they are a very, very reliable partner, but right now we have no redundancy in getting our crews to and from the international space station. that's not good. we need to have an american capability to do that. we will invest in that capability. we will -- the seed money. several companies are doing very well. i would encourage all of you to kind of follow them. some are companies you know, boeing, lockheed. some you may have never heard of. when i talk about sierra nevada, a great military contractor for decades, but not very well known for their work in space. not on a broad basis. blue origin in washington state. jeff beezles the funner of amazon who wants to build, who is building his capsule. he says the first beam to go are going to be him and his son. he's not on any particular timetable. but there are very innovative commercial entities that are

coming on. we this year will fly for the first time as i mentioned two capsules dragon from space x and cig nas out of dulles, virginia, to the international space station to carry cargo and hopefully have crew within the next three to five years. >> our space program was really born out of a perceived international threat. we look back remember back in the '50s with sputnik and launching the space race, the race to the moon. now potentially our only other superpowered a vaer ver sar china is embarking on a space program. and your counterpart is a general officer many the chinese army. is that a threat? what are the defense implications of a potential space race? >> this may be controversial in my director of communications would probably be sweating right now. but i don't view the chinese as

a threat in terms of space. they are very competent and capable. they have a module that's on orbit right now that i think they intent to use as a human tended, the first part of a human tended space station. they have a capsule that they use to carry crews to orbit. hopefully everyone in here knows that they've had three successful human missions. they've done a space walk. they have walked through essentially the gemini program. they have rendezvoused and docked it. some time this year another unmanned demonstration. by the end of the year they will fly another human mission and utilize it for some time. i don't look ats a as them a

competitor as much as i do a foourt developer. we can't work with them because i'm prohibited by law, but all of my international partners do. i'm the eternal optimist, but i'm also a realist. right now we are the only ones not working with the chinese in terms of space development and the like. they are years behind us technologically. one of these days we will probably partner with them and we will advance the cause of human exploration, but we have to be careful as we were with the soviets who are now the russians. >> last yes, of the uniformed services, the lead has been the united states air force in support of space programs. with the looming reductions in the defense budget and to each of the services and the air force, what are the implications on our space program and nasa?

>> i think the biggest implication for us right now and we are -- we really try to coordinate among the dod, the security is community and nasa. the biggest concern is the launch environment. the effective and affordable presence of launch vehicles. where all of us are about to be priced out of the market. one of the benefits that we hope to bring from the introduction of commercial access to space is a lowering of the launch cost. it will benefit the national security apparatus dod and particularly us in nasa for many of our science missions. so we are working together. we are all facing the same problems. as i said, it is a national security issue. we've got to modernize our infrastructure because we work cooperatively all the time. the admiral and i were talking about the work at the kennedy space center. there's no place better than vandenburg air force base and

kennedy space center cape canaver canaveral. i'm encouraged but we do have to work on our launch infrastructure. >> thank you very much. we have two presentos for you. the first is our 90th abversery commemorative coin. we call them adult pogs. and a gift from us. good things come in small packages. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> one of the robust programs

reserve officer association is our ongoing defense education forums which are capably led by robert fiedler. we are presenting upwards of 70 of these defense education forums per year mostly in the national capital region and most in our minuteman building. we're bringing together the great minds, researchers and policymakers in the think tanks of washington, d.c. and the nation in our legislative branch, the executive branch and the defense establishment. one of our frequent faculty presenters and one of the most respected, most quoted analysts of national defense is michael o'han lan. senior fellow of the brookings

institute. he shares with director general petraeus a ph.d from princeton in public and international affairs. as senior fellow in the foreign policy of the brookings institution, he specializes in defense strategy, the use of military force, homeland security, and american foreign policy. he's a visiting lecturer at princeton and adjunct professor at johns hopkins and a member of the international institute for strategic studies. i present him to you. [ applause ] >> good morning, everyone. it's great to be with you it's a little humbling to be following general petraeus and administer

bowen who have been deployed to iraq a and space and i'm usually deployed to the library. i appreciate your putting up with me. we have a number of big subjects. with generally supportive word about where the mcis going, but with a few questions and concerns in the interest of conversation i'm going to focus on the latter. first let me also though say how much of an honor it is to be with you. i know we have leaders from yesterday, today and tomorrow in this group who are so interested in our national security, who do so much for it, who sacrifice so much for it. as a civilian, i can only again humbly say how much i appreciate

