at these agencies are not properly funded or properly integrated then we can see the initial bail ultimately. that's their assessment. c i i can on your mind is committing how many times you have heard from our commanding generals in both iraq and afghanistan about the desperate need for more civilian both in iraq and afghanistan and the value that they brought. secretary rice used to chide me occasionally reminding me that we have more people in military bands than she had in the entire foreign service. i will give you another example

and its inaction were both the executive branch and the congress are responsible. when i left government of 1993 the agency for international development had 16,000 employees. they were dedicated professionals. they were accustomed to working in dangerous and difficult circumstances in developing countries and they brought extraordinary not only skills but passion. when i return to government 13 years later in 2006, a idea was down to 3000 employees and they were mostly contractors. and that is a measure of what has happened in the development part of our broader strategy and i would say for those of us of a certain age who can remember usia in its heyday what we have in the way of strategic communications in our government today is a very pale reflection of that sub those, the whole

civilian side has been neglected for a very long time. and that neglect will be exacerbated by sequestration and they will not, these agencies don't have a way to provide insurance of funding that dod has and the overseas contingency because they don't function well i think that's the conclusion you draw. our overall security and responsiveness is inadequate. is that fair? >> i believe so, yes. >> this is a subject of a lot of our discussions is we have tried to find the money for department of defense and bearing the bulk of the difference of budgetary and political contingency accounts. as a means of funding on a

long-term basis in your view is that an adequate approach or should we raise the regular budget caps and do it as we used to do it? >> first of all my approach when i was secretary was to take every dollar i could get wherever i could get it. it's a terrible way to budget. it is a gimmick. it does provide the resources but i think it's hard to disagree. the way that things ought to operate is that if there is a sense on the hill, a majority view that the budget needs to be cut to reduce the deficit because the regular order of business and you, like i did when i was secretary of defense

you make tough decisions. what are you going to funded what he you not going to find that you make choices. that's what leadership and political life is all about it seems to me. and then you vote a budget and the money flows whether there is more or less of it. in the current paralyzed state maybe there is no alternative right now to getting the money this way, but it is as the saying used to go its a hell of a way to run a row wrote. >> thank you very much dr. gates for your extraordinary service to the nation. >> thank you dr. gates and thank you for your service and i would add my compliments to those of your predecessors, prior speakers. i believe you represent one of the best secretaries the nation has ever had and i know you have served with dedication with the

nation's interests first. he put the defense department first and some former cabinet colleagues putting education first and roads first and so we have pleas from every department of the agency we don't have is money -- as much money as we would like. the crisis we have entered on the budget crisis is essentially the president of the united states has said you're not getting any more money for defense unless i get more money for non-defense. so the process as we move forward matt the defense defense department's request and the presence request for defense but it has not met the non-defense increased all of which on defense and non-defense are barred because we are already and debt. we borrow the extra money.

it's a difficult time that you are correct, history teaches us. the conflict doesn't go away. we don't know what it will be like and we need a law -- strong national defense and thank you for your good advice. recently, do you believe that with regard to the extremism we are seeing in the middle east, that we as a nation and our allies are on europe, nato and other places, should seek to develop a strategy, bipartisan in the united states, worldwide tube deal sophisticatedly with that threat over decades to come and can we do that? >> senator i think that, i think we face a generation of conflict in the middle east. i think we have four for, at least for complex going on

simultaneously. shia islam read my iran reformers versus authoritarians, islamists versus secularists and then the question of whether these artificially created countries iraq, afghanistan, syria comprises of historical ethnic and religious groups can hold together at all. i used to say without repression. now the question is whether they hang together at all. syria has become if you will the epicenter of all of that and i think some of you may have read dr. kissinger's long essay the other day in "the wall street journal". my concern is that i don't see an overreaching or an overriding strategy on the part of united states to how we intend to deal with this complex challenge for

the next 20 or 30 years. and one of the benefits of containment, and there were lots of disagreements about how to apply it and the wars we fought under it and so on but i will always believe that's critical to our success in the cold war was that we had a broad strategy of containment that was practiced by nine successive administrations of both political parties. it had bipartisan support. the general notion of how to deal with this. we don't have anything like that with respect to the middle east and i think, and so we are kind of dealing with each of these crises individually rather than backing up and saying what is their long-range game plan here and who are going to be our allies and who are going to be our friends? where do we contain? where do we let it burn itself

