either it hasn't been a consensus strategy, but it's changing so quickly the budgets can't keep up. overlayed with the budget driven decisions by the white house. that would be the thing that should happen. unless you're having a sweep of congress and the white house, it wouldn't. i agree that that would be the right thing to do. >> tom? >> robert kennedy once commented that americans are not well informed but highly entertained. and i think one reason we're here now is to help the process of getting americans well informed. and what they need to be informed about is through some mechanism or another this whole process has got to be at the very minimum, delayed long enough to make it informed. right now it's not. it has the automatic dimension that goes into it. what you would like to see in a

facetious way is i think every republican on the hill ought to walk around with a red lapel pin with a blue 20 in it and every democrat should have a blue lapel pin with a red 20 in it. 20 is the percent of gdp we have to get to in federal expenditures and revenue. we are at 15% on revenue, which is an all time low, since we have been keeping reliable records. that gap is quite clearly unsustainable. so at some point there has to be a serious informed realistic discussion about what the options are that are going to move you back in the direction of the new number 20.

i haven't seen that yet. i haven't seen indication that people are willing to get there. if you begin to focus on the problem, then one of the first steps you're going to have to take is take a deep breath. the senator was very clear about it. get the move back to where we can deal with it in a constructive and not destructive manner. i tried to lay out the paralysis that will hit the government and the defense side of it. when i was here with mike as the army federal executive fellow back -- i won't say how long ago. but i did a report on the planning and budgeting process with the intent of going to gather best practices from other agencies of government and

applying those to how the defense department does it. known does this as well as the defense department. he said, you know, i only got to deal with three things, people, telephone and buildings. and i have a hard time coordinating and laying that out. it's a complicated thing. we have to recognize that the objective is long-term objective. it's going to be an informed decision on both side of the equation. we have to move without penal e penalizing ourselves severely in the long term. if we are forcing them to have to reconsider, renegotiate,

reevaluate 40,000 contracts, the only thing that will come out of this is positive employment for at least one generation of lawyers. talking to dino alvarez a while ago, the a-12 story that has gone on for the better part of 20 years should be somewhat constructive. >> all right. there's been so much positive news from the panel. i want to open it up to the floor here for questions. i think we have a question right here. >> thinking about the long-term object objective is there something that would be in terms of moving

beyond the structure, something that would rejigger the way we have our forces postured around the world. is there something we can do in the management side? move past long-term budgeting, work on the programs, two side that helped make it more agile and nimble. heaven forbid, sequestration is on the horizon again. something is prepared to move. >> can i try that one first? >> sure. rebecca is much more in tune to the contemporary thoughts on strategy, particularly as it pertains to air power. i've got my own views about that. of course, i'm the army guy up here. let's set those aside for now. there's a couple of things we have to come to grips with in a

serious way. what we're seeing now is an accumulation of effects over a lot of discreet decisions and policies that have just built up to where we are. one of the tax exceptions is eliminating the home mortgage exclusion. that affects 67% of american households. it's a big thing. what we have to start encouraging now are outcomes on a more much holistic way than we have done over the course of the time. we're quite reactive. there are those that think we rush up to the army and say my goodness, we were in the lab the other day and we came up with

this thing here. and it walks, it flies. it will leap overal buildings. the army comes and says here is what we would like to have. by the time we cost it out, they think, my gosh, i never naught it would cost that. it was said we would much rather have the united states navy of today with 284 ships than the one in 1950. they talk about the expense that has accumulated over that for a long time. i'll plead guilty. i'm an army retiree. i made the decision a year ago to drop my company's but it's a

rational decision on my part, which is taking advantage of how they exist. we have a voluntary armed force. we have a much more capital intensive force than we've ever had. we're never going to mobilize like we did for korea, where we wind up bringing 3 million people on board. that's not going to happen. even though the budget has gone up 60%. we've only gone up 2% in military manpower. the navy and air force went down. we have 8% fewer airplanes. we have 8% fewer ships. it's a capitol intensive service. that's the way it is. take a deep step back. take a look at what we need to do and how we need to do it.

find every way we possibly can to apply technology to it as opposed to manpower. just one small thing. you're seeing it right now. it's in the language now. my son, who is an english professor at northwestern knows the words. he's an english professor and could care less about what goes on in the military for the most part. but we're at a point there should never again be another john mccain story. we have the technology. we can do this. and we're going to have to make a decision to move forward in a cost-effective way. >> i can't resist. i mean, my frustration with the discussions on sequestration and the turning the volume up to 11 on the national security implications. as all of the senior leaders that speak with urgency on that don't speak with the same amount of urgency on the fact the

defense budget is being eaten from within. regardless of what happens to the budget, whether it goes sharply up, stays flat. until you deal with the fact of the escalating costs and personnel and the lack of reform, you end up in the same place by a matter of a couple of years. around 2030, 2035, that's it that the pentagon is paying for. nothing else. and yet, how did we deal with them? we have sequestration discussions, and yet, what happened? we decided to potentially create a commission with no power. dealing with the escalating health care costs, catching up a personnel system designed in the