and admire what you do for our nation. thank you for that great privilege. let me now talk about a little bit where we stand with the defense budget. the thrust of my comments is i think the administration is generally on the right track in looking for defense savings in the range of $400 billion to $500 billion over a decade. and just for those who are not following this debate in quite as much excruciating detail as some of us who live inside the beltway, let me me remind you that those reductions are in addition to the major savings expected as we are drawing down our forces from the wars. we're essentially out of iraq and we are beginning the downsizing in afghanistan. that will be a slow process, and i think there's a good chance we'll keep 10,000 to 20,000 u.s. forces in afghanistan even after 2014. but in any event, the draw down has begun and we're down to about 90,000 u.s. troops after being at 100,000 last year and we are down to virtually zero in

iraq after being as high as 170,000. so we're getting savings from all that and in addition, we're looking at close to a half trillion dollars in savings as a result of the administration's new budget, which actually is really a result of law the congress drove last august budget control act required as a down payment on deficit reduction that we have cuts of that magnitude. as you know, we may get to this in discussion, the possibility of se quest ration could double those cuts. could add another $500 billion to the existing plan for reductions. and in fact, current law requires it. sequestration meaning sort of an automatic cut in the defense spending levels is already the law of the land. it sort of happened accidentally or i could say inadvertently not in a desired fashion. it is currently the law of the land. there have we have to worry for

those of us who thinks it goes too far that it may still happen. the administration's budget and strategy that's being unvalid right now does not however presume sequestration. there's a little bit of an oxy moron in a sense. the administration and the president signed a law which now as the result of the failure of last fall's supercommittee mandates sequestration and yet the administration is not planning on that sequestration as a matter of current policy. or as a matter of its current budget submission to the congress that comes forth next month. it's a little confusing for those of you who aren't following it in detail. it's worth pointing out we're living in an ambiguous world. we don't really know where things are headed. what i want to do briefly today, is explain why i think the initial cuts the $400 to $500 billion in cuts the administration is assuming and supporting are a good idea. why sequestration would however be a bad idea. but the big thing i want to

emphasize is the administration i think has not gone quite far enough in finding those savings. and this is the main critical point i want to make today in the spirit of provoking conversation, maybe it can involve some of your discussion with undersecretary, i think it's going to be on the minds of lawmakers and presidential candidates for the next few months. the administration has done, i believe, is to essentially understate the way all administrations do. the real cost of its current defense program. so when it call indicates savings it's doing so for from an unrealistic vantage point. we're not making deep enough cuts to accomplish the budget targets that are in law. what this means if i'm right and i've done my own independent calculation and i don't claim to have done perfectly accurately, but i try to use the best i learned in those graduate school days with then major petraeus

when we were taking courses together. and then where i went on next was the congressional budget office. i tried to show these calculation in my book called the wounded giant. i found you have to go deeper and make more significant cut backs to achieve the goals in the budget control act even without sequestration. you might say why bother make such a fuss about an accounting difference? the reason is right now the nation is willing to rethink this question of defense strategy. we've got a lot of people focused on it. we should make good use of this moment. the problem is if you make cuts piecemeal after the fact year after year after year you mind up doing it in a somewhat less strategic way. i think the administration has generally done a very good job with its new thinking. there are a couple of areas that i think it might need to go further. i want to lay out a couple of those. i know we don't have too much time. i want to have most of the

conversation with you in the remaining 20, 25 minutes in this session. let me lay out a couple of ideas that i think should be more central in administration strategy. i'm going to finish with one near and dear to your hearts the role of the reserve component especially in planning for possible future ground wars tom tee up where i'm going to go with that. as many of you know the administration has proposed that we no longer need to be ready for two simultaneous ground wars. that would be a change that has not previously be been seen in 60 years of american defense policy. ever since korea we have been planning for at least two grounds wars at a time. in the cold war it was typically big war in europe against the soviet block and then another war somewhere in asia. be it korea, china, vietnam, maybe something else. since the cold war ended, we typically focused on north korea and iraq. north korea remains a problem.

iraq is still a problem in other ways. but i would submit that things have changed enough in iraq and in the broader middle east that the administration is correct to change our basic construct from two simultaneous land wars to one plus the ability to ramp up quickly and do a holding action in a second place if need be. but i'm not sure they've gone quite far enough in how they changed the structure of the army or marine corp. as a result. i want to talk about the navy to begin. you can consider this equal opportunity or sort of equal unkindness on my part towards each service i'm going to go and be broad based. the navy an amazing service like all four of our military services doing amazing things around the world. however, escaped sort of unscathed in this budget process, frankly. the aircraft carrier fleet is supposed to stay at 11. the only changes to navy shipbuilding programs are pretty much just some delays in things

