the testimony, you have to have everybody want to be at the table to actually then put the workshop together and develop it. so there have been various states of interest and organization that have been required to put these together. that's why these others are still evolving. what we've been able to do is kind of develop now a pretty standard protocol as a basis for the uniqueness of each region and we're using that protocol. it includes everything from getting together to talking about within a region who are the federal and state and local entities that need to be engaged, who would you call if you started to have debris, what would they be looking for, what are some of the specific issues, how are we going to look to make sure we have radiation under control, if there's hazmat, how are we going to make sure we get the coast guard and state folks and all of that is part of a package we develop. it's just been a little slower to evolve getting all the appropriate parties at the table in some of those states. >> is there recognition in these

states, i mean, across the board about the potential, the magnitude of this problem? does it vary? >> i think it varies a little. but, again, you know, i don't do this day to day so, i would defer. but certainly we know that alaska and washington in particular are very interested. we know that. others know they're within the realm of potential impact. but washington and oregon -- i mean washington and alaska we know very -- and hawaii, for that matter, we know very clearly they have interest. >> thank you. . >> senator cantwell. >> thank you, mr. chairman. this is the chart that we'd gotten from the university of hawaii and shows the migration of millions of tons of tsunami trash basically making a trajectory right towards the west coast. and you can see by the size of the marine debris field that

we're talking about large-scale debris. so when you say noaa is looking and you don't see anything and you're working with partners, this is what your partners are coming up with. so i hope that after today we can get the information, get it to these partners, and come up with, again, some assessments about really what we're doing because when our constituents see this, when they go online and they see this, they're very concerned. which brings up one very basic point, which is we have, you know -- we have wanted mr. chairman, one of our local communities, mayors to be here, but i think because of the scheduling of the committee couldn't accommodate a second panel. but one of the things is they want to know -- 911 operators want to know what to tell people when they're called about this marine debris. so when somebody calls and says,

well, we cioncan, we see personal belongings, we see styrofoam, these local communities have said they've tried to get an answer from noaa about what 911 operators are supposed to tell people. so what are 911 operators supposed to tell people? >> i can't give you specifically what they're supposed to say, but that's been part of the discussion as we've worked on this issue in most of the states. it's certainly part of the discussion that has been many the contingency plan development. we obviously need to educate people better, but i think that's been part of what has been covered. so i can't give you the specifics, and we'll certainly get you something for the record and make sure it's -- but, you know, we're working with the local responders on this. by the way, university of hawaii is one of the consortium of modeling organizations that's working with us on the model that we are updating every two weeks. and did we get one of these

around to you folks? okay. so i don't think we have competing models. i think we have tried to make sure that we've gotten anybody that's involved in this and has expertise at the table to develop this model, at least as a consultant. so -- >> well, long beach is a very beautiful part of our state, and i wish we had a map of our state right now because you would see that it's the very exposed part on the coast of our state, a very large tourism area, and the fact that the mayor is trying to get answers is very important. i want to get to something else. i know we're out of time, mr. chairman, but another aspect of this concern is obviously our migratory fish that -- the tuna, the salmon. these are a great part of our ocean species that migrate and oftentimes they migrate along these paths of debris. so what do you think the risks are there to our tuna and salmon

populations? >> i think you've stumped me. my fisheries colleagues probably need to answer that question for you. you know, i'm a little bit familiar with the issue. i've not heard it in the context of our deliberations on the tsunami debris and what the potential for impacts are there. so -- >> i think just with -- i think just with what happened with deep water horizon, people wanted the answers about what the impacts were going to be on those fisheries there. so, again, something that we hopefully will get an answer later for the record and we would appreciate it. again, we just want an assessment if that kind of debris field is going through and there are migratory pattern where is these species do follow these kind of debris fields, then what are some of the risks associated with it. so thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you all very much. first, admiral, thank you for your attendance, and i know some

of us will have some more records -- or questions for the record. i think we'll keep it open for ten days for folks to submit questions. mr. kennedy, also thank you. i know you probably feel like you've been on the hot seat. we hope you did feel that way. so, you know, there's a lot of concern. i know you care because you were one of the originators of the debris program within noaa and i know you understand it and you probably -- my guess is -- i'll put words in your mouth without yao saying them, but i'm sure you would like more resources to do more and there were more opportunities. there's a huge demand, and this may be an opportunity to highlight what the needs are for the component of what you're doing within noaa. second, you made a comment, and i want to take you up on that offer, and that is the issue of the low, the medium, the high risk analysis. you know, this is -- probably every quarter i'm probably going

