university. chatting with marco rubio supporters here. traveling with the c-span bus. defense secretary ashton carter outlined the pentagon's budget request in a speech today, it includes increased spending to counter russian, iranian inpluns in the middle

east and threats of islamic state and north korea. from the economic club in washington, this is an hour. >> we're very honored today to have the 25th secretary of defense as our special guest. ash carter has had a distinguished career in government service and in academic life. very briefly, he became the secretary of defense, the 25th secretary of defense, february of last year. prior to that, he had served as deputy secretary of defense for two years and prior to that had served as undersecretary of defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics. in the clinton administration, he had served for four years as the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. for those services in the defense department to date, he has five times been awarded the distinguished service medal of the department and awarded the defense intelligence medal. in the academic world, he's had a distinguished career, as well.

graduate of yale university majoring in theoretical physics and medieval history. an unusual combination. he won a rode scholarship. taught at oxford for a while. came back and was a research fellow at m.i.t. and a research associate in the brookhaven labs ultimately in 1986 he went to the kennedy school where he ultimately became the head of the bellford center in a chaired professor at the kennedy school. he is the author of 11 or co-author of 11 books and more than 100 scholar articles on subjects like management and technology and national security so it's my pleasure to introduce the 25th secretary of defense, ash carter. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you.

thanks, david. appreciate it. good morning, everyone. appreciate you being here. it's a pleasure for me to be what i understand, david, to be the first secretary of defense to address the economic club of washington. and one of the core tasks for me and one of my core goals in this job has been to build and to rebuild bridges between our wonderful department and the wonderful, innovative, strong american technology and industry community. so i appreciate you returning the favor by giving me the opportunity to be here as what is, of course, the largest institution with the largest budget in america. and it's that budget i'd like to discuss with you this morning. a week from now, president obama will release his administration's budget for fiscal year 2017.

about half of its discretionary portion, that is $582.7 billion to be precise, will be allocated for the department of defense. and today, i'd like to preview with you some of the overarching themes and some of the new investments that we'll be making because the fact is this budget marks a major inflection point for the department of defense. in this budget, we are taking the long view. we have to because even as we fight today's fights, we must also be prepared for the fights that might come ten, 20 or 30 years down the road. last fall's budget deal set the size of our budget. allowing us to focus on the shape, making choices and trade-offs to adjust to a new, strategic era and to seize

opportunities for the future. let me describe the strategic thinking that drove our budget decisions. first of all, it's evident that america is still today the world's foremost leader, partner and underwriter of stability and security in every region across the globe. as we have been since the end of world war ii. and as we fulfill this enduring role, it's also evident that we're entering a new strategic era. context is important here. a few years ago following over a decade when we were focused of necessity on large-scale counter insurgency operations in iraq and afghanistan, d.o.d. began embarking on a major strategy shift to sustain our lead in full spectrum war fighting. while basic elements of our resulting defense strategy remain valid it's also been

abundantly clear to me over the last year the world has not stood still since sen. emergents of isil and the resurgence of russia being just a couple of the examples. this is reflective of a broader strategic transition under way, not unlike those we have seen in history following the end of other major wars. today's security environment is dramatically different than the one we have been engaged in for the last 25 years. and it requires new ways of thinking and new ways of acting. i talked with president obama about this a great deal over the last year. and as a result, we have five in our minds evolving challenges that have driven the focus of the defense department's planning and budgeting this year. two of these challenges reflect a return to great power of competition. first is in europe where we're taking a strong and balanced

approach to deter russian aggression. we haven't had to worry about this for 25 years. while i wish it were otherwise now we do. second is in the asia pacific where chi that's rising and where we're continuing to retain the stability in the region we have underwritten for 70 years and that's allowed so many nations to rise and prosper and win. that's been our presence. third challenge is north korea. a hearty perennial. a threat to both us and to our allies and that's why our forces on the korean peninsula remain ready every single day, today, tomorrow, to as we call it fight tonight. iran is the fourth challenge because while the nuclear deal

was a good deal and doesn't limit us in the defense department in any way, none of its provisions affect us or limit us, we still have to counter iran's malign influence against our friends and allies in the region. especially israel. and challenge number five is our ongoing fight to defeat terrorism and especially isil. most immediately in its parent tumor in iraq and syria. and also, where it is me it is a sizing in africa and elsewhere, all the time we protect all the while we're protecting our homeland and our people. while isil must and will be defeated now, in the longer perspective, we must also take into account in our budget that as destructive power of greater and greater magnitude falls into the hands of smaller and smaller

and more abhorrent groups of people, countering terrorists will likely be a continuing part of the future responsibilities of defense and national security leaders far into the future as i can see. d.o.d. must and will address all five of those challenges as part of its mission to defend our people and defend our country. doing so requires some new thinking on our part, new posture and in some regions and also new and enhanced capabilities. for example, as we confront these five challenges, we'll now have to deal with them across all domains, not just the usual air, land and sea but also particularly in the areas of cyber, space and electronic warfare where our reliance on technology has given us great strengths but also led to vulnerabilities that adversaries are eager to exploit.

key to our approach is being able to deter our most advanced competitors. we must have and be seen to have the ability to impose unacceptable costs on an advanced aggressor that will either dissuade them from taking provocative action or make them deeply regret it if they do. to be clear, the u.s. military will fight very differently in coming years. than we have in iraq and afghanistan or in the rest of the world's recent memory. we will be prepared for a high-end enemy. that's what we call full spectrum. in our budget, our plans, our capabilities and our actions we must demonstrate potential foes that if they start a war we have the capability to win. because the force that can deter conflict must show that it can dominate a conflict. in this context, russia and china are our most stressing

competitors. they have developed and are continuing to advance military systems that seek to threaten our advantages in specific areas and in some cases they're developing weapons and ways of war that seek to achieve objectives rapidly before they hope we can respond. because of this and because of their actions to date, from ukraine to the south china sea, d.o.d. has elevated their importance in our defense planning and budgeting. while we do not desire conflict of any kind with either of these nations, and let me be clear, though they pose some similar defense challenges, they're otherwise very different nations and situations. we also cannot blind ourselves to the actions they appear to choose to pursue. let me now highlight some new investments we are making in this budget to address both near term challenges. i'll start with the near term

challenges. and begin there with our campaign to deliver a lasting defeat to isil. as i said a couple of weeks ago at ft. campbell, kentucky, and in paris a week and a half ago and as i'll reiterate when i meet with my coalition counterparts in brussels next week we must and we will defeat isil. because we're accelerating the campaign, d.o.d. is backing that up and we need to back it up in the budget with a total of $7.5 billion more in 2017, 50% more than in 2016. this will be critical as our updated coalition military campaign plan kicks in. for example, we've recently been hitting isil with so many gps-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets we are starting to run low on the ones that we use against terrorists the most. so we're investing $1.8 billion

in f y-'17 to buy over 45,000 more of them. we're also investing to maintain more of our fourth generation fighter and attack jets than we previously planned including a-10 which is devastating to isil from the air. the budget defers a-10's final retirement until 2022. replacing it with f-35 joint strike fighters on a squadron by squadron basis so we'll always have enough aircraft for today's conflicts. another near term investment in the budget is how we're reinforcing our posture in europe to support nato allies in the face of russia's aggression. in pentagon parlance, this is called the european reassurance initiative and after requesting about $800 million for last year, this yee year we're more than quadrupling it for a total of $3.4 billion in 2017.

that will fund a lot of things, more rotational u.s. forces in europe, more training and xer sidesing with our allies, more prepositioned war fighting gear and infrastructure improvements to support all of this. and when combined with u.s. forces already in and assigned to europe, which are also substantial, all of this together by the end of 2017 will let us rapidly form a highly capable combined arms ground force that can respond across that theater if necessary. as you can imagine, the budget also makes important investments in new technologies. we have to do this to stay ahead of future threats in a changing world as other nations try to catch up with the advantages we have enjoyed for decades in areas like stealth, cyber and space. some of these investments are long term. i'll get to them in a moment. but to help maintain our

advantages now, d.o.d. has an office we don't often talk about but i want to highlight today. it's the strategic capabilities office or sco for short. i was deputy secretary of defense. to help us to reimagine existing d.o.d. and intelligence, community and commercial systems by giving them new roles and game changing capabilities to confound potential enemies. the emphasis here was on repetty of fielding. not ten and 15-year programs. getting stuff in the field quickly. we need to make long-term investments, as well. i'll get to them in a moment but the focus here was to keep up with the pace of the world. i picked a talented physicist, a rode scholar to lead it. sco is incredibly innovated and rapid development and the even rarer virtue of keeping current capabilities viable for as long