like submarine building. nothing major in terms of any program being fundamentally rethought. and i'm -- i'm a little worried that this is not really being provocative enough. i think the navy actually has one big idea at least that it should consider. i know a lot of you have thought about this and can give me maybe many reasons why it's hard. i've been talking a lot to navy people. i understand why it's hard. i still think it's time for sea swap. what sea swap means is that two crews share a given ship on foreign deployment. in other words, up until now as you all know and many of you have been involved one way or another in this the navy has always kept one crew with one ship. that crew is essentially formed at the beginning of a tour, a two or three-year tour of the various sailors. it trains up in american waters. starts doing longer training missions maybe to south america for drug related thing or somewhere off the coast of north america and then finally it sets

off on a six-month deployment typically to the persian gulf or the western pacific or in the old days more the mediterranean. and then it comes back so that sailors are never away from their home port more than six months at a time. that's the way the navy likes to operate. unfortunately i think this wastes a lot of time in transit. i know sometimes the ocean transits are used for good purposes. we do exercises with allies et cetera. but for the most part it's a lot of steaming time that's fairly unproductive. when you do the math, this is not my princeton math, this the navy math, the navy needs five or six ships in the fleet to keep one on station. that's not a ratio that we should be tolerating. it's not a ratio that's good enough for the fiscal times in which we live. we're deploying billion dollar warships all over the world with this fairly inefficient way of using them. and i think it's time to stop wasting that month in transit each way and at least for

surface combatants. i'm not proposing this for the aircraft fleet with 5,000 people. for the surface combatants with typically 300 people on the ship. i think it's time we start flying the crew which has trained on one ship in u.s. waters to meet up with the ship over in japan or somewhere else on the other side of the world and the crews swap. you may have a small residual crew that stays on to help with the transition. if you look at the analysis of the navy think tanks that gives you 35% more mission deemployablity per ship. that's the kind of idea we need to consider in these time of fiscal times. like the title of my book says, we are a wounded giant right now. the world still needs us to be a leader. it needs us to be the leader. for all the talk of china it cannot lead a multinational coalition or alliance system. we have 60, 65 allies in the world that like to work with us.

the chinese have basically north korea. there's a reason for this. for all of our wars, all of our failings we have an open political system and we have decades of experience working with our allies. even when they disagree with us, as they often do, they feel that they can disagree in an open transparent way. they understand our motives and they basically trust our intentions. i hope the chinese will get there. i'm a big believer in hopeful person about the chinese trajectory as well just like atd min straiter bolen but they're not there yet. nobody else can sustain the prosperity except for the united states. we're abwounded giant. we have to get better. we have to reduce our deficit. defense needs to play a role. we've got to seize this moment and think of clever creative ways for the pentagon to contribute. another idea, i'm conscious of the time, i'm going to go quickly with apologies if i'm going too quickly with these ideas, you can come after me in

discussion. i'll give you one more thought ant the national guard reserve component issue in the two war capability question that i mentioned before. let me talk a little bit about nuclear forces. nuclear forces are still very important to american security. i think we have to be careful about keeping our arsenal reliable, safe, dependable, and also on parity with russia. i don't think the united states and russia are going to be adversaries. i don't think we need to worry too much about the details of our single integrated operational plan. our big war plan for fighting the russians, i don't think the details matter very much. i do think we want to avoid giving mr. putin and any other russian nationalists who might look to nuclear forces to revitalize their greater sense of a greater russia. we want to avoid giving them any in any event or suggestion that we are conceding to them this trapping of superpowerdom.

i'm not suggesting we get in their face and expand nato. i do bloef on nuclear forces we need to be careful about not drawing down unilaterally and we need the arsenal to be safe and reliable. however, if you mandate or premise those basic qualities in the nuclear arsenal you can save a lot of money, i believe by doing some things differently. i don't think it matters that much each and every detail of our war fighting plan, of our integrated operational plan. we can be a little more relaxed than we used to be. for example, instead of sailing 14 try dent submarines with ballistic mys and distributing the allowable warheads you should the new star treaty across the 14 platforms i would reduce down to eight ships ef they have the capacity. they were designed to carry enough warheads to meet our new warhead ceils. even with eight ships. that's an example of how we could save some money. we could do that and reduce the

icbm force in half. frankly, we could have a good debate about eliminating the icbm force. i'm not sure we could do it. it's the kind of debate we should be having. the obama budget and strategy documents are a little bit careful on this issue, however. i understand why they're careful. they're responsible for the nation's security in a time of war. they're also embarking on a presidential campaign where the republicans are criticizing them for more limited cut backs being proposed. nonetheless, it's a moment when i think we need to shake things up a little. if we don't get deficit in shape we're not going to be the global dominant power in ten or 20 years whether we want to be or not. let me come back to the whole issue of the two war versus one war capability. again i'm talking about land wars. i do think that we need simultaneous crisis response capability for both the persian gulf and the western pacific in terms of maritime and air threats. most of our concerns in those two regions are now centered