to ask the same question until we get an answer. my hope is that's not at a point where we're looking at these photos enlarged because the amount of stuff has really piled up. soy hope you can get the administration to respond on that issue. and then the last is recognizing that noaa has a certain role, but i know in this situation maybe it's a reanalysis of how noaa responds to these issues. and maybe it is a more -- larger allocation to these ngos that are doing incredible work and have been for years on cleaning up the beaches and so forth. but now we're in a different ball game and we'll be in it for, as that one diagram shows there, many years. and maybe noaa needs to rethink how they're approaching debris not just monitoring and reporting but a more active role because we have now a stream that's not just incidental, it's significant. so i hope you take that back. but, again, the record will be kept open for ten days for additional questions.

and i have a feeling we'll continue to have great discussion about debris. thank you all very much. the hearing is closed. ? thank you.

the u.s. house will be spending the afternoon on defense department programs and policy for next fiscal year. more than 140 amendments may be considered. the house will also vote on extending the national flood insurance program through june. that's the 17th time it's been extended while negotiations continue over a long-term solution. the senate will vote today on filling the remaining two vacant positions on the federal reserve board. senators will then return to debate on food and drug administration user fees. the senate is live on c-span2. the house, when they come in, on c-span. to learn more about micks of congress, c-span's congressional distri directory is available. it's a complete guide to the 112th congress. pick up a copy for $12.95 plus

shipping and handling. order online at c-span.org/shop. when immigrants start to show up in significant numbers, which is somewhat the case in the 1820s and 1830s but really very much the case in the 1840s and afterwards, they're showing up into a political environment in which they're already qualified to vote as soon as they become citizens. this is just to give you a sense of the kind of politics we're talking about. this is an image from "harper's weekly" in 1858 just after election time. it shows the saloon and a polling place. if you wanted to vote, you could see the doorway all in the way in the back, you had to go in there to vote. >> this week on "lectures in history," from muncie, indiana, ball state university professor james connolly examines immigration, voting, and the rooltds of pluralism in the united states saturday night at 8:00 eastern, part of american history tv this weekend on c-span3.

national security adviser tom donegan joins president obama today at the daily briefing. president obama meets with leaders of the g-8 industrial nations this weekend at camp david. president obama chairs the meeting this year. we'll have live coverage of the white house briefing at 2:00 eastern. after the g-8 meeting this weekend, president obama flies to chicago to meet with nato members starting on sunday. it's a two-day meeting of the 28-country military alliance. a discussion now on some of the challenges facing nato in light of budget cuts by u.s. and several other member countries. speakers include vice president biden's deputy national security advisor juliana smith. the conference was held at george with with university in washington, d.c. this portion is just over an hour. >> okay. welcome back. this is the final panel of the

day on smart defense. those of you who were here from the beginning of the morning, you'll know that my name is ian davis and i'm the director of nato watch. in chicago, the heads of state and governments are likely to approve, so we're led to believe, more than 20 joint projects to share costs of military hardware and to promote what is being defined as a new mind-set in weapons buying known as smart defense. they're also expected to announce a collective forces initiative with measures designed to sustain and increase the links between the armed forces of different nato nations. and together these two initiatives are expected to lay the foundations for nato's future forces to 2020. now, most of this has been, you know, quite heavily signposted in advance over the last 12

months. and i think someone mentioned in the previous session regarding counterterrorism much of it is not new. for those of us who have worked on some of those issues for the last 20 years made attempts at increasing the interoperability and common procurement within europe go back at least to the 1980s and the work of the now-defunct western european union. clearly, there's a new impetus to this debate brought about by a rise in defense costs and falling defense budgets. but what really fascinates me on this particular issue, really, is the dominant underlying narrative in which this debate takes place. and in some it's about, you know, europe does not pull its weight in the alliance and that european nato is heavily subsidized by the united states. in my view, this is a rather simplified and distorted view not only of the nato budgetary

process and of how the public good of securities shared, funded, and measured in an alliance. nonetheless, having said that, over the years there have been many colorful warnings described as a capabilities gap and the unequal burden share. in a number of speeches last year, the outgoing u.s. secretary of defense, robert gates, probably did the most to revive this debate. for me, i rather like one of the latest comments that sir robert caplan referred to in an article last week. he cited a u.s. air force planner who was obviously xleerly exasperated by the shortfalls in key european capabilities during the libya intervention, and he described nato as like snow-white and the 27 dwarfs. so the billion-dollar question is this -- can the smart defense approach achieve a pooling of resources and integration of