as possible. in other words, it tries to build on what we have. smart. so it's good for the troops, it's good for the taxpayers, too. thinking differently in this way as is well-known in u.s. defense history and space, country on the moon, computers in the pockets, information at the fingertips. all that. taking kaairplanes off of the decks of ships, nuclear submarines beneath the sea, satellite networks that take pictures of the world. all those things. this kind of bold and enno investigative thinking can't be lost to history. it's happening now every day not only in sco but in other places throughout the department of defense like the dozens of laboratories and engineering centers all over the country. as we drive this work forward, the budget grows the research and development accounts for the second year in a row. investing a total of $71.4

billion in r&d in 2017. a number that no other institution in the united states or the world comes close to. and to show the return we're getting on those investments i'll tell you about a few projects in the sco. that it's been working on and that are funded in this budget. some of them you may have heard of but my guess is some of you have not and some of them we're talking about the first time here. first one is advanced navigation. taking the same kinds of micro cameras, sensors, so forth littered throughout our smartphones and everything today and putting them on the small diameter bombs to augment the existing target capabilities on the sdv. that is module kilt to work with other payloads enabling off

targeting, small enough to hold in your hand like your phone and cheap enough to own like your phone. another project uses swarming autonomous vehicles in all sorts of ways that in multiple domains. in the air, they develop microdrone that is are really fast, really resist tent. they can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at mach-spoint 9 like they did in alaska last year. or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the iraqi desert. and for the water, they've developed self-driving boats which can network together to do all kinds of missions from fleet to defense to close end surveillance. without putting sailors at risk. each one leverages the wider world of the technology. mic microdrones are actually 3d

printed. and the boths built on some of the same artificial intelligenceal go rhythms that long ago and in a much more primitive form were on the mars lander. they've also got a project on gun based missile defense. where we're taking some of the same hyper velocity smart projectiles we developed for the electromagnetic gun, that's the rail gun and using it for point defense by firing it with artillery we already have in our inventory. including the 5-inch guns on the front of every navy destroyer and also the hundreds of army self propelled how itsers. in this way, instead of spending more money on more expensive interceptors or new platforms, we can turn past offense into future defense. defeetding incoming missile raids at a much lower cost than round and imposing higher costs on an attacker.

in fact, we tested the first shots of the hyper velocity projectile a little over a month ago and we also found that it significantly increases the range. and last project i want to highlight is one we're calling the arsenal plane which takes one of our oldest aircraft platform and turns it into a flying launch pad for all sourts of different conventional payloads. in practice, the arsenal plane will function as a very large airborne magazine, network to fifth generation aircraft that act adds forward sensor and tar getting nodes, essentially combining different systems already in our inventory to create wholly new capabilities. so these are just a few examples of the sco has done so far and they're working on a lot more. now, there are many other areas where we're driving smart and essential technological benefits

in the budget in the long term and keep our military and the decades ahead the best in the world, the first with the most bar none. one of these is under sea capabilities where we continue to dominate. and where the budget invests over $8.1 billion in 2017. and more than $40 billion over the next 5 years to give us the most lethal under sea and anti-submarine force in the world. it buys more advanced payloads and munitions like better torpedo torpedoes. it buys more advanced maritime patrol aircraft. and it not only buys nine of our most advanced virginia class attack submarines over the next five years it also equips more of them with the versatile virginia payload module which triples each submarine's strike capacity from 12 tom hawk missiles to 40.

now, budgets often require trade-offs which all of you in your own domains are very familiar with. so we're trade-offs among force structure modernization and readiness posture needed to be made, we generally pushes to favor the latter two. this is important because our military has to have the agility and ability to win not only the wars that could happen today but also the wars that could happen in the future. to put more money in submarines, navy fighter jets and a lot of other important areas one trade-off was to buy only as many combat ships as we really need. this is part of a broader effort in our budget to focus the navy on having greater eer lethalit. i'll be discussing this further tomorrow in san diego when i visit some of the navy surface

warfare sailors. we're also investing more in cyber. totally nearly $7 billion in 2017 and almost $35 billion over the next 5 years. among other things, this will help to further d.o.d.'s network defenses, built more training ranges for the cyber warriors and also develop cyber tools and infrastructure needed to provide offensive cyber options. i also want to mention space because while at times in the past space was seen as a sank wair, new and emerging threats make it clear that's not the case anymore. last year, we added over $5 billion in new investments to make us better postured for that and in 2017 we are doing even more. enhancing our ability to identify, attribute and negate all threatening actions in space. so many commercial space

endeavors, we want this domain to be just like the oegss and the internet. free and safe for all. there's some in this world who don't want that to happen. who see america's dominance in these and other areas and want to take that away from us in the future so we can't operate effectively around the globe so we're not waiting to invest until the threats are fully realized. we are investing now so we stay ahead of them. now, of course, pioneering and dominating technological frontiers is just one way that our budget seizes opportunities for the future. we're also innovating operationally making our contingency plans and operations more flexible and dynamic from europe to the asia pacific. and we're investing to build the force of the future as i call it. force of the all-volunteer force

of the future because as good as our technology is it's nothing compared to our people. our people are the reason we have the finest fighting force the world has ever known. and we have to ensure that the talent we recruit and retain generations from now is just as good as the excellent people we have today. i made several announcements over the last few months to help to do that. we're opening owl remaining combat positions to women. very simply so that we have access to 50% of our population. for the all-volunteer force. and every american who can meet our exacting standards, and that's important, has -- will have the equal opportunity to contribute to our mission. we're also implementing several new initiatives to improve and modernize our personnel management systems to create what i call on-ramps and off-ramp this is allow more people inside and outside d.o.d.

to engage with and contribute to our mission. people outside defense to come in for a while, maybe not for a career but for a few years. and contribute to the most consequential mission that a human being can contribute to. and our own people to get out and learn about how the rest of the world works and make sure they're up to date and up to speed. i have emphasized this in silicone valley and our boston technology hub. we're strengthening the strength provided to the military families to improve their quality of life. the emphasis here being on retention of excellent people and where we can making it possible for them to reconcile the needs of having a family with our needs not always possible to reconcile. but we're making an effort where we can consistent with the

profession of armless and our needs. there will be more to come along this line. now having told you about the budget and particularly talking to an audience like this, i need to say something also about how we're reforming the d.o.d. enterprise to make us more efficient. i can't come before a group like this and ask for the amount of money that i believe we need for our defense unless i can also satisfy you that we're spending it in the best possible way. just like you have your shareholders, we have our taxpayers, and we owe it to them to ensure we're doing everything we can to spend our defense dollars as wisely as responsibly as possible. that's why along with our budget, we're keeping up our focus on, for example, acquisition reform. we're starting to see results from our better buying power initiati initiatives. we're looking to do more and get

better. we're also doing more to reduce overhead, which we expect to help nearly -- provide us more than $8 billion over the next five years. $8 billion that we can use elsewhere for real capability and not overhead. and we're looking at reforms to the goldwaters nichols act, the famous act of the 1980s that defines much of d.o.d. on this last point, we have been doing a review for the last several months. i expect to begin receiving recommendations on that in coming weeks and making decisions. let me close by touching on the broader shift that is reflected in this budget. for a long time, d.o.d. tended to focus and plan and prepare for whatever big war people thought was coming over the horizon. at one point becoming so bad that after a while, it started to come at the expense of current conflicts, long-term at

the expense of the here and now. thankfully, we were able to realize that over the last decade, correct it and turn our attention to the fights we were in. we had do that. the difference is, while that kind of singular focus may have made sense when we were facing off against the soviets or sending hundreds of thousands of troops to iraq and afghanistan, it won't work for the world we live in today. now we have to think and do a lot of different things about a lot of challenges at the same time. sad to say but true. not just isil and other terrorist groups but competitors like russia and china and threats like north korea and iran. we don't have the luxury of just one opponent. or the choice between current fights and future fights. we have to do both. and that's what this budget is designed to do. when this forum we're in now was founded 30 years ago, its

inaugural speaker declared that america's best days should still lie ahead. with this budget and with our magnificent men and women of the department of defense, they will -- our best years will lie ahead. as those men and women of the department of defense continue to defend our country, help make a better world for our children. thank you. [ applause ] >> in introducing you, i neglected to say when you were in high school you were a lacrosse player, a football player, a cross-country runner and also basketball. how did you manage to do all those sports? >> i always did a sport in each of the three seasons. i did swimming and diving in the summer. plus i always had a job at night. i always worked at night. fishing boat, gas station,

hospital orderly. i was a busy guy. i couldn't do all the sports at the same time. when people got a lot bigger and taller than i did, i gave up basketball.wrestling. when they got beefier, i gave you up fobble aotball and start cross-country. if you are good as everything, you can be good at lacrosse. but you are not a football player or a tall basketball player. >> when you are the secretary of defense, you have all the military under you. they are in good shape. you have to stay in shape. you look like you are in good shape. >> i try to work out whenever i can. really every day. if i can. i drive everybody crazy. i think people like it. i walk a lot. one of the nice things about working at the pentagon is -- it has these great big hallways. i walk around. i talk to people. you do a little bit of management by walking around. >> you walk in somebody's office

and surprise them? >> when you get to the top, everybody comes to you. you can sit there all day and not move. if i worked in a smaller office building, nobody has a building as big as the pentagon, i think i would go nuts. because i like to get out and move around. >> let's talk about the budget for a moment. is it harder to negotiate the budget with service chiefs or omb? what's harder? >> well, i gotta say, omb by tradition is not totally but quite deaf differential to professional military and d.o.d. advice. we get a lot of latitude i would say compared to the civil agencies. within the department, we have a very -- a process that has gone back for a long time. you know, it really makes the best use of the uniformed and civilian leadership.

