i first started working on the cyberissues, my biggest issue was convincing people that this is a problem than anybody needed to pay attention to that we needed to spend money on. and so i don't have that problem now. which is both good and bad. but now what do i do about it. and so i think that on the government side the irs is an example that the others are where we are having to take another look and we are having to take a look at the full array of end-to-end security amount is

worrying about the firewall and other things at the perimeter but actually doing defense and really thinking about the whole lifecycle of the intrusion looking at all the different ways you can break for the intruders and are trying to do their job and i'm actually flipping this lifecycle around on them. it's a hard problem in one that is difficult for the government to get its arms around and one that we are working hard on. >> can i ask the answers to the question, the last one the put back up on the screen. because i think that was interesting. savvy security, the problem my company can manage, half of the ceo say that i can manage it. but half say that they cannot manage it and it's a bigger problem. so what you make of those numbers? is that second-half? that my company can manage, is

an overconfidence or a statement that i don't want the government in my closet or in my business. >> it can be a little bit of both. it's a multidimensional nature of this problem that makes it fascinating. and in many ways much of what needs to be done has to occur at the organizational level. and if you actually look at the fact that the bad guy usually gets in through vulnerabilities that we know about and we know how to fix. you can actually really make the bad guys really difficult. if you are just doing things like maintaining and doing a good job on past management, keeping your software of today, that won't keep out the sophisticated bad guys and so what you could be also seeing is the difference between those that have been the targets or

those that are the more sophisticated threats versus the pedestrian threats that are easier to defend against. >> i should've added a third possibility. not that they are overconfident but because they are perhaps getting good enough at managing things. are there other questions? >> right here at the top. >> hello, we are in the electric business and of course the greatest one of those critical of the structure areas and you talked a lot about prevention and what you do and the more sophisticated forms of intrusion. like many things, how we respond to the inevitable is very much a part of this so i'm curious how we would respond and how that government industry partnership shows up in that. matter of time.

>> one thing i can say is if you take a look at the cyberframework, it lays out five broadcast that you have to do in cybersecurity. you have to identify your information that you actually want to protect, which is a much harder thing than people realize. i can't tell you how many times i've had organizations go through this exercise and say yes, it turns out that we actually didn't know. until we do that exercise. so we had to be able to detect the intruder and know when someone is on your network and actually find them and we have to be able to protect and respond and recover. so the full spectrum of capability that we are interested in building not just one piece of the building blocks. and what you care about as a company also affects how you think about that. so from the government side one

of the things that we discovered is that there are some instances where we want to protect from manipulation and so we are not as concerned as from anyone seeing it but making sure that someone can change it and that has an impact on how we protect it and how we respond and how we recover from somebody that is actually discovering that we have an intrusion. i would argue that what we are trying to do is a really good example where the doe has been working hard with that sector to actually look at it and how do we bring in the lessons of resiliency from how you dealt with the physical world. can we build a tool eight agreements in cyberspace come cyberspace come in the same way that the electric industry has so that when there is a storm in one part of the country you surge the crews there and can you do this cyberspace equivalent of that.

those are the kinds of efforts that we are looking at it can the government facilitate some of those partnerships and that is the thing that we are looking at you try to build on some of the partnerships in that area. >> last question? >> some say they influence events and not just in china but through europe and other parts of the world as well. what steps do you feel that the government needs to correct that were resolved that the client as well as restoring international cooperation around cybersecurity >> i think that those forces were at play for edward snowden came onto the scene. but those disclosures accelerated some of those trends and i think that a large part of what we have been trying to do is to really focus on in

essence, doubling down on a stakeholder approach and expanding out the participation in that model. what has been interesting to me is how i was at the conference back last april and what was astounding to me was how isolated the voices were that were calling for enormous state control over the internet. and that there were differences of opinion with a resounding support they that came out from all kinds of places around the world supported that anticipatory model that was actually quite heartening. but i think we've been trying to capitalize on that momentum and build a and really support that. their other efforts that we need

to do more of an we need to do more capacity building and other parts of the world and we need to enable and work with other governments to figure out what their needs are so that they can help build that digital economy in places like southeast asia so that they have a greater stake in the open transparent interoperable internet. the other piece of it as we saw what happened in brazil with some of the legislation was particularly financial community started having discussions about what this would mean for them domestically and that went in a very different direction and i think it energizes some of the business communities more probably around the world which is also piece of what we are trying to do. >> we are out of time, but let me slip in another question. and let's take a minute to answer this. how can companies and universities and others who have been targeted help? >> i think by continuing to

discuss this issue with peers and colleagues and also within your own organization. this is not an issue that you can validate to the closet. this is something that must be dealt with very much as a leadership and ceo level issue. >> thank you very much. >> thank you to her back as well. >> now a discussion on the state of the financial sector and the impact of regulatory law. this is with sheila bair and jeb hensarling, who chairs the house financial services committee. >> we haven't concluded that that is bad that the data is bad. the question is there organic market growth or not. i can't say that since the passage of this, and i guess we

could debate, the big banks have become bigger, the small banks have become fewer and i do believe that there is causation. so what i would like to do is the too big to fail phenomenon which is the house this past yesterday a bipartisan bill to add a new chapter to deal with the larger financial institutions and i do believe that that should be paired ultimately and there's so much that we agree on and we may disagree on that. and i am concerned about the ability to designate this. >> explain those for the people that work in the real world and not washington. >> okay. you know, yes, we excel in

washington and acronyms, but we've really cornered the market on acronyms. to this council is a group of regulators that i would argue have the ability to effectively control large financial institutions in america by designating it to be a systemically important financial institution this includes bank holding companies and with 50 billion assets that frankly from their discretion to discern by using ill-defined terms of financials and stability systems at risk that they pose systemic risk to the financial system. and i just believe that this is a dangerous phenomenon and ultimately we need to make sure -- we need to make sure that we