out? we have an address those long-term questions it seems to me. we are strength -- thinking strictly an month-to-month terms. >> thank you. i think that's very good advice. i have been around here for good while, i believe there's a possibility of a real bipartisan support for that kind of long-term vision. we have a disagreements on spending and some other issues but i think this one we can bridge and i appreciate your thoughts on that. i met with the german group yesterday and raised the need for europeans to contribute more to mutual defense and the leader of the group pointed out it was unacceptable that nato is funded 70% by the united states. he acknowledged that. you have spoken on that in the past very clearly. do you have any further ideas about what we might do to have our allies carry a bit more of a

load? >> this is one area where one might hope in the long term that mr. putin has done us a favor by reminding the europeans that actually the world has not gone on to broad sunny upland swear there is peace and tranquility all the time. the reality is many years ago nato countries are committed to spend at least 2% of gdp on defense. when i left office, there were five countries out of 28 that met that threshold and two of them were greece and croatia so it gives you a measure of where the others need to pull up their socks and as you say i spoke very bluntly about this including in brussels in my last speech in europe. probably never be welcome in europe again either and i think the more reticular leave the

more that members of congress from both parties talk to their counterparts and parliaments europe, that can only help in my view. >> thank you. >> dr. gates, in your speech on budget austerity at the eisenhower library you said that quote eisenhower was wary of seeing his beloved republic turn into a muscle down garrison state militarily strong but economically stagnant and strategically insolvent unquote. as you have heard we have got a lot of very difficult appropriations challenges coming up the next few months and i wanted to ask you if you had any opinion as to what eisenhower might think of the proposal to use the overseas contingency operations fund i.e. the war fund to cover baselevel dod

budget items or whether you might have some thoughts on that >> while i think, i think i expressed my views that these kinds of arrangements are never at all as satisfying or as cost-effective as regular order of business in which choices are made and decisions are made based on those choices and dollars allocated. it may be more dollars than it may be fewer dollars but at least people have predictability and i would also tell you that having some predictability year-on-year would be helpful. so i think obviously regular order of business in terms of managing these budgets, that's really what i was talking about in a good part of my remarks, having regular appropriated defense budgets that actually began at the beginning of the fiscal year is the way things

ought to work and they have not worked that way up here for at least 10 years. that needs to be fixed. by the same token as i said when i was the secretary, if i were confronted with a situation that i face now my sense would be to take the money because what is my alternative? and what kinds of programs in my going to have to cut in order to accommodate a certain defense need? let me give an example of a place where i've made a big mistake. in 2010, this committee and others were very unhappy about supplementals and talking about moving away from supplementals. i knew that when the wars were over those supplementals or the oh's would go away. a lot of the funding that we had

for military families and for families of wounded warriors and wounded warriors were being funded through the supplemental. i moved all those programs or as many of those programs as i could into the base budget in the believe they would need those programs for years and years to come. well guess what? all of those programs are now being hit by sequestration and continuing resolutions and everything else. what i thought would protect those programs ended up making them -- whereas if i would have left them in the oco's they would still be fully funded. those of the perverse consequences of not having regular appropriations. i would make one other observation about eisenhower and his military-industrial complex speech. it gets quoted a lot but there's one factoid that people don't usually include. when eisenhower made that speech

in 1961, the defense budget accounted for 51% of federal spending. today it's 15%. >> shifting gears a little bit with the rest of my time do you have general thoughts on how you build a culture of incentives and values that really value off-the-shelf solutions where they are appropriate within the acquisition process, the procurement process rather than sort of having this inherent bias towards exquisite new programs and products? >> i think that there are obviously areas in which you ought to buy off-the-shelf capabilities and frankly one of the great cultural shifts and national security arena actually