i was under secretary as you mentioned for acquisition and technology and logistics. whenever a decision was made above me, i always said, i wish somebody had asked the person who has to carry that out. so i'm very -- i believe in involving the people who have to carry out these decisions and execute these budgets in the decision making. so i'm very inclusive in that regard. i think we have an excellent professional military judgment in all of our services. and that's all reflected in this budget. this is what -- these people who do this for a living and have for many decades think is the best way to spend this money. i have a lot respect for their judgment. >> the defense budget the president will propose is $582 billion more or less. suppose congress says, we think you need more. what will do you? you won't take the money? >> no. don't say that. look, the budget that we have reflects the bipartisan budget

deal of this year for which i am grateful. and i will tell you why. we have started every fiscal year for six years, david, with a con continuing resolution. i won't go through -- most people in this room know how debilitating that is, how inefficient it is. it's disspiriting to our troops. they say, what's going on? other countries look and say, what's going on with you guys? can't you get your act together? it's very important that we not be jerky proceeding. it was two years -- a two-year budget deal. i would have liked something longer than that. but it was what i have hoped for and was speaking about since i became secretary of defense, which was a coming together in washington. end of gridlock. what that means to your question is, did i get everything i want? no. but i think that's the

definition of people coming together and compromising is everybody walked away without having everything they wanted. that said, with the money we have, the shape is what matters. we have been working on the shape within the size that the bipartisan deal gave us. >> for many years we have had a dual budget for defense. we have had the regular budget and a so-called oco account where -- for the war. is the new budget agreement such that you can't get more money for oco and 582 is including that. >> 582 does include oco. the budget deal did take account of both. let me tell you why the theory of oco is a good one. i'm sorry. it's overseas contingency funding. it's intended to cover the variable costs of operations that go up and down in the course of a year. the base budget funds the enduring military that will be here ten years, 20 years down

the road. if you think about it, david, think about hurricanes, for example. a major hurricane occurs every three years. we're asked to respond. you can have us do that. you can give us the money every year and we will spend it. or you can give us the money when the hurricane occurs and we will spend it then. that's obviously more efficient. it makes sense to have variable costs in the budget. >> it has been leaked -- sometimes there are leaks from the pentagon. you probably are familiar with that. something that has been leaked that the navy would like to have a few more ships. i think you cut the number down to about 40. they wanted maybe more. suppose they go to capitol hill and try to get more. will you resist those? >> well, i'm going to argue for what we, including in the navy, think is the best balance.

by the way, the size of the navy is increasing. we're going to go up to 308 ships. >> you have -- what do we have now, 280 or so? >> exactly. that's exactly right. 278 actually. we are increasing the size of the navy. but what's really important is to increase the lethality of each ship. so we're emphasizing that. and we're emphasizing under sea. we had to make tradeoffs. in each of the services you make tradeoffs as i said amongst force structure, capability, investment and readiness. all three of those are important. you just have -- we only have so many dollars. >> there's one ship you are building. it's a new gerald ford class aircraft carrier that supposedly will cost $15 billion for one ship. how did one ship get to be so expensive? are you going to build more. >> i'm sure we will build more in the future. we will not build them in the way that that was built.

that's an example. i talked about the need for discipline. that is a program that was undisciplined. we're trying to wrestle that one into shape. i'm not going to try to justify the history of the ford class carrier over the last 15 years or so. we have been trying -- i started when i was -- to get that program under control. by the way, a lot of our programs we are getting under control now. the figures reflect that. but we have got to do more. it's important because not only for efficiency sake but for the confidence of our business community and our political leaders and our people. they say, look, we're giving you, you know, this much money for defense. we need to see that you are using it well. when we have an example of that where there's a cost overrun of that magnitude, it casts into

doubt the whole enterprise. it's not okay. of course, we will buy more aircraft carriers in the future. i'm supposing we will. but not that way. >> so on isil, do you expect it's likely for any possible way that you can see the u.s. government during the obama administration sending ground troops into the syria iraq area to combat isil? >> we are. >> significant ground troops. 50,000, 100,000, anything significant? >> we're looking for a couple things about that. just to remind everybody, we have 3,700 boots on the ground in iraq today and we're looking to do more. we're looking for opportunities to do more. to get to your question, we're not looking to substitute for local forces. we're looking to enable local forces. why is that? it's because we not only have to beat isil, we have to keep them beaten. that is, there has to be somebody who sustains the defeat afterwards. we know what it's like when you

don't have that force to sustain the defeat. and so we're -- our strategic approach is to enable capable motivated local forces. they are hard to find in that part of the world. but they do exist. but do we have troops that are helping them? yes. we're actually looking for opportunities to do more. so as we go north to mosul, we have to take raqqah. that will prove there's no islamic state. we need to take those two cities. you will see us doing more. we have asked for more. every time the chairman and i have asked the president for more capability to do that, he has said yes. i expect that will continue. one other thing, david, which is it won't just be americans.

this is crucial. it's got to be the other members of our so-called coalition. a lot of them are doing -- making considerable contributions to this. but some of them are not. and you really have to look -- this is a fight of civilization for its own survival. we need everybody -- and that's all the europeans, the gulf states, which are do -- turkey which is right there on the border. there are a lot that need to make more contributions. are we going to do more? yes. we have to win. >> in your coalition, you have 65 countries. i think in davos and other places you said the other members aren't doing very much. what are you doing to encourage them to do more? >> well, not all of them are in that category. but many of them are. so what am i doing to encourage that? next week i will be for much of the week in europe. and i've asked the defense ministers -- the first time ever

interestingly since the campaign against isil began, that the defense ministers -- not the foreign ministers. they met before. but the defense ministers getting together. what i'm going to is sit down and say, here is the campaign plan for -- if you think world war ii news reel picture terms, think of an arrow going north to take mosul and another arrow coming south to make raqqah. that's a good mental picture of taking care of isil and syria and iraq. we have other places in the world, but we have -- it's necessary, not sufficient but necessary to destroy isil in iraq and syria. and what i'm going do with them is say, here are all the capabilities that are needed. boots on the ground. airplanes in the air. more proday iproday -- prosaic . training for police that are patrolling the cities.

i will say, okay, guys, let's match up what is needed to win with what you have and kind of give everybody the opportunity to make an assignment for themselves. this is important. the united states will lead this. and we're determined. but other people have to do their part. because this really is -- civilization has to fight for itself. >> we have flown sorties. is anybody else flying and dropping bombs? >> yeah. others are flying and dropping bombs. we're grateful for that. there are other ones that are flying transport aircraft that are flying tankers, that are flying aircraft, that are flying isr reconnaissance planes. there are people doing training, brits, australians, a number of people besides us are doing training in iraq and taking action in syria.