transatlantic but especially european military procurement to ensure that the alliance retains needed capabilities even at a time when the allies are making deep defense cuts? or to put it into the language of that u.s. air force officer, will those european dwarfs be whistling while they work, in tune on the same song sheet, will they be taking on a larger share of the burden of keeping snow-white safe from the clutches of her mean al qaeda-affiliated stepmother, and will we all be ensured a fairy-tale ending which essentially means more security for smaller defense budgets? to answer these tricky questions, we have a very talented panel. for the benefit, because we're on c-span, i'm going to just give a brief resume of the four

speakers we have. we have julius smith, who's just become deputy national security advisor to vice president biden. she previously served for three years as principal director for europe and nato policy at the pentagon. prior to joining the administration, she was director of the european program at the center for strategic and ernl st international studies. and i have to say before that, she was with basic. so as a former basic person, there's still time for me to invite you to the ball, i hope. next to me on my left is the managing director of the center for transatlantic relations at johns hopkins university. previously, he was hungarian ambassador to the united states. and before that, the first hungarian represented on the nato council. he was a negotiator on the delegation preparing hungary's

membership of nato. to my immediate right is john pfeffer, who is co-director of foreign policy and focus at the institute for policy studies. he's also a 2012 open society fellow looking at the transformation atransfor ma transformati transformations across eastern europe. he has also been a writing fellow at the provisions library in washington, d.c., and a fellow at in korean studies at stanford university. mariusz f.d.mikilus is president of strategy international based in greece. he is a nato specialist who is a former visiting scholar at the center for transatlantic relations. currently a research fellow at the george washington business school and the e.u. center of excellence in washington, d.c. he has a book coming out on nato's security future in greece. i think just from their resumes you can see they've each got a lot to offer on this particular top

topic. i'll be asking them to speak for 10 to 12 minutes, and i shall be playing the role of the wicked witch if they look like they're going over time. julie, start with you, please. >> great. thank you very much. thank you for the invitation. it's good to see some old friends and faces, particularly from basic. so we all know that the defense budgets of allies inside the nato alliance have been an ongoing challenge for the alliance. and not just in terms of what allies spend. i think it's also been a question of how allies spend the budgets that they have in hand. and this has become increasingly worse over the last couple of years for a couple of reasons, most notably the financial crisis, which all of the 28 members of the alliance are grappling with and turning to their defense budgets for some possible relief, including cults that are coming here in the united states. but what's changed about the

cuts that we've seen over the last months and recent years is two things. one, the actual size of the cuts that we've been witnessing has changed quite dramatically. in in years past, in decades past, we've seen allies cut you know, somewhere around 5%, 6 p%, say about 10%. this had an impact but not a crushing blow in any way, shape or form, but what's changed is now we're seeing countries cutting upwards of 20%, 25%, and that's where, i think, some really tough choices have to be made by nato member states, and they really are forced to prioritize. sometimes that's very helpful and useful, because there's no question that there are instances where one can find inefficiencies and waste, but when you're talking about a 25% cut in most defense budgets,

particularly those that have already seen cuts in recent years, you really start to feel that collectively inside the alliance in terms of new capability gaps that have been appearing. the second thing that's been happening that's changed a little bit in recent years, vis-a-vis defense budget has been the actual type of the cuts we've seen unfolded on the european continent. traditionally, what would happen when a country was faced with cutting their defense budget is it kind of would skim across the top and take little bits from all the different area, whether rnd, acquisition, personnel. everybody to be affected one way or another. what's happened now is countries have been forced to move forward with what we call not horizontal but vertical cuts. that's where whole capability elements are eliminated entirely. one example cited quite frequently is the dutch decision to eliminate all of their tanks.

all of their armor, and one could argue that, you know, from a dutch national security perspective, maybe that was a decision that was wise, and long overdue, but one has to also ask the question, had there been a conversation in nato among all of the allies to determine whether or not that actual capability might be needed in years ahead. say, looking out over the next decade. and that type of a conversation is not happening. so that's another problem that i would point out is that inside capitals in nato member states, individual members are taking these rather radical decisions in some cases and, again, might seem perfectly reasonable and rational for each of the member states to take those specific decisions like the dutch eliminating armor. or the danes eliminating all