occurred in the early 1980s when we in the intelligence arena that had always led the way in developing data processing, data storage data management were discovering that the private sector was far outstripping us in terms of their capabilities and so beginning in the mid-mid-80s we began buying off-the-shelf software and hardware for that matter so there are areas like that where i think in fact the private sector is way ahead of the government and where we can buy off-the-shelf capabilities that will actually improve our capabilities. there will be some areas and these are always the areas that are contentious but that have to do with some specific military capabilities where you are in the round of completing new technology and those are the places where you have to take risks and you have to realize there are going to be cost

overruns. most of the highly danced technologic advanced programs defenses had for the last 30 or 40 years have all in their initial years had cost overruns and partly it's because we are dealing with in trying to do things that i've had never been done before. >> dr. gates want to thank you for subjecting yourself to this today. we appreciate it. >> senator inhofe. >> thank you mr. chairman and dr. gates i agree with the statement made by her chairman that there is no reform that we are looking at hoping for and anticipating and i also want to say in the various incarnations you have head had i have always enjoyed personally working with you. you have gone out of your way to dinners with individuals and have really tried to work with us so i thank you for that. you observe in 1961, 51% of the

budget and it's now 15% and that's a problem. it's of a low-wage -- lowest percentage since world war ii. that is not a problem where adjusting the day. both u.n. secretary hagel sought to shrink headquarters in combat command stats during the respective time as secretary of defense. secretary carter initiated 20% reductions in staff during his time as deputy secretary and in august of this year deputy defense secretary said all services entitled cost reduction targets for major headquarters ordering preparation for 25% cut in appropriations from 2,722,020. our defense authorization bill

has a lot of language that says this is what we need to do and it's a major problem. let me just ask you to think about something that hasn't been brought up yet and it's an observation that i have made a long time ago. that's the problem you have with bureaucracies in general. there are crazies want to grow. it was regan who said there's nothing more eternal on the face of this earth than a government with less reform. every time there seems there's a bureaucracy that is asked to reduce its overhead and that's what we are talking about today, headquarters its overhead they will cherry-pick something that they do that the public is so concerned about. let me give an example. i've introduced legislation in the back that passed legislation that addresses the faa. i had problems with reams and reams of bureaucrats from that

department out lobbying knowing they had a lot of people out there on their staff. if you look at the faa, in 1990 the total number of pilots that they regulated which is primarily what they were doing in year 2000 was 625 pilots. today it's 593 pilots. yet in the year 2000, their budget was $9.9 billion and then today it's 16 -- it grew from 9.9 billion to 16.6 billion so that's an increase of $67 billion. every time there is some kind of an effort by me on the radio for

some or all talking about how it's an inflated bureaucracy that doesn't have the work that they had five years ago there've budget is 67% more. every time i did that they would say we will go and start reducing. what did they reduce? they reduce things that scared people. they reduced the number of comptrollers that are out there. i could give you a lot of examples but i don't have to because i know that you know this. is there a way to handle this? i think i should be considered in this whole discussion and even though i have to delete another committee hearing i suspect that part wasn't brought up. what are your thoughts? >> it just so happens senator that in january i have a new book coming out that specifically addresses the subtitle is lessons on change and reform 50 years of public service and it's how you lead and change the bureaucracies. and how you bring about change

and one of the elements in a book for example is how to use it. maca budget stringency to change the way an organization's does its business. it creates an opportunity for a leader who is determined to change things and make them better because you don't have enough money to do all the things that you have been doing and therefore you have to think about how you do it differently. we have a lot of programs as we have referred to earlier in a four-month period we came up with $180 billion in overhead cuts in the defense department. some of those cuts created a strong reaction including here on the hill. senator kaine will recall the reaction when i shattered joint forces command in norfolk and i

had the entire virginia delegation on my doorstep actually in my office. >> and the then governor. >> and the then governor. >> who is the worst. >> but the point i'm trying to make his first of all you cut $80 billion out of the defense department generally but what i signed the services to do was to find $100 billion in cuts on their own just in the services. but what i did with the approval of the president was to tell them if you find 100 early in dollars, if you find the cut, if you meet the target that i given you, and then you show me new military capabilities or expanded military capabilities that are actually two site will give you the money back to invest in those.