i don't want to suggest that we're doing it all by ourselves. now, there are some folks that are really doing amazing courageous work. but the reality is we have a coalition that is committed at the political level to defeat isil and that needs to be translated into the operational military contributions they are making. that's what i will be doing next week in europe. >> the russians say they want to defeat isil. but their guided missiles don't seem to be going to the right places. is that because their technology is not as good as ours? >> that's so true. they did. they said they were going to go in and fight isil. that's not what they did. that would be welcome if they did it, but it's not what they are doing. in the main what they are doing is propping up assad. so this is wrong headed in two ways. it's wrong headed in the sense

that it's not doing what needs to be done. r remember, them a threat from isil, too. they going after the russians. so serious business for them as it is for us and the rest of the civilized world. >> when they are flying around and we are flying around, how do we coordinate? >> we have worked that out. we talk at the working level and make sure we have safety of flight. they are behaving professionally in that regard. what they need to do -- i don't know whether they will do that -- is get on a different strategic track. that would be one where they help us to make the transition in syria that has to occur to end the civil war there and get a decent life for people there again. that means without having the whole state of syria collapse and all the state structures go away, without the person of assad who is a lightning rod for

the civil war, but a transition where the state structures as the russians say survive and the moderate opposition and those state structures combine to make a government of syria that can run the place on some decent principals. and then help us turn against isil. that's what they should be doing. but they got off on the wrong foot. i think they have a self-defeating strategy. i don't know how long it will take them to realize that. >> speaking of the russians, on ukraine, it has been reported that we're training in the united states ukrainian soldiers and sending them back now. do you expect to have more conflict there? >> we actually train them in ukraine. mostly. we send equipment and so forth. it's hard to say -- obviously, while we're watching the russians activities in the

middle east, we're not taking our eye off of ukraine. i mention that we're making investments in europe, supporting our nato structure in europe and also supporting the ukrainians militarily and in other ways. >> you expect more conflict in the near future? >> it's hard to say what -- whether the minsk accords are not being implemented to the letter. at the same time, the level of violence is low are than it has been. i certainly hope it stays that way. the minsk accords is the right way to go to settle things down there. don't forget, david, even if things settle down, crimea was still annexed. >> i know. >> you have to look at this conduct by russia and the rest of the europeans do as well and say this is an unwelcome development in european history.

as i said in the speech, it has been a quarter century since we had to be preoccupied with that. unfortunately, it looks like now we do. i wish it were otherwise, but both ukraine and in nato, we're going to have to help countries to harden themselves against russian influence, including the little green men phenomenon, and also melt as we did in decades past staunch defense of our nato allies. >> in afghanistan, before you leave office, obama administration is over, what do you expect will have -- eight to 10,000 soldiers there? >> the plan is to have 9,800 through the end of the year. that's our plan. we adjust plans. the president adjusted his plans in october. the thing to look for in this coming up season is the growing capability of the afghan security.

the whole deal is over a period of time that's not going to end by the end of this year, we have a plan to stay with it. the budget i described -- i should have said this in the budget contains full funding for the afghan security forces. remember, that's the key. they are supposed to be increasingly able to take over their own security. so in this season coming up, you watch whether they are using operational mobility more than they did in this last fighting season, whether they will have now fixed wing aircraft. we just delivered to them. rotary wing airport. all these capabilities they didn't have last season they will have this season. you hope that that -- not hope. that's the plan is to have that strengthen their hand against taliban. full self-sufficiency is years away. >> you mentioned north korea as one of your favorite subjects in your speech. did the north koreans explode a hydrogen bomb recently?

>> i don't think that they were as successful as they may have claimed. we don't know that fully. i don't want to go any further than that. but i -- that's the story. don't forget -- i don't want you to take any consolation from that, because nuclear weapons in the hands of north korea, particularly coupled with ballistic missiles, coupled with their -- how do i say this? odd demeanor and position right there on the dmz, that's a really serious combination. they're not in the headlines a lot. but we, ace sas i said, never t our eye off that. >> you famously wrote an article with bill perry when you were not in government saying that maybe a pre-emptive strike against an icbm or other missile capabilities of the north koreans will be something the u.s. should consider. do you still have that view?

>> that was a different circumstance then. it was a test launch missile. our policy was that we were not to tolerate it. we were trying to figure out how to not tolerate it. so that was then. now is now. but for now, the nuclear program of north korea is a serious concern, the ballistic missiles are a serious concern, the size of their force positioned right there on the d mz and the size f the special forces which they work on quite hard, in every way they are a serious business. and i just got to remind you, we're on the korean peninsula. we will win. no question about it. but it is a very, very savage and intense war. so it's no -- it's not something that -- not an area where you

want deterrents to fail. but deterrents has to be strong there every day. >> the chinese seem to be building islands in the south china sea. are we going to just let them do that? are -- you think they're going to use it for military purposes? are we going to send ships nearby? >> they are. we are reacting. we have to react. by the way, it's true that they are not the only ones doing this. therefore, our formal position as a matter of what about these claims in the south china sea is that we, the united states, don't adjudicate those claims. we do want is everybody to stop land reclamation and stop mi military. the one you described, namely, we will keep doing what we have done, what we have done for 70 years. we will fly and sail and

operation where international law permits, period. and we demonstrate that and that won't stop. second, we're making all these investments that you see in our defense budget that are specifically oriented towards the checking development of the chinese military. third, they are having the effect -- i don't know when this will dawn on them -- of causing widespread concern in the region which makes others react, including others react by joining up with us. so to give you a few examples. vietnam, for example. very eager to work with us on maritime security. vietnam. and then good old friends that you are very familiar with, australia, the philippines, probably notice that japan is a rising military power in the

pacific and close longtime friend of the united states. so all around the region people are reacting. the chinese are with this kind of stuff going to get people to react and compensate. more importantly, it's self-isolating behavior. i don't know when they will realize that, whether they will realize that. it's not the american approach to have a cold war there, to carve up the region, to divide. we're not trying to stop the chinese from doing what they're doing. look at what the united states has brought to the asia pacific region over the last 70 years. the most rapidly growing region economically in the world. it has been the peace and stability there that we underwrote that's allowed first japan to rise, then south korea, then taiwan, then southeast asia and now china and india. that's what we have stood for. and they have benefitted from that. so to disrupt the security

environment where half of humanity lives and half of humanity's economic behavior is is not a good idea on their part. certainly for our part, we intend to continue our strong role there. >> before you leave office, do you think guantanamo will be closed? >> don't know. i have been completely unabashed about this. i would like to see it closed. i think on balance it would be good for us. but here is the issue. there are people in that detention facility that -- there's no other way to say this -- have to be detained. there's no way that i can safely have them transferred somewhere else. so to answer your question can it be closed safely? for us to do that, we have to find another place to detain the people who must be detained. now, at the moment it's against

the law to establish another defense facility. some in congress have considered a willingness to consider a proposal to build an alternative facility. we have such a proposal. we will see whether we get the support for it. this is something that i just would rather not leave to my successor, the job of this detention business and to the next president. but i don't know whether we will get it done this year. it's not something -- to do it this way, we need the help and support of congress. i hope we're getting it. i'm working on it. i think it would be a good thing for the country on balance. >> how damaging were the snowden revelations? >> no question it was damaging. it was damaging first to our security and compromising important secrets to our foreign poli policy and relations around the world but critically to our industry. yes it creates some distrust,

which i'm working very hard to try to overcome. not by preaching to people and not by -- trying to work through issues. but also, you know, for our companies, it has put them -- it has used as a -- essentially a guise for protectionism by some competitors to american companies. no question about it. so it has put -- snowden's actions put our companies at a disadvantage to the point where some countries that -- from whom it is wild to hear such a claim are saying, store your data in our country, it will be safer there. really? safer than here? you know, i'm intent upon building bridges of trust. when i was started out in this business and was a physicist, everybody in the generation

older than me that brought me up, they were all manhattan project people and so forth. they had a reflex that it was an important duty to use your knowledge for good and in service of the public good. i can't expect that for everybody today, not as big a fraction of the young people have the experience of closeness to the military. that's why i'm trying to reach out to people and make them familiar with what we're doing, give them a user friendly way to make a contribution. i do find that people out in silicon valley and our innovative community -- i need to say this. these are people who have -- are where they are because they like to do things of consequence. they see that defending our country and defending our world is something of consequence. so the mission does grab them. they get it. they look at isil and they look at these problems i have talked about russia and china and so

on, they understand this is serious matter. we have to defend ourselves. but i need to meet them halfway, listen to them and find a way in this very different age from when i started where a young person can see their way to contributing to the greater -- what's better than waking up in the morning and being part of something bigger than yourself? >> you have said that women can be in all combat parts of our military force. the marines were not thrilled with that, i think. you overruled them? how did that work? >> the marines raised some issues which we have to address. we are addressing in implementation that didn't make me say we're not going to it, but it made me say -- if you read my statement, i'm working right now on the implementation. simply declaring things open is not effective implementation. there are real issues here.

we're working through those issues. it was important to them, for example, that i say and i did that the way we implemented this was going to be important, that standards were not going to be relaxed, that there would be no quotas. this was about creating the opportunity. but i couldn't make it so that women would be able to satisfy that -- those standards in the numbers that -- there's a lot that needs to be done here. i thought they raised some very important considerations. and we're addressing those in implementation. but for the army and the navy and the air force and our special operations command, they all recommended no additional restrictions. they also gave me their reasoning.

together and said what i said, which is this is the right decision, but we have to implement it carefully, standards are important, don't expect quotas. we're going to do it in a serious professional way like -- i'm not saying this about me. i'm saying about the department of defense. i'm so proud of a place like that that is a learning, adapting organization. they take on things -- we took on counter insurgency. before me time. mastered it. you may not have liked the circumstances. i'm not trying to say that. but we got really good at it. this say place that takes on a mission and then very carefully, very deliberately, very professionally works it through. we will do that. we will do that for this. i'm completely confident. >> you have a ph.d. in theoretical physics. when you deal with members of congress, are they often on the same intellectual plane you are?