1940s. it doesn't match the needs. it was mentioned acquisitions in terms the shiftn industr has been towards services. we had no significant reform the pentagon sibd to find services smart and better. that's the real part of the equation that meets the volume rates. and that's the solution of maintaining our national security strength. rather than just these numbers. so let's give someone else a chance to ask a question. >> those people in the pentagon need to have a more open mind. peter is absolutely right. back 20 years ago we were doing a study on the military establishment. i was on the officer in the program staff in the army. and it was obvious to my little group that this was going to

this be a cost-driver that was going to really hurt us in the future. no one could see it at the time because the costs were not obvious if you just looked at the first layer. we were taking out doctors. costs are going up. i came out with a radical idea. i just read about it. i didn't know anything about this. i read about it in the newspaper. a lot of places do the thing called a co-pay. i propose, why don't we set it up so when a soldier takes his daughter, because she's got a small cold, to the clinic, and he's generally gone all day. and let's just have a little $2 copay, which will make him do the rational decision about do i spend all day doing this, or do i take my $2 and go by the drugstore and get some aspirin and go to bed? you would have thought that i was -- i mean, i thought i was going to be court-martialed.

how can you probably believe that a soldier ought to pay $2 to see a doctor? it's a radical idea, but other people do it. the military is an isolated group. it really has to be brought forward, less isolated, and more consistent with how practices go on in other places where you're not seeing the personnel numbers. nationally you're not seeing this increase. so we have to separate them. >> there's no sexier topic than military health care. you focused on active duty troops. the reality is most of the cost is on the other side. studies found the lowest per capita users is active duty.

the form suit call costs have gone up by 500%. mail order is more convenient. it comes to your home. there's a lot of smart things that could be on the table that aren't because of, i would argueer, a lack of leadership and unwillingness for political pain. let's go to something far less sexy than military health care. other questions. right here. >> hi, there. nick iquinto with the american students of contemporary studies. so i heard a lot of focus on the domestic impressions of the sequestration, but coming from my perspective we had leaders and strategists come to our institute last week, and there was some concern about funding

in context of the european partnership and the transatlantic partnership. and they referenced a lot of the demil demille -- in the meanwhile. we have the united states saying we can't spend all that money. and that's in kind of the sense of the asupgss that on one hand, we can't do the sequestration. on the other happened, we heed to cut the defense to some extent. so what would you say the repercussions are for the transatlantic partnership and international security cooperation? >> i'll take that one. as you know, some of our key allies, i'm thinking particularly of britain and the uk, have already been through a fairly renching process of cuts. i spent some time last week with a group of 12, one and two stars

from various international air forces, and all of them, nearly all of them, were deep into a series of cuts. and one fellow said, i think it's really key, that this is no time to turn our backs on each other. he meant it as a group of airmen, that being the context. and sequestration is hard. one thing that i think would be cut pretty quickly are the partnership and cooperation activities. i think of exercises. all the services the marine and army do. all the exercises with international partners on a regular basis. i would expect to see that go away. that would be a real loss. those are things that have great value and help bond the coalitions that we all now rely on. it would be hard to see that go away. that would be a source of tension. there are probably larger issues in the transatlantic dialogue. but the budget thing is there really on both sides.

so we'll all be working through that, almost regardless of the direction of sequestration. good question. >> okay, we have time for one last question if anyone would like to ask it. so with that, we want to offer each of you the opportunity for closing remarks. i want to emphasize the need for strategy sources. the number one thing we should not do is chase after tilted windmills and chase after the things -- go on a child goose chase essentially. let's not cut programs because we heard of them. we need the f-35. we need the big programs. yes, they're big dollars. yes, we all know what they are. but cutting those alone are not the solutions that we're looking for.

we have to come to grips with the larger issues. but let's note get distracted looking for the one magic thing to solve it. >> i would similarly echo that and say the defense capabilities an budget cuts have been under way for three years. the budget control act is not the first round of the cuts. so that makes it harder. and all the the cuts that will come after it if it doesn't happen. killed or delayed major programs. extended the period over which we bought them. and 240 major and minor ones.