have market ideas and appearance and reality of your own money at risk. so that is how do we confuse the market discipline into this system. there is a little bit of a bargain here so the big banks have enhanced supervision on one hand and on the other hand i am convinced that they enjoy the ability to borrow and lower rates and i think it's because again when you embed federal regulators in these financial institutions, the market is convinced that the regulators will not let them fail. and this is not good. it's not good for market innovation or economic growth and not good for individual freedom. >> there might be one thing worse than government taking over aping financial crisis. that was the crisis we saw in 2008 where there was a political

fiat and this concept was established to create the rubric the idea of wanting this done in an orderly fashion. so you agree with the chairman about what he says about the dangers of this. >> i think that we learned that there are some institutions that are outside the traditional regular banking which can put a system at risk and we should all have them in part of the bankruptcy process from shareholders and creditors and is not impose the taxpayer supported war resolution. so i think in terms if you're going to do this, i would agree with that and if you're going to make one designation, the central question should be not the bid, that's not the

question. the question is what happens if they fail with the cost, then let them fail. >> let's say wells fargo talked about this, valuations went under, there was a mortgage crisis. >> they are a regulated bank. most of the assets are in the insured bank. so most are subject to the same process. but this is really activities outside the insured debt. and so straightforward it makes a model and usually you have a market to market loan and you have time if you see trouble blurring and it could be part of this.

and so when i was with the fdic, wells fargo is not the bank i worried about that the trading operations that i would worried about. >> this raises a hypothetical that a bank that we think of being sound gets into trouble. is there no doubt that the u.s. would step in in whatever way it could to save it? would you agree with that? >> i cannot speak to what the future policyholders would do. i can simply advocate for the policies that i think what service best and i would push back by saying that an ounce of prevention is maybe worth a pound of cure. certainly after the crisis, i think you can make the case quite clearly that our capital and our leverage standards were inadequate and insufficient. i don't think you can make the case that they were insufficiently complex.

and i'm afraid that dodd-frank have made them have made them far more complex and that includes our economy and nation as well. so to me, the answer is to make sure that it's -- and it's easier said than done -- that we have historically proven capital leverage standards in place and let's face it, there is a narrative out there that i believe is a false narrative. if you want to get the proper diagnosis and remedy, you have to have the proper diagnosis. but the fundamental cause of this was undermining historically proven underwriting standards in real estate. and so i think that any objective view of history would show that it's a smart and good as is many of regulators and lawmakers are one of the great tragedies is not just the

inability to stave off this but to lead to the crisis. roughly 70%, 75% of the troubled mortgages were backed up by the federal government and that includes those ratcheted up under bush 43 and clinton and the community that we have for reinvestment act. basically the oligopoly, there were a number of federal policies that help to lead us into the crisis. and so the federal government track record in managing risk really isn't all that great. they essentially told all the financial institutions that they have to reserve little or no capital against mortgage-backed securities and sovereign debt.

>> we have a lot of smaller banks. >> she would know better than i would. but i think we have four to 500 go belly up. >> what is your view right now on where capital requirements have gone for banks? i know that you feel that they are insufficient can you give us your view? and then the chairman, if you could on that. >> i think we need to be significantly higher and dramatically simplified. and so i don't think that that is true. if you look at a database, that a lot of leverage. and so you gentlemen, the leaders of nonfinancial commercial companies, you'd be amazed.

you wouldn't be around. so we added financial institutions that are different. i get that. but not that level. they need to be radically simplified and they create all sorts of things and that is one of the crazier things that they do this trade does one to another as lower risk and this went to ibm or coca-cola or others. in an just encourages them which makes it harder for them to fail in an organized way. so i would scrap this. you need some judgment that will help the delivered ratio. the current system is too complex. >> we are incremental. >> dodd-frank has failed. >> i wouldn't say that it has failed. >> i would.

>> okay. i will not defend the implementation process and i've been very disappointed. one of your questions is do we have to much regulation. i would say judge by complexity and quantity we have too much regulation and otherwise we have too little. >> i surely transiently agree with sheila. they haven't served us well in the past. i'm also very concerned by having one global or national standard because was proven wrong again and the risk ratings given to mortgage-backed securities to have this central view of risk management, i think it's unheard of. so again i would prefer that there would be fortress balance sheets and our committee will do a deep dive on capital standards early in the next congress and

so i don't want to prejudge the hearings and committee at dimity is. but again i will concur with sheila that the complexity i don't think serves us well and i don't think that she is quite sad. but i am concerned of one national view of risk management and i think it is once again going to be better handled by market mechanisms with respect to dodd-frank. the taxpayers have become poorer and it's more and difficult for working families to purchase a home even though local community bank may actually want to win the money. that is the consumer financial protection bureau as it may be, it's given us one national standard dealing with a debt to income ratio that federal reserve data has said that

roughly third of all african-americans and hispanics would no longer qualify simply because of the national standard of debt to income. that is part of the legacy of dodd-frank and all of a sudden as we implement the standards we are finding that dreaded annual fee comebacks. pre-checking is becoming a thing of the past. so my particular congressional district, perhaps a microcosm. i recognize a rural area and almost 435 of america, the average working family is worse off with household finances than they were four years ago and i would just say at some point the sheer weight volume and

complexity, the uncertainty of the regulatory burden slows economic growth. that's what we are seeing today and i hope that 2.5% gdp growth does not become the new normal. but even if the regulators get it totally right, in terms of my fifth-grade son in seventh grade daughter, when every teacher gives you a work on the same night, it doesn't all get done. and when regulators have regulation on top of regulation it is harmful to economic growth and usually small businesses or the innovators are entrepreneurs that suffer the most. and it makes us a less dynamic economy and prosperous society. >> let's turn to small business wall street. most of your customers and we actually have an audience with

questions about this. so grab your partner. and so the little below deck. and it assumes the negative, but try to be open-minded about whether you agree with it or not. >> is this wall street or "the wall street journal." [laughter] >> when it comes to wall street itself, agreed or not a great, you trust it or do not. i will be quite interested to see what the responses and so they do trust wall street. and so it was from big companies they feel that they are being served by wall street and to that point it is still a threat to the financial system or have they been sufficiently isolated where they can fail and take losses in a way that won't impale the rest of the system.