is that hard for you -- how do you deal with that? >> the joke that everybody tells me, not with congress specifically in mind, is that i have finally -- they were two separate majors. they were a right brain left brain thing. i liked them both. people now say i now work in a field that is the perfect union of medieval history and physics. for congress, i'm going to say something that may surprise you. i find that the great majority of members of congress that i interact with are really serious, thoughtful, want to do the right thing. they sometimes find themselves in a situation where they can't find a way to do the right thing. i think that's frustrating for a lot of them. that's why when we do come together behind this budget deal and so forth, i think it's a huge triumph. the folks who did that, despite

all odds sat down, worked it out, the old-fashioned way in congress, i really think deserve a lot of credit for the -- it wasn't everything everybody wanted, wasn't forever. it was for two years. that's the way things ought to be done. you can't just pound your spoon on your high chair in this country and get what you want. i conditian't do that. i have to work with other people. >> final question. what's the best part about being secretary of defense? >> the troops. absolutely. it's being among the people. that's what lifts you up every time. you look at them and you say -- it's just -- it's incredible. my wife works -- she can't spend a lot of time doing things. but when she does, she loves the troops. they are families. these are fantastic people. that's by far and away the best part. >> worst part is writing letters

to families? >> yeah. you never get used to the loss. i've been at this now seven years. fortunately, the numbers are less than when i came in. that never stops being hard. >> thank you very much for your service to our country. >> thank you for having me. >> appreciate it. [ applause ] on the next washington journal, congressman dan kildee who represents flint, michigan,

gives a preview of house oversight committee on the water contamination problem and the local, state and federal response. after that, representative ted yoho of florida talks about efforts to combat sex trafficking. and later, david levinthal of the center for public integrity on campaign spending. washington journal is live. join the conversation on facebook and twitter. every election cycle we're reminded how important it is for citizens to be informed. c-span is a vehicle for empowering people to make good choices. it really is like you are getting a seven-course gourmet five-star meal of policy. boy, do i just sound like a nerd, but it's true. >> to me, it's a home for

political junkies and to track the government as it happens, whether on capitol hill or in the agencies. >> most staffers seem to have a television on their desk and c-span is on. i think it's a great way for us to stay informed. >> i urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment. there are a lot of c-span fans on the hill. my colleagues -- when i go back, they will say, i saw you on c-span. >> you can get something like the history of grain elevators in pennsylvania or landmark supreme court decisions. >> i believe that we will win! >> there's so much more that c-span does in terms of its programs to make sure that people outside the beltway know what's going on inside it. >> i am proud to announce -- >> i announce my candidacy -- >> i am officially running -- >> for president of the united states. >> a reporter who covers

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becomes book tv. >> it has been a wonderful way of accessing the work of those folk who are writing really great books. >> every weekend c-span3 becomes america history tv. you are a history junky. you have to watch. >> whether we're talking about a congressional hearing or we're talking about an area irizoniri history. there's so much you can convey. >> whether it's at the capitol or campaign trail, they are capturing history. it brings you inside of the chambers, inside the conversations on capitol hill and lets you have a seat at the table. you can't find that anywhere else. >> i'm a c-span fan. >> i'm a c-span fan. >> i'm a c-span fan. >> yes, i am a c-span fan. >> that's the power of c-span, access for everyone to be part of the conversation.

matt mahan joined president obama's senior communication adviser to talk about technology in government and politics. this is an hour ten minutes. >> i'm so excited to see we have a full house tonight. thanks for being here. now is an important time for us to be having this conversation about the relationship between government and technology. especially with the advent and rise of technology platforms that are creating new industries and changing how we live our lives every single day. it's clear that technology is out pacing -- is fast outpacing federal and state regulations. if there's one critical

factor -- additional factor that drives this merging of tech policy and politics it's the constitue constituents. gone are the days of when they used to say, that's government. i don't expect a response. we're in a different time now. constituents deserve and expect an engaged responsive government, powered by the el t elected officials that they sent to congress or to their government to serve them. this is all made possible by the use of technology. technology is magic and i think that by bringing constituents and government together it has proven its worth. i would like to get started. i'm pleased to be hear in conversation with matt mahan, jennifer palka and dan pfeifer. he is the vice president of polpol policy for gofundme.

thank you for being here. let's get started. my first question is for. ladies first. i would like to talk about the modernization of government that's happening across all federal agencies under president obama. there is definitely an uptick in talent going from silicon valley to washington, washington to silicon valley. the administration is recruiting top-notch talent. you were one of the recruits. you went from silicon valley to washington. you were -- what we would love to hear from you is about your role as u.s. -- deputy uscto in the white house and the advent of the united states digital under your tenure. >> thank you for opening with the question about the government side of it. i think very often we think about this as just politics and that and government are closely

tied but they are two different things. i think it was sort of when obama was elected and everyone -- he was the first president elected with the internet or with help from the internet. there were years when there was an enormous disruption of politics by the internet. so that was starting in 2008. starting in i would say about 2012, we started to see this really take root in government. i think it was led to be honest by the folks in the government digital service in the united kingdom where they took it very seriously bringing in digital talent and not having it just be sort of innovation at the edges (t&háhp &hc%aying, we can@úq provide digital services to citizens that meet a far higher quality bar. that really create an experience for citizens that meets this

expectation that you have now when you are on your mobile phone or online all the time. everything is so convenient and so different than it is -- than it was ten years ago. i was running code at the time. we started out of an inspiration of the ways in which the internet had disrupted politics. how are we going to bring the principals and values of the web not just to getting people elected but to the business of gove governing? it matters what we think of government. if we have a good experience, we are likely to be more involved, more engaged as political citizens. so i was running code at the time when todd park who was the cto, second ever chief technology officer of the united states, which is a big deal. this is something president obama brought to his administration. asked me to come and work on a

program that he had started that was modelled after code for america, the presidential innovation fellows program. i know of at least two people in the audience who were presidential innovation fellows. you shout out to the other ones. i don't flow wheknow where they. this brought the best of silicon valley to government. i reverse pitched todd on the notion that we really need to bring not just folks into agencies to help with open data and create value for the american public through data and the wide variety of benefits that people have been seeing from this but also really put more digital competency at the center of government and change fundamentally how we create the technology that mediates our interaction between governments -- between government and citizens. so much incredible has happened. i think we probably would not

have been terribly successful if healthcare.gov hadn't failed. i'm sorry if that's controversial. >> i'm not sure that was worth the price. >> it worked. some of the people who made healthcare.gov are in the room. ryan being one of them. hello. [ applause ] in the end, we enrolled more people than we even had thought. >> right. >> we would before the site failed. that's a remarkable accomplishment. >> it's amazing. >> partly because of that, the plans to create internal group that we ended up calling the united states digital service were under way before healthcare.gov that crisis, which turned into such an enormous opportunity, really gave us the air cover to say, no, we have to take a fundamentally different approach to how we create technology that works for the american people. it has to be data driver and it

has to work a lot more -- not entirely. a lot more like how silicon valley works. i'm incredibly proud that the people who came to this task came to it with such an amazing desire to serve the public and have brought so much incredible change. we have seen things like agile procurement happening. we have seen wholesale reinventions of services that the government provides citizens. now we have seen that working also at the local and state level through code for america. i think it's an mazing thing. i think as people start to have experiences with government that more match the experiences they have in their personal lives, my sincere hope and my wish for the world is that really makes people have a confidence in government that changes their experience with the political realm. >> i mean, that was amazing. thank you. fantastic answer. i think you are right that this

administration is doing a great job of taking a page out of silicon valley's book. they are bringing the best practices back to the citizens. matt, i want to go to you with that. i'm fascinated by what you are doing at brigade. i will set it up in that any successful and democratic society, civic participation is necessary. the problem is not everyone feels like they can be heard. not everyone feels like they can be heard or make an impact. with social media we know it changed how constituents and elected interact with each other. if democracy is your startup -- we know it's a hard job to mobilize con city estit we know it's a hard job to mobilize con city estiuents to n active role. how will brigade help to scale democracy? >> great question. let me start by saying that the impetus for brigade was a fear

as we looked at the electorate and voting behavior and attitudes toward government that we're really worried about where the country is going because we think that citizens are losing faith in their own efficacy. when you say it's hard to participate, it is. and yet people who have educations, people who make money participate at a very high rate. their interests and their needs are often pretty well represented in government despite obvious gaps in technology and other dysfunctions that jen kind of said we're trying to resolve. if you take the last california mid term for example, anybody want to guess, panelists included, what turnout was for younger voters, for the 18 to 25-year-old crowd? any guesses? here in california. >> about half that. about 8% turnout for millenni

millennials. latinos as a whole, only 6%. low income voters, i don't know the stat but it was in that ballpark. yet for educated, white, middle-aged to older voters, turnout was closer to what you would expect, 50%, 60%. so i think that ends up being an issue of justice and responsiveness of our government and of our elected representatives. now when we look at the problem particularly thinking about this next generation of voters, we have identified two components to it that we want to try to tackle. one is complexity. democracy is not scaled well offline. there are over 500,000 elected officials in the u.s. we are each represented by over 40 elected officials, 30 or more of them are at a local level. you probably couldn't name more than a few. i personally can only name a handful. you probably don't know what they are elected to do, what decisions they are making.