so they were and said device. wasn't a zero-sum game for them for anything they identified they were going to lose but it forced them to address this tale and tooth issue and created penalties if they didn't achieve the goals but an incentive for them to find and be successful in the effort. one of the things and it goes to one of the questions the committee is addressing, the number of general officers. as part of that exercise we took an initial swipe at senior leadership in the department and this is one of those things you start and you never know whether came out abu -- we proposed cutting 50 general officer positions and i think twice that number of senior civilian positions. you can do this but the thing that requires whether it's the faa or the defense department or anyplace else that requires the person in charge to monitor it

almost daily and to make sure that people are doing what they said, what they signed up to do or that they signed up but they were given. in effect you have to regularly grade your homework. you can't tell somebody, you can't tell a service secretary at want you to cut $25 billion in overhead over the next five years and then a year later asked him how he is doing. what you need is to ask them in two weeks what's your plan and its two weeks after that how are you doing on implementation? you can do these things. you can make these are our christie's work and that's kind of the thesis of the book but it's how do you do that because it clearly is not done very often in one of the things i did and for which this committee expressed a great deal of appreciation at the time was

actually holding people accountable. people get fired in washington now the time for scandals and doing things wrong and that kind of stuff. hardly anybody gets fired in the city for not doing their job well enough. that is what was rare. somebody getting fired because they didn't do their job well enough. we need a little bit more about in the city. >> my time has expired but that's a great answer to that question. by the way a the way i will swap you e-books. i have a chapter in mind on that >> i hope they are available in audio. [laughter] senator hirono. >> thank you mr. chairman. dr. gates thank you very much for your very strong statement about congress's responsibility to govern through compromise and we have been wrestling with a very negative impact of sequester on defense and non-defense side so my hope is there will be a compromise that will achieve a sequester relief

for both sides, both segments because national security is more than just defense. i'm not trying to lecture you are anything but guess i certainly respect your views. you mentioned during the cold war that we had a broad strategy of containment and with all of the complex they continue to arise in the middle east and i think you did know that we are in an environment where so many complex or many of these complex are unpredictable that we don't have a strategy in the middle east. i think after our experience decades long experience in iraq and afghanistan that there is a desire that boots on the ground in the middle east should not be u.s. boots so from that close another of -- a number of what i would consider strategic kinds of decisions.

that may be one of the reasons our unwillingness at this point to put our own boots on the ground in the middle east. would you consider that perhaps not a strategic decision but one that really from which flows a lot of our response to what goes on in the middle east? >> first of all when it comes to something that specific it would be a mistake to have an essence a one-size-fits-all but basically says from pakistan to morocco, the united states will have no boots on the ground. the truth is we have just as one example we have 600 sets of boots on the ground in sinai as part of a peacekeeping operation that has been there since the 1973 war. are we going to pull those guys out because they have with on

the ground? >> my point is than you are beginning to make distinctions so you could have its on the ground as long as they are not in combat so does that allow advisory were? does that allow them to be spotters for airplanes? so i guess my feeling is that the first thing about the strategy is identifying what are our interests? what are we trying to protect? what are we trying to prevent from happening? and any work back from those answers into the techniques, the tactics by which you try to accomplish those broader objectives or that broader strategy. ..

>> that doesn't mean we should stay out. it doesn't mean we should do nothing, but we also ought to make sure that our strategy doesn't include objectives that are unachievable. >> i agree with you there. perhaps one of the areas of the world where we do have a strategy is in the asia pacific area with pacific rebalance, would you agree that that is a strategy? >> you know, i think despite going back several presidents. we had several presidents during

their campaigns take one position toward china with which when they became president they adjusted. i think while we don't have, if you will, an explicit bipartisan agreement on strategy in asia, i think there is a pretty broad agreement across board parties, leaders of both parties in terms -- except for maybe one or two presidential candidates, about how you deal with china, what our strategy ought to be in asia. i so guess i'm fundamentally agreeing. but i think there is a pretty broad bipartisan agreement on the role we ought to play in asia. >> thank you very much.