>> it has the increased capital with companies now, which may or may not add value depending on your perspective. i do worry when we ensure the process and i think that's an activity that is a part of this program. if i had one beef, that would be it. and when i got a call earlier about it in 2008, they called me early in the morning and i said basically that is what we still want to have happen and should happen. a lot of the work going on now wanted to make sure that it can

be part of this. >> and then we have the derivatives which we ran into. so chairman, thank you. is that part of the instability or not? >> it gives a term of art used in dodd-frank, although it is still defined. i suppose you could argue it. regardless of the investment banks i feel that we are making some of this name is takes a day that we made leading into the crisis and i want to make that point. certainly by fiat or internal management decisions we do have far stronger balance sheets than we did at one time. but i question at some point that you cannot have economic growth without some risk taking.

and so i'm still not sure at what point do the federal regulators regardless of how a enlightened they may be, to decide what is this and what is bad financial intermediation. not too long ago apple was floundering in one of the large indefinite banks and took a risk on apple and now we kind of know where that has all led. what that happened today two i don't know. it's a ridiculous example because we don't now. but i suppose you could make the case that north korea has a very stable economy. zero economic growth is very stable. so i don't think it's something we care to emulate. >> would you agree that we turn this into the banking sector? if you look at the returns on

equity compared to the electric utilities, they are almost equivalent. they are about 9% return on equity over the last year or so. so these from the capital market are telling you that they are about the same. would you agree that these are the regulating facilities? >> i don't quite know the answer but i will say that it doesn't take too many years of service in washington to turn you into something conspiratorial. i try not to question the motives of those that i debate but i will say that it's clear to me that there are at least some in the political left whose ultimate goal is to treat the large financial institutions so that capital can be allocated on a political basis and that is what we saw with the affordable housing of fannie and freddie and congressional leaders. and so the economy blew up.

so i do not think it's a good thing in america as we function with these utilities. we are probably on the way to doing it now, i wouldn't think that we are there today. but since we are in the christmas season as i look at the ghost of christmas yet to come, if these things are unchanged, we might wake up and see what we have. >> we have to move quickly because we are out of time. do you agree with this or no? >> no, i do not. there's a lot of risks being taken. and i do think that the regulators are trying to much with the prescriptive rules and they cannot do that. we need this because the next time somebody could do something stupid and they probably will.

we need to make sure that the market understands that in advance and those are the two places that i would focus. >> so okay, from the audience, let me ask you an important question. you are going to have keys to part of the kingdom come next year. and what is going to be the most important thing looking forward, the realistic legislative change that you think the you can bring to the financial services sector to . >> regrettably i don't know the answer to the question. that's a priority to figure out if the white house will be open for business. i don't know the answer that i am fearful. many in this room may know that there was a bipartisan agreement on attacks extender package at the white house decided to blow up. those of us in the house would argue that the president in an

extraconstitutional fashion in dealing with our immigration laws, there was a time on fundamental housing reform that i thought that between the white paper, which is now regrettably gathering dust on shelves and being deleted from hard drives, that maybe we could have come to an agreement there. we passed a number of bills that have been bipartisan and modest in creating a community financial institution. our kind of job start up is aimed at issues like this, like crowd funding in order to hold down a capital cost for the entrepreneurial ventures and i'm hopeful that we can get those on the president's desk and i must admit that i am a little pessimistic at the moment by the

president. and i don't know -- i try to be anonymous. you have to be or otherwise you have lots of opportunities to call in to fetal position and weep. and i have the honor of tearing it up going back and passing on these bills that we passed on a strong bipartisan basis and putting them on the president's desk working with my counterpart in the senate. >> okay, let's hear from the real-world economy. >> since we are the last thing standing. [laughter] >> we are, so we have to be more entertaining. >> you feel the same way? i am interested in your answer

on that. >> first of all, he was -- everybody knew that he was in serious trouble. it went on for months. so this wasn't a sudden kind of failure and it's just not accurate. by the time that happened it was a tough decision for him and others to make. but in retrospect it became unstable at that point and it was a trigger on breaking the buck and the whole market was a part of this as well. and we only got half of this through. so by that time i do think that they were all thinking on the bailout. so how could they possibly let them go down? but they did.

and there are some people that woke everyone up in congress to deal with this. but i do think that they there probably measures that should have been taken earlier and i do think that it has been a little bit more realistic and there could've been something that could avoid a disabling bankruptcy. >> before the crisis unfolded, and with all the caveats about the limitations of dodd-frank and small banks and larger banks getting bigger, is the financial sector healthier than it was in 2006 and 2007? and i mean is it more stable? and a greater contributor to growth in the united states?