the federal budget is about 2.something trillion. all of those elected representatives spend just as much money. they make a lot of decisions about things like public safety, transportation, education. in many cases healthcare, parks and rec. a lot of local decisions about spending and regulations that actually have a bigger impact on yu your quality of life than the decisions that the president can make, not that he or she could make that many anyway. so i think complexity is one matter. how do you help people make sense of this massive opaque system? not just who the reps are and the issues, but how decisions get made. how does power get exercised? the other is even if you can overcome that problem and we think technology offers obvious solutions there, take -- i was giving this example. if you want to travel to dubai and london and then singapore and then back home and you will

need hotels and cars and you want to book that, you put in a few parameters and you get options and sort it. it's not impossible to take complex data and personal preferences and start to make sense of it and make if accessible and understanding for people and let them do something with it. there's the complexity problem. i have indicated what i think some technology kind of direction we could take there. but there's a deeper cultural problem which is even if i can make sense of the system and i decide to participate, is it going to matter? it's not apathy. we think people don't care and they can't be bonl ethered. it's a crisis of faith. is it going to matter? our hope there -- we think the promise is in long tale of office offices and local electi elections. if you vote in california for president, your vote probably doesn't have an impact, unfortunately. we just did a local election test in manchester, new hampshire. in a city of 75,000 people, the

mayor got re-elected by 100 votes. a handful of people could have knocked on doors, organized neighbors, said, this is what we care about and it could determine the outcome of the election. i think making those things transparent, bringing data to bear, social tools and connect that to the political process in a direct way is how we scale up participation and make it more representative. that's what it is about. how do we make it more representative and more responsive to the needs of everyone. >> thank you for that. i think i'm definitely going to become a user after this. thank you for that. i want to come to you next. jennifer and matt have both spoken about things that you can certainly give us a lot of insight on. specifically, i wanted to go to jennifer's point about when she was in the white house and your experience when you were there. before i get to your actual question, if you could give us a little tidbit around what you did with the state of the union, that amazing experience when you

brought it to life. >> sure. the state of the union is for the white house is the biggest audience you will have at any point in time. but over the course of time, state of the union audience viewership has dropped dramatically. that's in part because president obama has been in office for seven years now. you have seen it before. it has been going -- people have more choices now. they have more -- for a decades it was more channels. now they have what's on their phone, on their tablet. people don't -- younger people don't believe in appointment television. you don't show up at tuesday night to watch a speech. you watch it when you want to watch it. we thought in 2015 -- we spent time thinking about how can we engage people more with the state of the union? we thought if we sort of divided it into viewers that with had and tried to design content.

the first group of people are your television watchers, people who watch it on tv. that's easy to deal with. you make sure they know it's on tv and you give -- you write a good speech and have the president deliver it well. do that. second group of people will be people who will watch it on tv but watch it not in the traditional way of themselves and their television but will watch it with their phone or ipad or computer. the people what we call the two screen experience. we did for that was to have a set of content that would be able to be -- that would highlight -- moments of the speech would be info graphics, additional information, photos and short videos that would provide depth and nuance to some of the points and share those on social. so you could see that as it was happening. the third group were people w watching online. we tried to drive people to the white house website. would you get that what we call the river of content where you would see the graphics and that

information as you were watching it. the last group were people who were never going to watch it on television either on demand or on their phone or anything like that. how can we engage those people? we did a couple of things there, which is -- the most notable was for the first time ever we put out the text of the state of the union on media in advance. people who were a part of the that platform through their connection on twitter or facebook would see the speech. they may not ever watch it. but they had an opportunity to read it or see parts of it. we would also take over the course -- we didn't view the state of the union as this one hour moment on the first tuesday in february. it was instead a period of time leading up to and leading before. we were announcing policies, you know, on facebook or in real events leading up to it. afterwards, we would take parts of the speech on climate change, for instance and then motivate

and engage influencers to share that content. would you have a chance to interact with it. we saw just from our own metric and data more engagement that way than if we had had 30-some million people watched it. compared to the 100 million who would have watched it 20 years ago, it's a fraction. we saw more engagement through this than if we had gotten an additional 5 million people to watch. >> that is what you did. now i want to come to your question about the president himself. as someone who has been with the president since his first campaign, you have had the privilege of working for the most powerful startup in the land. so having said that, the up side that you have had has extraordinary. you have been able to do good in your job. you have been able to serve the american people. again, bring technology to government. so, speaking about the president, how would you say that he has -- what key objectives would you say that

he's achieved in the administration that are solely or exclusively driven by the use of technology? >> well, i think a big part of it is communication. right? it is a fundamental role of the president to communicate with the american people. now, that serves a strictly governmental function at times, to tell people about how they -- can get health care, a tax refund, or prepare for a hurricane coming. the traditional tools that allow you to do that -- network television, cable television, and newspapers -- reach a dramatically diminishing part of the audience. so a huge part of what we had to do in that course of time, was learn how to leverage tools to do that. that's incredibly important on the governmental side. then you have to communicate in two other fashions. one is to try to get your agenda passed. that's to motivate public opinion. and the president has had very good success with that in some areas and ran into a wall in

partisanship, the split government we have in washington. but one way in which we think of the long arc of this presidency where he's been most successful from a communications perspective, in his willingness to experiment with new technologies, viewing the presidency as a platform of engagement, not strictly communication, has been in helping move the ball forward in public opinion on things that are very core to him. when we started running for president, think about this, the idea that marriage equality was something that was opposed by a majority of this country and something that almost every political figure would be afraid to touch. >> that's right. >> republicans, the conservative economic view from reagan of smaller taxes -- lower taxes and smaller government, was the predominant way.

the idea -- in immigration, in the democratic primary, if the president got a question on immigration, in most states, it was from the right, about loose borders and people taking jobs. these are democratic primary voters asking the president the sort of questions that you now hear eight years later at a donald trump event. and on climate change, was sort of a much more picayune issue politically. the democratic party itself was divided on it. and over the course of a very aggressive and concerted effort over time, the president has moved the ball. let's take guns, too, because that's in the news right now. it moved to a place, moving public opinion there. action hasn't happened on all of those things, but he views part of it as helping shape the public opinion environment so that after his presidency, additional progress on these areas is possible. if he communicated like a

traditional president, which every time we did something unconventional, whether it was the president holding a selfie stick, or getting with zach galifianakis, or do a youtube interview, which now seems completely normal. in 2009, the conventional wisdom flipped out. like, we were demeaning the president, you're putting him on the internet? like doing all those things was -- >> it wasn't the internet. it was zach galifianakis. [ laughter ] >> right, but even sitting with youtube and taking questions. it was seen as somehow demeaning of the presidency. zach galifianakis is up for fair debate, i will say that. but doing all that was crucial to fundamentally changing the way that all presidents going forward, republican or democrat, will engage with the public. >> totally agree. it's fair game to say back in 2008, what you did in '08 almost

seems archaic compared to what we're doing now. so he brought those issues to life. he was able to engage and mobilize. matt, how would you respond to what dan is saying about how the president used technology and how we can marry that with what brigade is doing? >> couple thoughts on that. one is dan's describing what great presidents have always done, figure out how to leverage the bully pulpit. there's a proliferation of different communication channels and apps. the president's done an amazing job of figuring out how to navigate a really complex media landscape and get a message out to a lot of different audiences. one of the things going back to 2008 that i think is very interesting is that many of you in this room may have been familiar with my barack obama.com and some of the technology that was built there to help groups of people organize together. i think there's a promise in that idea and i think you saw it in the dean campaign, using meet up, and you've seen that in these different moments of people trying to use the internet. there's a promise there that

hasn't been realized. and what i think it is, is the opportunity for more bottom up self-organization that can plug into something formal and somewhat centralized and top down. you kind of have to have both of those. and for a long time now, our media, our mass media has really been very centralized and has tapped into a model in which candidates and non-profits raise a bunch of money and do direct marketing to mobilize people who don't really want to hear the message. and trying to nudge them to give that one dollar because of guilt or whatever it is. and oddly enough, i just downloaded the field the burn app. how many have you checked that thing out? a good number here in san francisco? no? i won't even go to the other side of the aisle. interestingly, i downloaded the app and it had a deep dive on all the issues with info graphics and videos, which was amazing.