senator ernst. >> i appreciate your many, many capacities, so thank you. you were secretary to get body armer and drone to the field to support our war fighters and to do that even while we were undergoing sustained ground combat you really had to fight the bureaucracy at the pentagon to achieve that. so we are glad that you did that and you took that step to make sure our war fighters were protected, but i am afraid that after you left, it has reverted back to the same old, same old. i would like to see some more puchback out -- pushback out there. ten years on how to buy a new handgun and an item with a total cost of a few hundred dollars

per item. ten and a half years or half a dozen industry days later, the army produces a 351-page for proposal. 351 pages for a handgun. whatever is in the pages, it isn't a lien or streamline or because of bureaucracy and lack rf -- responsiveness, our soldier have handguns that are over 30 years old and they have stated that they absolutely hate those small arms. what should congress do to get the army to fix this mes -- mess for what the soldiers need in

time of war? >> well, it seems to me -- my friends in the army are not going to like the answer. >> that's okay. [laughter] >> what it is about is -- is calling the secretary of the army and the chief of staff of the army and the chief of acquisitions to sit at this table, and ask that question, why is it taking ten years? this is absurd. 350-page rfp. it's a handgun. again, i always come back to the same theme. most bureaucracies have stifling effect. what are required are disruptors and if you have people in senior positions who are not

disruptors, you need to make them into disruptors. and the way you do that is by holding them personally accountable. >> i appreciate that, thank you. i like that answer, so i don't know why they wouldn't, but i think you're right on there. i would like to talk a little bit about the middle east as well. in the past you called for a safe haven to help in humanitarian disaster in syria. i would like to direct my attention to iraq because we do have a humanitarian disaster in iraq as well. i believe we have a safe haven there. they have taken in nearly 1 point # million -- 1.6 million refugees and many are cristians, they are really unequipped to provide for the influx of all

those folks. they are fighting with limited resources against an enemy which has an endless supply of weapons and other types of equipment whether that's simply picking items up off the ground that are left by other security forces. so how important in your opinion has the u.s. relationship been for our country and dod for the past quarter of the century? >> i think it's a important relationship. in my view is that one of the things we ought to be -- i said this in an interview and i probably was a little more blunt than i should have been. i think that the idea training

indegenous in the country and infiltrating was never going to work. one of the things that could work is identify groups, particularly tribes and ethic groups that have shown they are prepared to defend their own territory against isis and to provide weapons to those tribes and those religious groups. they may not fight in iraq or outside of their own turf against isis, but they may well fight to the death to protect their own homeland, villages and so on, so finding those groups and arming them, at least begins to contain isis and presents them with a diverse number of

enemies that make it difficult for them to further expand their activities. and i would include above all, among those groups the kurds. >> i appreciate your answer. >> that's what the wakening was about, right, secretary? in this rfp the army specify it had army needed to do including comply with the brush but they didn't specify the caliber the weapon should -- [laughter] >> thank you, senator, mccain, and thank you to you dr. gates for your service and we have a special affection. i want to focus on the last bit of your testimony which is what congress can do better and in particular we have a hearing right now on the budget committee about federal budget reform. you testified that, i think,

only two years during the years that you you were dealing with full appropriations bill on the first day of the fiscal year, otherwise you were dealing with cr's, you and your colleagues and the secretary of defense dealt with cr's, you dealt with threats of all of the above, you dealt over debt ceiling limitations. are we going to have to absorb the full se -- sequester. talk about the strategic challenge when you're dealing with the degree of budget incertainty that we have seen in the nation in the past number of

years. >> well, as i said in my comments, we have had an appropriations bill at the beginning of the physical year twice in the last ten years and believe me, i think it was probably the ninth and tenth year ago. i submitted through the president five budgets to the congress and never once had an appropriation at the beginning of the fiscal year. the problem is you then have to straightline the spending, you have to adjust the spending. you can't start anything new or can't spend anything more on anything and you get into the months in the fiscal year and all of a sudden you have money. instead of dispersing money over a 12-month period in a rational and plan way, you have to hurry up at the end of the fiscal

year. when you get a cut of 30% in the operations budget half way through the physical year, which is what happened in 2013 that's when you ended up with a third of the air force active duty fire wings grounded. that's when you didn't have the money to deploy truman to the pesrian gulf. and so what you have are commanders at lower levels not wanting to get caught short so they're very conservative in the way they spend their money, because they don't know what's going to happen, and so you have less training, less exercises, less maintenance. these are things that can be put off and they are being put off, and the backlog of navy is