around iran and the persian gulf on the one hand with china and the western pacific on the other. they are not primarily scenarios with ground combat. the threats have shifted a little bit. which is part of why i'm in favor of shifting ourselves from a to two land one capability to a one land war capability. however, if you're going to do the one land war, i admit you have to be pretty darn careful to make sure you have enough capability to do it right. you can no longer rely on the second package to beef up your first mission if things go wrong. you'd better give yourself some added margin of assurance and assume you're in smaller operations around the world.

we may need to be stablization missions. i can middle age scenarios where we stay in afghanistan with 10,000 or 20,000 u.s. troops until 2020. i could scenarios where we wind up like it or not in syria with a nato-arab league coalition trying to defend the innocent civilians from president assad is slaughtering in increasing number. i could imagine a mission in emyemen for a somewhat splar purpose. the basic notion that we can somehow dismiss the possibility of difficult counterinsurgency operations because we're tired of it and it's no longer the flavor of the month in national security debates is a trend we have to be careful about. i'm not suggesting we jump on the bandwagon and declare the era of land warfare over. i'm talking about a more marginal shift. so even if we go from two land wars to one land war at a time, we need to do several additional

things. i'm ticking them off to quickly finish and then look forward to your questions. one, we have to have the simultaneous capability for smaller missions that i just mentioned that would typically be part of coalitions. typically more in the spirit of stablization operations, not major ground wars per se. we'd better assume they could occur. and in fact i favor what i call a one plus two framework for sizing the ground forces. one all out war. two prolonged multinational stablization missions. i admit it's somewhat arbitrary to say two as opposed to one or three. but nonetheless based on recent history it seems a prudent basis for forced planning. i think each one of these stablization missions could involve several american brigades over a very extended period of time. we've all learned the hard way many of you have learned the hardaway or had to maybe deal with the fact the rest of us

didn't anticipate well enough that these missions in places like iraq and afghanistan take a long time to finish once they get going. we need a total force capability to handle several brigades of deployment for a long time. while we're also capable of handling that one big war for example on the korean peninsula. so caveat number one, condition number one be ready for other missions. condition number two, you'd better be able to ramp up fast. if one war begins an all out war, you've got to start to ramp up the rest of your force right away. you don't wait and hope for the best. you start to ramp up your capability so no other would be aggressor around the world sees an opportunity at that moment. what that means is you mobilize part of the national guard's combat brigade capability. other aspects of the reserve component might be quickly mobilized really on a preventive basis. not because there's any other

acute concern bau because you want to send a message. then you start increasing the size of the active army and marine corp. at that moment. if you do those things, i think we can do to a somewhat smaller army and marine corp. than the obama administration is intending. they're saying we could go to 148,000 soldiers. i think these numbers are at one level reasonable. but they're a little bit too high for what i thought necessary to meet the budget targets and they're higher than i think we really need to be if we make proper use of the reserve component while recognizing that more of our threats have shifted to the maritime domain to the persian gulf and the western pacific. not quite as much to the sands of mesopotamia because for better or worse however iraq now develops in the future, iraq and other major countries in the mideast are unlikely to drag us into large ground wars. i think that by making greater

use however of the institutions that you represent and have served within and embody and can tell us so much about, i think we can actually make a little greater use of this asset in the way that director petraeus was discussing that we've learned how we can do many the last decade. and really shape a total force package with a little greater reliance on the reserve component than we have so far. i think the army, the active army would wind up at 450,000. the active marine corp. at 160,000. those would be reasonable numbers as long as we recognize the asset in you. i don't want to push the argument too far. we need to do this in a careful way. i think looking at the full range of threats to the country including the threat of the debt that it makes sense to try to use the portfolio of active reserve in a way that favors the reserve component a little more

than we have so far. with that, i'll look forward to your comments and questions. thank you. [ applause ] >> typically provocative. >> thank you. >> again, please if you have questions pass them into the center of the aisle. our sergeant in arms will collect them and they'll hand them up to me. i see a stack already building. i'll kick things off. this may be down in the weeds a little bit. you already picked on the navy a little bit. why do we need big carriers with 5,000 people when we're currently embarked on the most expensive koefs acquisition program with the f-35? and the short takeoff and vertical landing capability of the f-35 b is