it had this cool map for me to geo-locate myself. i had my profile with my achievements for how many votes i gathered. but i was looking at it, saying, where are the people? like even there, there's no conversation and bottom up power-building through creating a community of action that can sustain itself over time. and even with successes online today, like sopa pippa, it was a very quick "no." it wasn't where a group of people who maybe want change around gun laws who are going to build power and capacity over time. my background bias is towards grassroots organizing, so that's how we see the world in our company. but i think there's a promise there that technology hasn't realized and that for everything president obama has done, that's going to be the future of getting elected, but also sustaining efforts to get things done once in office. >> wonderful. and jen, what do you have to add to that? >> i would just extend that. you have getting people elected and sustaining that agenda,

sustaining that community, that set of values. and i think what we see also through our work with local government, it's also not just the "i want to have a voice" in the policy, but it's also "i want to lend my hands to making my community better." and that's also something we're seeing the power of the internet be able to bring together. for us at code for america, we have a program where we have folks from silicon valley come and do partnerships with local government for a year. they take a user-centered approach. >> the fellows? >> these are the fellows. and we welcomed our new class of fellows at code of america, but in the first class, 2011, they're coming from tech jobs and doing a year of service with local government. we had a team that was working with the city of boston. as a side project, one of the

folks noticed in 2011 in boston, it was snowpocalypse. do you remember this? >> isn't that every winter in boston? >> that's true. but this was really bad. it was the first year in a long time. and these are programmers from start-up and google and apple. and they're sort of in these operation centers in boston city government during this massive snow crisis. so you really get part of what government does. we think of government is sort of policies and stuff. but government is clearing the snow. government is helping people who are stuck. government is, like, who is getting the snowplow? is my neighbor getting the snow plow or another neighbor getting the snow plow? when the snowplows clear the streets, it covers the fire hydrants. they can be so completely covered that if there's a fire, you're talking about quite a long time before they are dug out. we don't even think about that anymore. we don't have the resources to dig those things out. he's going, if i live in front

of a fire hydrant, i'm incentivized to dig that fire hydrant out. and eric michaels wrote, like in a day, to try something out, wrote an app called adopt a hydrant, that allowed the citizens of boston to say, i'm digging out that fire hydrant if it's covered in snow. and it's just this crazy thing that took flight. anyone here live in oakland? you can adopt a storm drain in oakland. why should the city come out and clear that storm drain when it's full of leaves? when you can just walk out and do it. i will say, i've done it, and it is gross to stick your hand in a storm drain. but once you get over that, you've saved the city, like a whole crew, right? and your street isn't backing up. there are things that we as citizens can do, to make our communities and neighborhoods work better that are things that we've asked institutions, local

governments, to do them for us. unfortunately, they do them now at very great cost. it is free to stick your hand in the storm drain. adopt a siren in honolulu, where it really matters, that you know when the tsunami is coming and you need to know that your thing so i just think there's that element too of not just, where is my voice in politics, but where are my hands to help make my community better and how do we use internet technologies to make that easier and better and i would just echo everything matt had to say about really the incredible relevance of the local level of government. >> and staying with that, and we're talking about adopt a hydrant. so just out of all the different technologies that you've seen foster through the code for america, follows your program, what would you say has been the most critical for digital civic participation, number one, right? and then relatedly, how would

providers of such similar technologies engage with the government? because code for america is doing such an amazing job, but how do we cast a wider net? >> to your last point, one of the things that's happened in the last three years, many wonderful people in silicon valley and we say meta physical silicon valley, it's not limited to the bay area, as much as we would like to think. there are amazing entrepreneurs who take this agile user-centered approach all over the country. but meta physical silicon valley is getting over its horror of government and actually doing start-ups that will provide technology and services to government in a way that are enormously changing the eco-system, giving people in government many, many different options that are not just the large system integrators, god love them, but we need start-ups doing things in an agile way. it's a huge thing.

seven of them have been spin-outs of code for america, but there are many, many others and we support all of them because it makes government work better for the people. so your question about what technologies have been -- >> like, let's say, is it a mobile technology, is it texting? what is a good way to ensure digital civic participation, something that's in your hands to drive that easy? >> i would answer before technology, we hear this question, what are the things that really open up this opportunity in government. more important than any particular technology, i would say, and i'm sorry if i repeat myself, i'll say this over and over again. an iterative, user-centered and data driven approach. that approach, whatever technology you're deploying, is just critical and is just very different from the ways in which government has sort of codified

their approach to technology in the past. and frankly, for all good reasons, we've created procurement and ethics rules because we wanted to do right by the people. but they've had an unintended consequence in a universe where things move so quickly. we can try things out in technology and iterate very quickly based on user feedback. that's what works and that's very hard to do in a government context, but that's what the u.s. digital service has been doing. that's what 18-f, which is their partner, who has an office nearby, in san francisco, that's what code for america is doing. that's more important than any technology, and it's very important that we support all of our government entities that are trying to take that approach, despite a whole bunch of rules that make it a little bit difficult. but to answer your question, i do think that text messaging, for us at the local level, there are many different things we've done. the aggregation of data in just making it usable for citizens is really, really huge. when you're dealing with populations who are relying on digital services for things like

food stamps or housing, we have found that finding very simple ways to text message someone, for instance, if you apply for food stamps in california, being able to follow up by text message and saying did you get the benefit. or hey, it turns out, you're about to fall off the rolls because you didn't reply to some of the communications that we sent, very long letters written in legalese that you don't understand. when you don't reply to them, you may fall off the rolls. if we can send a text message that says you need to call the office or you will end up at the grocery store trying to use your food benefits and it won't work. these things are really big for us at this moment in time, where we don't have everybody on a smartphone platform. text is huge. >> that's where i was going. it's important to take the messaging to the people, right? you want to go where they are. that's really critical. and to your point about open data, it's evidenced by the fact

that we have our first chief data officer at the white house, but the commerce department has their first chief data officer as well, a good friend of mine, ian kalen. also a previous innovation fellow. >> first year. >> so i think there's just a lot of -- there's a lot of coming together between what you're saying, the roles that people are playing and the relationship between the public and the private sector. so thank you for that. and matt, i want to come to you next, and i'm going to read you some stuff back that you've said before. >> uh-oh. that's what politics is like. >> don't do that to me, please. >> so i promise it's all good. >> my wife is in the audience. >> this is about brigade. in an op-ed, you wrote that voters, especially millenials, have well-formed opinions on issues such as whether or not airbnb should be regulated and a desire for civic engagement but they didn't know how to make their voices heard or believe that their voices count.

and according to congressional quarterly, 2015, 23 states advanced 60 pieces of legislation to restrict short term rental platforms like airbnb. how would you engage voters, who support tech platforms with the decision makers at the state level and stop such legislation from passing or at least let it be heard that we don't want this to happen? >> what we built last november, i referenced the test in manchester, new hampshire, we did the same test in san francisco. it really was a test. it was iterative, it's scrappy, we built it in five weeks, we looked at data, learned a lot, made a ton of mistakes and now we can take that forward with our next test in the primaries and the general this year. and i will get around to answering your question, if i don't, you can hold me accountable to it. what we wanted to test was basically three things.