becoming huge and it's because of uncertainty of when we are going to get something. i mentioned in my statement, often in a program, development of a program, when you move from one year to the next, you create the opportunity to significantly ramp up production. and when you ramp up the numbers, the cost go down. you lose those opportunities because you don't know whether or not you are going to have the resources to do that. it has a huge ripple effect throughout this entire giant organization. i used to say when testifying up here, you guys expect me to -- i've got the biggest supertanker in the world and expect me to run it like a skiff. >> at the start of your testimony you talked about conventional wisdom that you

challenged, the world is more uncertain now and been more dangerous. you sort of walked through from world war ii to today and you pointed out decade by decade the challenges, and while we may not be able to predict the next challenge, that there will be challenges is easy to predict based on past history. you testified that you don't think that the account is smart in terms of budgeting. it seems to me that the mission of national vents is probably in real terms kind of more threatened by uncertainty here than uncertainty in the world. bad things are going to happen in the world and we know it and not necessarily be able to stop it. we can predict that they will even we can't predict the particular ones. the uncertainty here is budget ary dysfunction. >> i sometimes say when i'm talking to groups and universities, i get asked what's the biggest national security

threat to the united states and i say well, fundamentally and i am not kidding it can be down within two-square miles in the white house. because if we can't solve these problems, if we can't get through and begin to address some of the tough problems facing this country, there is no single foreign threat that is more dangerous to the future of the united states than that. >> thank you, dr. gates. >> when you have the cr's and the sequestration that you mentioned, doesn't it over fact have effect on moral and retention? >> absolutely. bob hale who was referenced earlier, bob wrote an article about the consequences for morale of all of these changes and all this uncertainty and so on.

people just gets discouraged. i mean, they do all this planning and they do -- and then it all comes to not. and i told -- i told general general amus before i left, my biggest worry is how you -- as these wars ramp down, is how you have given these young officers and nco's amazing independence and opportunity to be entrepreneurial, thoughtful on their own doing amazing things, is really the captain and nco's wars. i said, if you bring them back to the pentagon and put them back no a cubicle you are going to lose the best of those people. i believe that this continuing uncertainty about the future, i mean, pilots, pilots join the

air force to fly. people join the army to drive tanks and other equipment, people join the navy to go to sea, you're not going to fly, you're not going to sail as much as you thought you were, i think there's a very real risk that these uncertainties are going to lead to a bleeding out of some of the most innovative and desirable young people we have in the military who just frankly get fed up. >> thank you, chairman, i want to thank you, dr. gates, for your incredible record to our country. i hope that we can come together to address with a budget agreement that's going to make sure that you have that certainty and our men and women in uniform that have given the

challenges we are facing around the world, so that they can plan and make their right decisions, that need to be made to make sure that the nation is safe. i want to shift gears a little bit and ask on a topic, first of all, that i noticed that you and secretary -- former secretary of state rice wrote recently on the situation with russia and engagement that russia is taking in syria to keep assad in power in cooperation with the iranians and i wanted to ask your thought process about as we look at what russia is doing right now, what you think that their goals are and also what you think we should be taking as steps, we recently had testimony before this committee from general

kaine and jones, and one thing they said struck me, if we continue the current course with interactions with russia, they believe it could be the end of nato if nato doesn't step up to address not only what is happening in syria but the situation in ukraine and what is happening in that region. so i wanted to get your thoughts on russia and where you think we should be stepping up. >> well, i had a number of opportunities to interact with mr. putin when i was secretary. we actually had an interesting relationship because of our respective background and intelligence. i would sometimes remind him that i was deputy director of cia when he was kernel in

germany. what putin has impacted in my view is the collapse not just the soviet union by the russian empire. russia's borders today were as when katherine the great was impress. putin is about lost power, lost glory and he is not crazy. he is very much an opportunist, but what i think he has two basic strategic objectives. the first is to restore russia to great power status so that no problem in the world can be addressed without russia's involvement and without russia's agreement and the second is as old as the russian empire