>> certainly liquidity and capital are better. but i do think that my personal view is that this plays a role and more investors are doing more. and they have poorer mortgage investors backing them. we've had it for years now. with the policies and they are very much alive which is in different places now but still there. and so i think the system is more stable but the risk is definitely greater. >> we don't know how this is all going to turn out. and i think that financial aspects are inflated. the good news is that the wealthier people tend to homeland.

those people that own them are in a better position. but you see bank lending as well. leverage lending, we are seeing that the government is leading the way as well with the standard. so yes, i think you're seeing a lot of things and the regulators are trying with this as well. so why should regulator be inside a bank and say that you can't lend it seven times. that just seems ridiculous. we should let them do what they do. >> everyone would agree that you could say we should have some kind of down payment. it's kind of a standard consideration. so maybe it's too rigid, a fact that they are leveraging rest when banks are lending to them,

it directly impacts their ability to pay back the loan. >> but you disagree with them and say given the platform to make that decision let the chips fall where they may? >> repeating myself for about the third time, i think that the answer is the proper application of leverage standards and that includes investment banks and commercial banks to substitute their decision-making for those that are actually in the market place. but again we have seen the single greatest fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus in the history of america and we have seen the most profound rewrite of capital markets and loss since the new deal and yet we still continue to be doing this eight years after this way in a

very mediocre growth economy and until 95% roughly of our mortgages are either guaranteed or provided by the federal government may still appear on the federal taxpayer balance sheet. we still don't have a sustainable housing finance system and i don't believe that we have solved the problem of too big to fail and i would argue that the larger banks are still enjoying an advantage. i think we have doubled down on many of the policies that are brought us here in the first place. so i'm not an investment professional but there are a number of asset bubbles within the economy that have been brought about by extraordinary measures from 2008 that have morphed into ordinary measures as we are about to go under 2015. i wasn't there were few allies.

i salute her for the work that she did. she had a tough job at the time. i was a minority member of the house and you really don't have a lot to do. so i applaud and salute sheila and others for making tough decisions. and again, the question becomes at some point is this worse than the illness? >> asking my question again, maybe it is a rhetorical question, is the financial system now compared to 2006 and 2007, is it healthier if you defined it by being more stable? >> i think perhaps you can on some criteria. but again, i think the cost is, at what price do we have stability? when we have the startups at the

25 or 30 year low, generational low, we have a higher percentage of the workforce working for larger companies and so at what point in price you pay for this stability. how much economic growth are you willing to pay for this stability. i am not convinced that we have seen the poem before the storm. i cannot give you a yes or no answer to the question, but i do believe that frankly we have the wrong policy prescription. i don't want to say that all of dodd-frank is bad. but to quote me, it's only 86.9% bad. [laughter] so yes, the increased capital standard by and large has been a good thing. some good can come out of this concept although i think it is

being used as a tool for the federal government to macro manage this. so there are aspects that have been helpful but all in all, i consider dodd-frank to be a failure and i am fearful that we are replanting the same seeds the left is in a crisis in the first place. >> giving you the last word. thank you for joining us. >> on this upcoming weekend's newsmakers, we have linda sanchez. she talks about immigration and president obama's recent executive order in the role of women in congress. watch the interview at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> the senate is back in session on monday at 2:00 p.m. eastern. senators are going to consider

federal spending past december 11 and the current spun funding expires at that time. also expiring tax breaks. the senate is live on c-span2 again at 2:00 p.m. eastern on monday. and the houses back monday afternoon on c-span on the legislative agenda government funding past on december 11. >> when the house and senate return, they will be taking up legislation dealing with new federal spending and they have a december 11 deadline to do that with a look at what could be the final week of the 113th congress. we have a senior congressional reporter. let's talk about firing up the money detail and what is the current status of this legislation and what are the details? >> most of the government up until the end of next fiscal

year which ends the end of september of next year, the idea is that would allow every federal agency except immigration enforcement agencies. which is a concession to republicans who want to fight the issue of immigration again at the beginning of next year when they take control of the senate. the condition agrees to a larger spending bill that they have democrats that have agreed to a short-term spending on the immigration issue. so watch for that as there is a big fight going forward and there are larger details that need to be ironed out as well as you mentioned. how much money will the spend agency by agency. end are and are these things that negotiators are going through right now. in addition, those are restrictions are put in the restriction bill against what they can do to implement various

policies. but to fight that is happening behind closed doors and some of those things could become very controversial they are not ironed out right now. and so do they have the vote to pass the house? that is a big question going forward if they cannot do that, then we want to look at short-term resolution probably until mid-february. next week is a critical week. >> what you hearing about house republicans leadership efforts to pass this bill and work on this? >> they are relying upon democratic votes. it looks that they will renew a sizable number of conservative republicans who want to have a tougher restriction against the president's executive action. they viewed this as critical for stopping the presidents immigration move. and the house republican leadership in the senate republican leadership do not

want to go down that path, they are worried about a government shutdown and to go down that path. but they do want to lose several dozen potentials and conservative republicans and so how much does it speaker boehner moved to the left and get that democratic support. those are things that are still hammering out behind closed doors. to meanwhile nancy pelosi, another article talks about her flexing her muscles.

and the republicans are going to move closer and closer to their directions on certain programs that they favor as well as getting getting rid of policy writers so the longer they hold up support the more that they will have to give to them and we have data. a lot of republicans think that this is an effort by the democrats to lead a short-term resolution by the entire government because some of them think that democrats want to have this big fight over spending with the beginning of the new congress and a potential government shutdown. something that the republicans get blamed for and am not quite sure that we're going to go down that direction but certainly nancy pelosi believes holding out as long as possible will help her at the end of the day. >> coming at the end of the

wire, we are talking about the house. what about the senate side? will they need to do in order to get this passed? >> the senate is a more difficult institution as you know. taking longer to pass bills and speed of consideration by unanimous consent which is not always an easy thing. but the spending bill, the democrats are going to need cooperation and some do not slow down the spending bill once it passes the senate. and there are $50 billion or so of authorized pending military programs in addition to lots of

nominations. dozens of these things as well as executive frank nominations the democrats want to get concerned and their final days in office. and if they don't give the support, they are slipping into the final weeks which all senators want to avoid. >> reporting for politico. you can follow him on twitter. thank you for joining us. >> thank you. >> c-span providing live coverage of the floor proceedings of the senate and every weekend, booktv. for 15 years the only television network devoted to nonfiction books and authors.