will users of brigade express their political beliefs in a way that can help us inform, help us help them inform how they may want to vote and participate in the election. if we make those recommendations on how they may want to vote, are they willing to then do a little more research and confirm how they're planning to vote in advance of the election? and can we motivate them to pull their friends in and engage them in that same process? one of the difficult learnings was driving mobile app installs is really difficult. that's a niche tech problem, but it's a big deal. really hard to get people to install apps. that was hard. we tried a lot of different marketing approaches. i was joking with dan that not a lot of people wake up in the morning, saying, i wish i had a better tool for voting, for engaging in politics. somebody understands. so the barrier to entry was really high. i think part of the tactical

lesson for us is to meet people where they are, build more on web, maybe through text, easier interfaces and touch points for people because there are a lot of people visiting facebook every day, there are a lot of people in a lot of different places where we can build more hooks. once we got them into that experience, though, which was focused on taking positions written by the chronicle. so a position might be something like, we should enforce more restrictions on my ability to rent out my extra bedroom to a stranger or something like that. or we should increase taxes to fund, you know, a larger health benefit for workers in the city, so on and so forth. we took a bunch of positions and partnered with the chronicle and produced the content and some background information. people were incredibly willing to dig in and voice their opinions. it was amazing how quickly people got through it. they generally knew where they

stood on a lot of these issues. i agree with that, i disagree with that, for the mission moratorium. didn't take a lot of information. voters are not dumb, and they're not apathetic. you just have to figure out how to reach them. so the completion rate was really, really high. people agreed, disagreed. you took a side, got to see what other people think, competing responses for why people took different sides. and we then said, given everything you've told us about your political beliefs, here's how we recommend you vote. with more information about each of the candidates. that stuff went well, as well. a high percentage of them said, i'm going to fill out my ballot on my phone, so i have this rich source of information before the election and many of the people said they kept that with them or took it into the voting booth with them. it was accessible, better structured, easy to read, it recorded their answers. i filled out a bunch. i wanted to do more research to help me keep track of where i

was on this thing that was always with me, which is my phone. and then on the last piece, we didn't probably get the peer-to-peer part as right as i would have liked, but we had power users for something like, i think it was prop f, who sent a lot of messages to their friends, trying to recruit them, saying, i'm voting "yes" or "no" and here's why. so to answer the question, i think there's a general question around distribution and how you get the new tools in front of people and how much demand is there that i think is going to have to be driven by creating cultural and social norms around participation and make it something people are talking about on facebook and twitter, reintegrate our civic and social lives and use technology to do that. how do you make it mainstream and bake it into everyday life and we're not the only ones doing that. change.org and nice citizen and pop vox, and a bunch of others in the space trying to figure it

out. but then it's about making it really simple, immediate feedback, personalized, transparent and a useful tool for people. when we got that in the hands of people, they used it and they loved it, and the response was really positive. and here in san francisco, it was on the order of about a thousand voters. so in an election of 160,000, for us, that's a pretty good validation, at least from the feedback that we got, that was so positive from those voters. >> i think that's a great quote, integrating our social and our civic lives. amazing if we can do that. that's wonderful. thank you. before i go to the last question with dan, i want to let the audience know in about five minutes we will go to q & a. so if you're starting to think about a question, the mike is there. you'll probably want to start lining up there in about five minutes. dan? >> yes. >> back to you. i have a multi-part question for you.

so i hope that's okay. with your new role at go fund me, right, you've gone from taking tech to politics and connecting the dots from silicon valley back to washington. tell us what does your new role entail, specifically in what kind of policy changes are you trying to impact? are those going to impact the -- are they going to affect the whole tech industry, or just a specific sector? and will it be easier to make those changes from the outside? >> look, i think the best way that anyone can make change, is if you have a chance to serve in government. that's the ultimate place to do it. >> agree. hundred percent. >> when you think about the people that jen and others recruited from, and you talk to them in the hallways, people who have worked at google and facebook and been part of these incredibly lucrative things, and you talk about the chance to give health care to more people, like the people who came in and

saved health care.gov, there was no other opportunity to have an impact on people's lives like that. that's the ultimate way to do it. you can do it on a local level. ultimate manifestation is in the white house. so that, i think, everyone, if they get an opportunity to do that in their lives, they should do that. >> hear, hear. >> thank you. for me, you know, what i -- when i left the white house after six years, and i've thought about what i want to do with my life, i didn't really know. because you had asked me when i first got in politics, what would be like your ultimate dream would be like find a candidate you really believe in, get started early with them, go on a journey to the white house and get to be a part of an important presidency in an important role. check. i got to do that. thank you, barack obama. >> and did it very well. >> thank you for finding myself unemployed about the time barack obama started to run for president. so that was good. didn't know what i wanted to do

next. i had spent some time out here through having spent a lot of time especially in the last two years of my time in the white house, we were beginning to engage more with the tech world and the tech space and trying to make those changes. i felt a cultural affinity with silicon valley writ large. geographically, because i moved here, obviously, but -- and i think there's -- when i went to go fund me, to do my first interview with them -- go fund me is a young company. only been around a couple of years. it was very small until a couple of months ago, it's now growing, about 100 people work there. i went to the first office, our current office we are going to move from soon. it's above a nail salon in menlo park. and the ceo knows i'm coming from the white house. so sorry about our office. it's people working in the hallway, all at standing desks. and i said to him, i was like,

this is better than every campaign office i ever went to work in. the first obama office -- >> in the fourth floor of the eob. >> in all of the eob. there's actually heat in this office. >> this is the executive office building, our offices. >> and so you feel like -- the obama campaign was the ultimate start-up. and all campaigns are start-ups in some way. what i think has drawn people from washington to silicon valley, and there are more of them moving out here every day, and people from silicon valley to washington and why those people in silicon valley are so valuable in washington is a bias for action. right? in start-up world, you have to move fast. you have to decide quickly and you have to act. in campaigns, it's the same thing. you cannot wait. if you sit around and dilly dally for hours, like, people want to try something and get it done. if it doesn't work, you try something else and you learn from it. so there's that cultural affinity.

what lead me to go fund me, which is a personal crowd-funding site, rapidly growing. most of our business is people who are raising money to pay for medical bills, or to help someone in their community, or fund textbooks for schools or stuff like that. but we do all kinds of projects. i didn't know i really wanted to take a job. i thought i could do the consulting thing, and do panels and work in coffee shops and do conference calls. but what really drew me to go fund me, essentially what go fund me is doing is using technology to empower people to help others. sometimes they're helping their family. sometimes it's themselves. a lot of times it's their community, and that was the core of -- that's the obama promise. >> so you're still doing good? >> it's the obama promise. we're a for-profit company. we want to do business. the better we do, more people will help each other. but the core obama promise was

not -- it gets lost in a lot of the -- but if you listen to the speech in 2007 and 2008, it's not, i'm going to do all these things for you. it's that we are going to do them together. we are going to come together and change our country. change comes from the bottom up. barack obama's background is similar to matt's, it's about grass-roots organizing. and what's most important about technology, good technology is about democratizing, about bringing power from institutions down to people. right? you look in terms of, like, what are the internet and the ability to blog, gave normal people the same power that newspapers had. periscope and meerkat, give the same power to people with a phone that television networks have. go fund me gives the same power to people that large non-profits have. that you can just see something in your community and you yourself can do it. you don't have to bake cookies.

doesn't have to be a bake sale or a raffle. you can decide use the power of your social network to raise money to solve a problem. that's inkrbly powerful to give people a chance to change their community. that's what led me to government in politics and that's what led to go fund me. >> i would just like to echo what dan said about public service and to draw that very deep, i think, emotional connection between a lot of the ethos that i see and feel in silicon valley and what the experience i had and others had in federal government or in any level of government. the team that saved health care.gov worked about 20 hours a day every day for about 150 days, in some cases. it was incredibly intense. it was sometimes i was not on the team, i was in that office

and was working on some parallel issues at the time, but these were people who were motivated by an intense desire to save health care for their fellow americans. and there were times when todd park, who was our boss -- i'm saying "our" because my colleague is in the audience -- would bring the letters that the president had received about the affordable care act into the office and read them. and there was one -- i think each letter hit various of us on the team differently. there was one that i can never forget him reading that was from a mother, who said, i have spent the past 20 years choosing between health care for myself and for my kids. and because i was able to sign up through health care.gov, i'm now going to see a doctor for the first time in a long time. i just thought, oh, my god. that's not a choice i've had to make. this is a choice she's made. and everybody on the team was just so inspired to do this amazing work.

and work, you know, we always joke at code for america, that when you end a code for america fellowship, you go to work at a start-up to have an easier job. people who work in government, particularly around technology, what they do, it's just profound. we saw that again very recently at code for america, we worked with the state of california this year to help them change the way they're approaching the procurement of the child welfare system. so it's very easy to get lost in the abstract things. it was going to be a $500 million or $600 million procurement. it was going to be very classic, old-school approach, waterfall methodology, five years to build, we wouldn't see anything until the end. these are the hallmarks of failed government technology programs. you can look at it and say, we have tools to bring to bear on that, we have different methodologies for procurement and different ways in atf and

then you're doing all that work in a very abstract way. and our team was coming home from a meeting in sacramento where they agreed to make the changes and reflected on the fact that this is not a piece of technology, this is the way that we take care of kids who are at risk in our state. there are 475,000 reports of abuse and neglect of children in our state. and when the technology doesn't work to manage those cases, those kids have bad outcomes. >> absolutely. >> i think that is such an important point that you're making. the technology is solving an issue. that's the point we're all making. i know i have to go to our questions from our audience, but i do want to end on one quick thing. dan, what you said about democratizing, that's what brigade is about. democratizing democracy. so we thank you for doing that. >> that should be our tag line. >> democratizing democracy. i was going to put that in my original question, but i liked democracy as your start-up.