sow so you kill programs, it's a big win. then the next year started more programs. you can show immediate savings. but when it comes to termination costs and everything else, the number falls slightly. his own chairman saying we got to cut down the budget. the first year he said we're going to save $100 billion. you name it. it's a much bigger enterprise. the fishefficiency drills conti into 2012 as well. unclear what it meant for 2012. just that they had to reach the change.

so today you can say we're going to cut the 30 major programs left. i agree. you can't pull a string here and pull a string here and pull a string here. that's the kind of defense reform or cuts that have been under way. it's going to take a whole enterprise wide effort. and it sounds so easy to say it's a think tank. but it's generally true. you can't do it the last year of any sequestration. it needs to start next year. you need a secretary of either party who has time to do this, to learn up, to figure out how to tackle it at once. the d.o.t. worked for us, which is entirely too large and in need of review. pretty quickly, military

compensation, not just tricare, the entire whole thing. it requires a new system for a new group of people probably dual tracked in the future. it's not easy to do. but it can be done. it's going to sieve you money or hurt national security. it's not sexy. that's the problem. everyone wants the program kills. the kinds of things that have to happen now are the slow, bureaucratic, boring things, behind the scenes, over multiple years of leadership at the secretary of defense level. >> i'm just going to take this here.

it was 5 # years ago last january that dwight eisenhower delivered his farewell address from the oval office. i got wonderful insight to it. he gave me a few thoughts on crafting the thing. his old colleague at the heritage foundation describes the speech as one cited and seldom read. it coins the phrase military industrial complex. and there is this enduring image that the industry i'm representing is a small thing with long assembly lines. in fact, it's not at all what we are. when dwight eisenhower gave the speech, the defense industry was the largest manufacturing industry in the country. it was larger than cars.

it was larger than oil and gas. it met an immediate need that was quite stark and challenging. and he references that right now are the top five of us in the defense industry. the top tier companies. combined annual income is half that of exxon. it's also half of wal-mart. if we have a complex, it exists in some other sector. david burteau did a study that since the defense consolidation and downturn of 1991, 150 companies have left the industry. either through consolidation or the outright exit. this is a rather tightly compact, very efficient business right now.

norm augustine likes to say, and he was an architect in the 1990 period that we have gone from having a large number of unhealthy companies to a small number of healthy companies. is approach to the defense budget, the defense establishment. and the defense industry that secretary carter called the sixth leg of service. this is the circumstance that we're in. they have to have a serious calculated plan and approach to it. and that is not sequestration. the room for error in the defense industry is actually much smaller than many people a few years ago would have told you.

despite a real diversity in the folks on the panel, there's been a fair amount of consensus around a couple of core points. the main one being the insanity of the predictment that we have placed ourselves into. placed ourselves into in the long term. but also placed ourselves into in the short-term. we may have disagreement on what to do next. that's a big take away. nobody is supporting this meat ax like approach. and the second is the notion that these lean times will force politically painful choices. but not necessarily stjically painful. that's when they call for leadership. leadership, which we heard was lacking in the context, is about two things. leadership is not only about making smart, strategic decisions, but also it's at the essence about making tough choices.

and so it remains to be seen if we'll have that combination. i hope we see the combination emerge in the next few weeks and months. we definitely need the true kind of leadership. and third is the thank you. a thank you to the fellow panelist and those who spoke. it's been a great, in-depth discussion of an important topic. please join me in applause.

jamesman james mann, author of the obamians. the event is hosted in washington, d.c. james mann, former correspondent for the los angeles times is author in residence at john hopkins school of advanced studies. we'll have the remarks live at 7:00 p.m. eastern on our website.

booktv.org. july 7th and 8th, book tv and american history tv explore the heritage and literary culture of missouri state capitol, jefferson city, with c-span's local content vehicle and booktv on the campus of lincoln university. this is probably our most famous book. this is the one we like to show to visitors. and this is a book about heir yet tubman. called heir yet, the meses of her people. this book was written in 1866. the special thing about this book is that harriet tubmanma me her mark on there, and that's really the most famous autograph, if you want to call it that, of what we have here in page library. she could read or write. so she left her mark, the sign

of the cross. >> watch for book tv and american history tv in jefferson city, missouri, july 7th and 8th on c-span 2, missouri. >> i could have told you here's how it would run. and the republicans would look infeebled. there would be a nominee. the republicans would rally around the nominee. the true nature of the race would reveal itself. which is it's going to be close. i thought the media would eat that up. obama is surging. this is a race. and i'll tell you what the next phase is going to be. the next phase is going to be the media will become more alert to the fact that