c-span2 is created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. coming up next, tom cotton and mike pompeo of kansas discussed national security at a policy forum in washington. from the same event, a discussion on u.s. military strategy and spending. and then later a recent address by pope francis to members of the european parliament. >> hungers min tom cotton of arkansas and mike pompeo of kansas discussed national security and international affairs at a recent forum hosted by the foreign-policy initiative. representative mike totten is a member of the house affairs committee and this is a little less than one hour.

>> is done, thank you for joining us. there are two members that have established themselves as members of the panel. this will be moderated by bill kristol who serves on the board of directors and the foreign-policy initiative and we are highlighting as we celebrate our fifth anniversary this year. bill is the founder and editor of "the weekly standard" and he served in the executive branch to the secretary of education and vice president dan quayle. so thank you so much for joining us in this conversation.

>> thank you. i would like to thank the staff for their hard work for what is already a very good session. and i would like to just think everyone is well. let me introduce senator congressman cotton, as well as congressman pompeo [inaudible] these guys go to the senate and they forget. [laughter] and i get to see tom for 30 more days. he will take your calls. [laughter] and so okay. the representative is a constant

wichita, kansas, he graduated from west point from the u.s. army. and of course he is a successful businessman and a prominent spokesman and a key member of the house subcommittee. senator elect tom cotton was elected in 2012. he graduated from harvard and harvard law school. and i can't really hold that against him. they like to have one conservative there at each time. so he was there in the late '90s as a conservative and he was involved in iraq and afghanistan after 9/11. and so now he is a leader in the house. >> i thought we might again with

it appears that obama has settled on a new nominee of the secretary of defense. tom may be here and if not, he may have the ability to get asked questions. and also what kind of questions would you like to raise is the secretary nominee? >> first, i would like to thank all of you for coming. thank you for having us and also for the great work you have been doing for the last five years. and i don't know the gentleman personally. honestly i will have a chance to visit with him and we will be able to discuss some of these issues. i supported the nomination of chuck hagel five years ago, i'm not happy that he was tired and i'm not convinced that he was

the problem with what has happened. and so that will be adhering whenever he becomes the secretary of defense. we need to have a frank conversation during the confirmation hearings and i think there is a widespread agreement across our party and even with some democrats as well and we need to grow and think about how to prioritize based on the threats that we will be facing in the future. and that includes leaving the islamic state in iraq and elsewhere. ..

when ash carter was deputy of defense and testified before you. >> i want to say thank you for inviting me and thank you for all the work you do helping members of congress understand these very important issues the most important issues we deal with as elected officials. when he testified he was very technically capable, was candid. i appreciated that a great deal. that's not always the case with administration officials who testify before our committee, and i appreciated that very much. and i think tom got it right. his challenge will be the same

one that the secretaries before him had, which is that all the policymaking has been removed from the pentagon and drawn inside the national security council or even into smaller circles, and so he'll fight that. he'll struggle, and this is a man who in 2006 wrote about taking out north korean nuclear capability, that will be an interesting discussion if mr. carter continues to hold those positions, positions that say we can't allow rogue nations, nations that intend to do america harm to become nuclear capable of capable of delivering nuclear weapons into the west. so, i'm not sure his views coincide perfectly with this administration and i'm not sure they matter. >> let me ask you. you both served recently in the u.s. army and are in touch both professionally and personally with many active duty and recently retired military and civilians in the defense department. i three secretaries of defense, each, after resigning, has

written a book or made statements that were pretty critical of the white house and there's always a little bit of that tension but seems to me, having been around washington a while, it's a rather unusual situation. what is your sense how bad is the situation, either within the pentagon or between the pentagon and the white house? is it something we could -- just normal friction or something to worry about? >> my sense is it is as bad as it has been since i served, and that's been a long time. i'm a bit of an older man. but i've not seen not only the senior folks but even folk inside the mid-range ranks and officer ranks, enlisted, don't have deep conviction their commander-in-chief understands the task that has been put before them, and that's is a deep bond between america and its service men and i think that bond has been breen in many ways, with commitments, demand placed on our service members without the resources or commitment to back them up, and so i have not seen as much anger

might overstate it. frustration would understate it. but somewhere in there, just a complete absence of confidence that the commander in chief will lead what remains of worlds reimminent power in the way these folks signed up to serve. >> just on the intelligence matters, since you're on the committee,ow awe liedded to other's people's senses. there is similar problems with white house micromanagement and politicization of decisionmaking. intelligence is little more of a black box. is it analogous. >> same issues, deep control. you see this, too, in missions being not taken into title x that were conducted in a different way previously so you see them being brought into different spaces where intelligence committee has done really good work, and i've actually -- i applaud the president, he continued to do very good intelligence work in eastern a afghanistan for the first years of his administration, and we are now