submarines. there's not a commonality what should we be refencing, where do we think we should spend our very limited resources and what guidance could we offer to capitals saying if you have a choice between x and y, we prefer you lean towards x instead of y or vice versa, and this is, again, something that's not occurring and i think will have a long-term impact on the alliance collectively. the other bit of bad news i would say in terms of just sketching out the nature of the problem before i get to what's happening at the summit is that it doesn't seem like the cuts that we're seeing right now whether vert irkal or horizontal or 5% or 20% show any signs of stopping, and so while the u.k. does technically have when it looks at defense planning out into the next decade a reverse bell curve. cuts occur now but they're

planning for a brighter day when they'll be an uptick. one is not entirely sure whether or not that will actually occur, but one could give credit to london for at least thinking that that might be a possibility. unfortunately, most capitals at this point are just kind of on the dramatic downward spiral with no anticipation that that may actually level out at some point, or maybe begin to tick upward. i think the last thing i would say in terms of the nature of the problem is, it's not all bad news when it comes to defense budgets and defense spending inside the nato alliance. one thing i would point out is despite the fact that we've seen these quite dramatic cuts and the financial crisis is putting quite a squeeze on many member states, we are not seeing nations pull out of current operations due to the financial crisis. we have not had any countries step forward and say, we are leaving afghanistan tomorrow

simply because we can't afford it. there are countries that are going to be accelerating their departure, possibly, from afghanistan. some have already opted to leave afghanistan from a combat perspective, but the reasons for that have not been laid out explicitly tied to the financial crisis. so generally speaking, i think with few exceptions we could say that despite the gloomy news on defense spending and the defense budgets, we have seen an environment where operations have not been impacted in a dramatic way. in fact, nato undertook libya and no one came to the table and said, we simply can't afford this right now. what is happening, trying to maintain operations. they have not been able to maintain commitment in modernization or transformation, whatever want to call it. so that's the part of the defense budget that has probably taken the greatest hit.

not the actual operations per se. the question on the table is, as countries come out of afghanistan and we work our way through the transition, what will happen to the resources that were dedicated to those operations, one would hope they might be funneled back into develop capabilities that are lacking or to draw lessons learned, to ensure that those resources are reinvested in a way that helps the alliance long term address some of these capability gaps but, in fact, i think i fear that we will continue to see modernization efforts stalled, and i don't expect we'll see a major uptick in those efforts in the years ahead. so that gets us -- that's kind of a quick burst on the nature of the problem. how we're looking at it, and the question is what can this summit possibly do toll alleviate that situation or help this capabilities challenge that the alliance is facing? and the alliance has come up with, as ian mentioned, this

nato forces 2020 construct, which mirrors a little bit the u.s. joint forces 2020 construct, as the u.s. was undergoing its recent against review and coming up with a defense strategy and the concept is that, you know, the united states as an individual nation and nato collectively as an alliance has to do some long-term thinking about where it wants to be in ten years' time. or say eight years' time and outline the types of missions it envisions undertaking in the futchary and then what capabilities will are required to undertake those missions and try and set kind of some -- some, identify some kind of priority areas for the alliance knowing that most allies simply aren't going to be able to do everything all the time. not every ally in the alliance will be able to be a full spectrum ally. an alley that can do everything from peacekeeping up to high intensely combat and we already have a number of allies that

have reached that point and are starting to specialize and develop niche capabilities. again, if it's not coordinated, you could end up with everybody. like a pot luck dinner. everybody brings sally and you don't have brownies or main course. the question is, how can we better coordinate these efforts? the summit's going to try and start the alliance on a more healthier course to identify some of those priority areas. but it's also going to start first and foremost with delivering on some of the commitments that were made in lisbon. you might remember at the last summit in lisbon, the alliance lodged this lisbon capabilities, critical capabilities commitment where the alliance identified ten priority areas where the alliance would commit itself to enhancing its capabilities in these core areas and it ranged from everything from counteried to ags to missile defense. a long list, of long-standing capability gap, new capability gaps highlighted in afghanistan

and capability gaps that were tied to future challenge, like cyber. and so what we wanted to do in this upcoming summit in chicago is to move forward with that list and ensure that the commitments that were made in lisbon we're following through on those and two of the key milestones there will obviously be missile defense. we can talk about this in the q&a, if you like, the alliance will declare it has met interim capability and secondly, it will be moving forward finally after ian points out, nothing new, but a miracle we finally closed the deal onning a ingags. a long, tragic tale, and a very different effort to get all the 13 nations not only to agree to procure this particular capability, five global hawk, but also to get the alliance at large to support it and maintain it. at 28. not just the 13 that are procuring that particular capability.