itself, that is to create a buffer of states friendly to russia. and if he can't create friendly states, then frozen states where the west can no longer expand its influence and russia can hold -- have at least a barrier, and that's what happened, if you will, in eastern ukraine. i think those are his objectives and he will be very opportunistic in pressing those objectives, but at the same time he's not a madman. i think if he encounters resistance he will hesitate, he will pull back. and so i think that he has seen an opportunity to cement russia's position in the middle

east through helping assad. i don't think he's not sentimental when the time comes from assad to go. putin will be happy to throw him overboard when that's convenient as long as russia has someone coming in that will allow them to keep naval base and military position in syria. so the question then is, what do you do about this. i think that -- and i guess another thing i would add, also in the back of putin's head, if he sees opportunity, if he has an opportunity to poke the united states in the eye, he will never miss the opportunity. the question is where do you resist him and where do you push, and frankly, in ukraine putin has escalation control. he has -- he has a lot more

forces on the ukraine border than we in nato can put on the opposite side or are willing to put. we also happened to have a pretty dysfunctional government which makes our trying to help them even more difficult. so the question is then where do you have the chance to establish some limits, it seems to me one of those places where he is at the end of long suppl and we have real assets is in the middle east. and -- and i think that there is an opportunity to draw some lines in syria that -- let me frame it another way. i think we should decide what we want to do in syria, whether it's a safe haven or anything else and basically say, just tell the russians, this is what we are going to do, stay out of the way.

and -- and if it's a safe haven and it's in an intar -- area that threatens assad's power i think them challenging us is significantly reduced. at a certain point, i think we need to stop talking about whether these actions make them look weak or doesn't know what he is doing. i think he knows exactly what he is doing, and at least in the short to medium term he's being successful at it. >> thank you. >> governor king. >> thank you, mr. chairman. dr. gates, welcome, it's a delight. your testimony has been provocative in many ways. you talk about the usia, now

successor agencies according to my calculations about half the budget and one of the reasons we are having problems with isis is we are losing the war of public opinion including the middle east, strategic error in terms of our ability to combat the idea, which is a very important part of this conflict, would you agree? >> totally. you know, i would run into people from pakistan who, morocco and elsewhere, they learned to speak english in usia library. these guys would go there as kids. we went there because it was the only building building in town s air conditioned. but they learned to speak english and they learned something about america and these libraries and activities. we had all the capabilities and

it wasn't just usia, cia had covert propaganda. magazines and stuff like that. so it was both covert policy that -- that extended the reach of the message that the united states wanted to communicate to other countries, and what we have now is a pail reflection of all of that. >> that's essentially the war that we are in now? >> absolutely. >> second point, you talked about how to fix bureaucracy and i kept thinking what you were really talking about is leadership. organizational structure you can mess around with, you can change and then we talked about the budget process here. we could change and have a different kind of budget. but we have a project process, pass authorization bills and

appropriations bills. we don't do it. wouldn't you agree it's really a failure of leadership or not failure of structure or good intentions? >> it is -- it is a failure of politicians to do politics. politics is about leadership but also about making choices and making decisions. you know, one of my favorite churchill quotes is having one to the ground is a very awkward position from which to lead. [laughter] >> my favorite, i'll trade yours, success consist going failure to failure without lost of enthusiast. [laughter] >> as we got into the subject, it became apparent that one of the subjects was trying to cram

a lot of new technology into an asset that's going to have to last 40-50 years. you can say the same of f-35 or other new weapon systems. how do we deal with the problem of new technology which involves risk, which involves time, which involves mistake and rework and yet we can't afford to be making obsolete weapons, do you see the challenge? >> let me use an example from when i was secretary. i stopped one new bomber program because i thought it was headed down the wrong path. and i ultimately before i left approved the next generation bomber that the air force is bringing before you all. but i told them that they had to design it with a couple of things in mind.

first of all, they needed to be -- we didn't want to repeat the b-1 or b2 bomber, we ended up with 20 of them and so they ended up costing $2 billion a piece. when we lost one on guam, that's 5% of bomber force and that's $2 billion. i said you have to build it, design it so that you can buy at least 100 and you have to keep the costs, you have to start with technology that you understand. so your colleague was talking about off-the-shelf hardware. if you look at the b52, i was born and grow up in wichita, they built the b52 when i was in elementary school and middle school. and they're still flying. now it