months away from leaving afghanistan, and the intelligence gap that will arise as a result of that is enormous and dangerous to america and it has been pulled inside the senior leadership inside the white house, and very much the same way you see inside of our defense department as well. >> i think the relationships between the president and his senior advisers in the white house ask the department of defense are probably as strains as they've ever been. it goes back to the very early days of this administration. the president wrongly campaigned in 2008 against the iraq war, saying we would pull our troops out regardless of conditions on the ground, which has largely changed. the war has been won by the time he was sworn in. but afghanistan was the good war he want ode to focus on, to he got in office and realized he had to act on the promise and the was boxed in hi best senior

commanders in the department of defense. i don't think they were trying to box him out. i they were simply giving him the honest recommendations in their professional military judgment of the resources necessary to achieve the goals he had outlined, and i think relationships have been deeply strained since then. but as mick said you see it down to the lowest levels as well, pipe with whom i served are still captains, majors, now they're enlisted, up to sergeant first class, master sergeant and it impacts they're day-to-day life. they can't get a slot in ranger school because there's not nut funding. not enough time on the range to fire their m-4s or tanks. or there aren't enough promotion slots slots so you're losing really battle hardened ncos a and officers that could cost us 5,000 years of combat experience. so they see the impact and feel somewhat underappreciated for all the sacrifices they've made and the gains they've won that

are going to be given back in afghanistan just like we have seen were given back in iraq. >> one more example. the president went to my alma mater, spoke at west point, always a dicey proposition. for any of us, frankly. but he went there and talked about -- he was speaking to a group of young men who had signed up to serve our country, speaking to a graduation, and he told them that among the most serious issues they would face in their careers in the united states military was climate change. i have to tell. >> vaguely remember being a young man, about to graduate, what would have struck me astip tin eared. this begin dozen wear on am armed force. >> let's talk about funding since you both mentioned that. the most concrete thing you can do in the congress you. can't change the president's world view much, i don't suppose, and can't change the

last six years but what about going forward? republicans obviously have been committed to generally constraining federal spending, understandably in any opinion, they were also times that with leaders saying we can't sacrifice our defense. what happens of the next two years in the terms of the defense budget? will that national defense panel, fellow director of the fbi, who will be here later, and michelle for now and others, serve on, bipartisan panel which said the current level is unacceptable and need an immediate increase and considerable stepup in the baseline. is that having effect on members, sense of giving higher priorities to the defense spending as opposed to abouting a general budget hawk? >> i believe it is. a story in the juan juan juan about rand paul speaking and that's what the said, we need to increase our defense spending, need to stop sequestration for the military.

part of that can be done by continuing to put reductions in the domestic side because, again, this goes back to the beginning of the presidency in 2001, passed an hundred million stimulus bill that threw the doors open at treasury for every agency in the federal government except the military. so there's a lot of savings in the long term from the domestic spending that we can at least use to bridge sequestration for the next year. i mean, ultimately there was a long-term we have to have an economy that is healthier growing and more people are working and paying into the tax system if we're going to have -- if we're going to be able to support the kind of defense budget we have in the post war period for decade and especially under ronald reagan when mike was serving. >> i'd say, full disclosure, i voted for the budget control act. i happened to continue to believe that it was a tool that was necessary at the time. to begin to get to discretionary spending back in the right place. i campaigned on it. still talk about that an awful lot. one of the two reasons, one of

which we're talking about today, the other one, i gave up a really great job before i came here. but we have to get defense right. the good news, though, is tom mentioned center paul but i will tell you, in a much broader way inside the house caucus, i'll speak to the 80 or so republican's came in alongside me who were determined to get our budget back into place where we can have a sustainable defense force for the next 20 years. i think there is a deeper recognition today that we can't take defense to the numbers that are contained in the budget control act. and when you stare at the spending profiles, for defense versus the others, you see the one that is really never got the benefit of the 2009-2010 increase in spending was defense. so we simply need to take it back and say, put it with the other programs and you get the money that the they would tell you they need and they certainly ought to have. >> one quick story. before you were members of congress, i was invited with

other conservative journalist to a dinner with president elect possible, jab of -- january of '09. and i thought, i'm not going to persuade president obama of anything serious. and it's not really what i think. but i thought on this precise issue he would do a big stimulus. it was obvious. republicans were like live to vote for the -- they were onboard the notion of some sort of stimulus, and i said why don't you do some defense spending? that is the classic case of stimulus. the normal account of how the depression ended has a hot to do with the defense buildup in 1940 and 1941, and i said there's plenty denver after iraq is considerable, obvious things you can do, and he was not interested. he said bob gates is taking a thorough look at defense spending, and i tried sty this is just 20, $30 billion off the top. just a normal course of thinks doesn't defense get some bit of

that? it was underreported at the time how remarkable to spend $800 million and spend zero on defense. but i think that is a world view issue, not a technical keynesian economics. >> we could have used that money for axles and tires and wheels and so forth to continue to keep vehicles on the ground that were safe to carry troops and would have actually put more troops back to work immediately. these are plans that were here in the united states and have two shifts and could have added a third shift. the government is good at spending money. very shovel-ready. then find people to wield the shovels. >> what about afghanistan? you served there, mike, you've followed it very closely. what do you think should happen, will happen over the next two years? >> well, i think whats happened in iraq of the last couple of years is a premonition of what will happen in afghanistan if the president moves with the

plans to completely withdrawal. i hope he learned the lesson of the mistakes in iraq. the fact he authorized 1500 troops to iraq, over 3,000, to me suggests he at least is making a slow motion tacit admission he was wrong to withdraw all troops from iraq in 2011, some if in fact he left this number that general austin at the time recommended maybe we would have few ever troops there today than he has recently returned, and obviously the conditions in iraq would be much better. the afghanistan government has made significant gains in both the civilian and the military side, and most of our troops who would remain in afghanistan would not be in a trigger-pulling function, they'd be providing intelligence and logistics and aerial support and i think it would be the height of folly for the from repeat his mistake in afghanistan he made in iraq. >> i don't have much to add to that. it's been -- the president is consistent in setting deadlines and demarcations about where we're going to go and what we're not going to do, and we would be

infinitely better off if he would support a better with a but talk about it in meaningful ways. talk about the mission, what it is we're attachmenting to -- attempting to achieve. congress can have a row. we could demand he continue to support the efforts in afghanistan. we have the capacity to at least make statements and indicate our willingness. we will support the president when he makes good decisions. we won't simply be critical because that's what we do because we are the party not his'll take good decisions and reward hims' support him where it's appropriate. >> i guess the republican house, sort of -- supported the president on afghanistan and -- >> absolutely. >> and i think with a higher proportion of republicans supporting him than the democrats in the house, for all the talk of bitter partisanship issues he was supported when he was doing the right thing. what's iraq? you served there also, and current situation, isis.

>> well, the islamic state is clearly the dominating the news from iraq, and i don't think you can divorce iraq from syria. the islamic state did not recognize the border between the two countries and therefore we can't either since enemy doesn't. the president nor longet tile had a political strategy which i think was designed to gem him through the election, not a military strategy, and to still that not adopted a strong military strategy. he continues to state very lofty goals, or as we say in the military, without providing near the resources or distress to his commanders to execute them. you really are returning back to the days of lbj and the white house, picking occupy bombing targets in vietnam, and the president, if he is committed to those goals, needs to empower his commanders and the troops in the field and on the ground and of course increase that number if we're actually going to destroy the islamic state, which i think is a national imperative >> i think that's all right you. a can't talk about what is going

on there without talking about iran either. they're everywhere. the reports that i think were in the press yesterday, perhaps, that iran is now attacking -- taking flights and attacking isis. by the way in somesons i think americans will be shocked by that. conversely, iran has enormous forces and enormous support in iraq already today. the she a ya militias, inemman, hezbollah's activity. stretches from hamas to doom mass, and straight through to baghdad. the iranians are committed to making sure that they come out of whatever the battle ends -- however the political resolution end inside syria and iraq, they're committed to being the victors and the controlling force. so when the president talks about tactics and things we ought to do and says we're going to destroy isis without doing so much as making assad even stay inside his home for one minute, the rest of the world seats that, our gulf allies see that,

and they realize we're not serious and take actions that are depry at odds with america's national interest. so you have failures on the ground, tactical failures in iraq and in syria but you have enormous strategic failure throughout the middle east taking place, it's very, very dangerous. >> you wrote an op-ed about -- that was not sync with the majority of the conference, august 2013, saying that the president had belatedly, september 3rd, 8:00 a.m., iraq was -- had a few calls and e-mails saying the president decided to do the right thing in syria and finely intervene after 100,000 deaths and so forth, and us not doing anything with chemical weapons were used, and you have -- in a bipartisan way you said you were willing to support him if he was serious and turned out not be serious. it is amazing you think how much damage our -- unactivity -- failure to do anything about

syria and the way in which that has metastasized it markable and is a serious threat. >> and it a radiating catastrophe throughout he region. the president's failure to enforce his own red line he drew, with the international community didn't but he drew and said he was going to enforce and it then blinked. the consequences that had throughout the world and not just with syria and not just in the middle east but everywhere. so much of america's foreign policy is bound up with what our adversaries and allies think of the president's character, of his spine, of his courage, and we -- mike and i here in washington and trips we have heard from allies all around the world who tell us, how damaging that was in their own region and what a bad signal it sent to mall factors around the world, whether they're nation states or nonstate actors. >> mike? >> intelligence would confirm that.

it's very consistent that -- i talked about our own soldiers not being confident in our administration. doing the right thing and being committed. i can tell you the folks watching us, whether they're enemy order allies, understand this administration is -- we forget we haven't talked to -- i'm sure we'll eventually come across their the russians shoot down a plane, and if anybody can tell me what the american response was i'd like to talk you because i've not seen it. this is fundamentally unserious. we begin with pulling missiles out of europe. just -- the sequencing and the cumulative impact of america withdrawing, whether by stated purpose or more observedly by actions, has led folks all around the world to think we're on our own, we're going act in our self-interest, and if we are counting on america, there is no promise they will be there when we really need them. >> dangerous situation.

>> very dangerous situation. >> you were at the recent conference in hole halifax. ted cruz talked about meetings had with foreign leader and it what striking how much uncertainty was about where the u.s. is and what we're doing. >> i heard from many people and formal and informal setting in halifax, conference, probably 40, maybe 60 countries, and deep concern about america's engagement with their countries or region of the world, and the charts that the obama administration was going to take. the path it was going to chart forward, and a deep, deep cry for american engagement in the world. i mean, went to one last year in munich as well, a similar conference, and i have yet to hear from a single country that says they want america less engaged in the world, and that seems to be the -- president part of the president's problem he use the problems in the

result as a result of american engagement and leadership and thinks if we just retreat to our domestic shores, then the world would be a better place and i think most people who are adults about that realize that's. no the case. >> deep he engagedded in negotiations with iran. you all voted for sanks in the house and i assume sanctions will come back up pretty early in the next congress. what do you expect to happen and what should happen? >> not much to ad. you whatnot to talk about bipartisanship. i don't know what we'll get, tom. 95 votes in the senate. 400 plus in the house. for real, and serious sanctions, perhaps even second order satisfactions. simple things, we're note going to let you sell what is now $65 a barrel oil. anyplace in the world. imagine the change. iran's economy shrunk by 5.3% in the year prior to the commencement of our negotiations, and depending on whose study you read it grew by almost that much in the year

following. that is a radical difference. it is giving komen any exactly what he entered these negotiations for, so whatever the outcome dish heard folks say one wi account get agreement. we got an agreement to keep the the current agreement. there was an agreement reached that day. i was to continue to allow iran's economy to thrive to allow them to spin centrifuges and do almost nothing to prevent them from having a nuclear enrichment capacity. so we're under agreement with the ayatollah and it's not ins the president best interests. >> i think congress should step in. >> we will. >> an utter farce. not just in negotiations over iran's nuclear program and the president has been acting like a love struck teenager with iran and ayatollah khomeini for five or six years. he has written four letters that have been unreturned and unre quited. >> i know how he feels.

>> too much information here use, we do have an agreement. i mean, iran is getting everything they want by stringing along these negotiations. we conceded the right to enreich urainum. concede ted right to keep iraq as heavy water plutonium plant. conceded we're not going to explore all the military dimension, they won't have to go through complete disclosure inspection. not going to put ballistic miss. s on the table and we have given them 5 bill. why he reach an agreement. he has gotten all he wants so we are being injured by the extension of these negotiations, and several members of the administration said, four months ago 0, 12 months ago, this a short-term negotiation, they'd walk away from a deal, and here we are and they refuse to walk away. so it's time for the responsible adults in congress of both

parties to step forward and say we're going to put an to end this farce and i hope they do it soon after the new year. >> be an interesting dire. >> robert menendez said yesterday the white house and senior administration officials need to stop downplaying the role of sanctions and i'm sure senators like chuck schumer would appreciate the opportunity to vote on a sanctions bill which harry reid deprived them of the last two years. >> i'm sure he is yearning for that opportunity. >> well, that's what being a senator is, congressman, supposed to step up and do the right thing, and a chance to vote. it will be interesting if you have real vote on real sanctions bill. i guess they could be exempt could be waivers and exceptions and maybe -- but the administration doesn't want anything. they want to -- >> they didn't want in -- they talk about sanctions now and how effective they were in driving iran to the negotiating table but didn't want them on the last round, either. they acquiesced when they recognized they were

veto proof partisan majorities. >> susan rice says additional sanctions during the negotiations would be dangerous. i remember when i was in the private sector i wanted all the leverage on my side in any negotiation i could possibly get ump wanted them to think i was the sanest person in the room and their only hope of getting the resolution they wanted. right? and you wanted the bad guy -- the used car dealer, want him behind the window. i they're demanding we take away their tools, their leverage. the most bizarre thing one has seen and it's difficult to come up with a good motive for them having demanded we not enforce a set of sanctions. >> one thing i take from this, the conventional wisdom, the president in his second term, final two years, focuses more on foreign policy which he doesn't need congressional support and there's a limit to what congress can do, but just listening to you two, between defense spending, afghanistan, you mentioned, iran, sanks, and actually sounds like a hefty

national security agenda early in the new congress. that would actually make a difference. your colleagues are agree with that? they've been pretty coke policy focused, which i don't blame them for them last four or six years, but could be a pretty interesting moment. >> i think it's broader. we shouldn't -- on june 15th june 15th next year the patriot act expires, and -- >> a word about that. somewhat controversial. >> so, controversial in one sense. there's very widespread agreement that most over the patriot act makes sense, provideses that are controversial that folks have considered about civil liberties. i'm a very consecutive man, deep didistrust the federal government, every activity it undertakes so i'm september the tick to those concerns but we cannot give away thistles that have been so important in tower counterterrorism fight, for now 13 years, and we have had a couple of these skirmishes on

the house floor, senate had one of as well but we always had the wind at our back in the sense that nothing passed. none of the modifications we made in the house have become law. but in the middle of next year, we must act. we actually have to pass something. so we'll begin the discussions, lots of committees will be part of that. but very important we get that right and calibrate that correctly. this counterterrorism fight is going to be with us for quite some time. >> and as a member of that committee, these are important tools. some people say it's all intelligence community has a self-interest in promoting it but this stuff hasn't produced much. >> there i lives that have been sniffed kansas as rahm of this programs. i -- it's hard to make counterfactual arguments and i can't provide details but i can tell you very, very clearly these programs are important useful and being conducted in a way that is highly professional

we every effort to security civil liberties of every american while still accomplishing this important mission that that absolutely saved lives across the country. >> you had a primary challenge from a former member who ran -- >> very different view. >> ran on this issue and it was interesting. everyone says the republican base is so hostile, so hostile to the government, even hostile to these programs but you won that handily. >> the american people are prepared to do what it takes to make sure and keep america safe, and they want us to be very cognizant of the fact they like their privacy. and if we do those well and we articulate it and talk about what we're doing and don't allow members of our own conference to talk in silly ways to say that the government's listening to every one ofure phone calls and reading you e-mails. i heard my colleagues say that. they do that knowing that it is not accurate. we can keep them from doing that, if we communicate adequately and professionally and treat our constituents as adults on this set of issues we can be successful.

>> tom, you talked about kansans over the last -- >> obviously the campaign that just ended had a lot of major issues from obamacare to immigration, to our national debt. but throughout the calm pain, in particular in the last four months of the campaign after the islamic state has risen to prominence, after mosul fell and in august, after the beheading, the most common question would be at national security, the islamic state or iran or ukraine and the general sense of american reef treat from the world. and i can tell you that arkansasans don't want to retreat from the world. they depressant want their fellow citizens heads getting cut off. and you saw it's couple weeks ago right before the announcement of the extension of the iranian negotiations, all 11 of the new republican senators elect, soon to be 12, when bill also diwins on saturday, called for congress to act if the president had such an extension. i thk