the subject of syria. you could not get more tense in the body language between them. it seemed to be very cold. you know, the president also compressing a personal disappointment in feeling as though, you know, the russians had not lived up to what he had expected of not necessarily in treating the u.s. the way that they had expected based on relations in the past. the two men, again, not a particularly warm dynamic and there was a lot of discussion after their last appearance about the notable tension between them. host: reading from the top of the statement, " we reached a conclusion that there's not enough recent progress to hold a bilateral meeting with russian president newton, so the meeting sorussian president putin. the meeting has been canceled " guest: you have been hearing a

lot of talk, even more tension from congressional leaders pushing for the g 20 summit to be moved which was not going to happen or for the u.s. to consider withdrawal from the olympics, which are to take place in russia next year. the early reaction to this announcement has been positive. he had a comment from chuck schumer saying the president made the right decision. -- in the the press past that putin has been behaving like a schoolyard bully . host: moving ahead, what happens next? >> it will be interesting to see what russia reacts. there've been questions about the move with snowden and with others in standing up to the united states or being perceived

to stand up to the united states lays well domestically in russia. the question will be whether officials will think they have gone as far as they can go or to up the antent and want to be seen as standing their ground. the response from moscow will be interesting. host: the headline, amid snowden tension, obama cancels the newton meeting -- putin meeting. thank you for being with us. guest: thank you for having me. >> later today the president will visit with troops and families from camp pendleton in california. tonight -- >> if you were an invited guest of the madisons or in the mid- circle of family or friends, you would be invited into the driving room from the drawing room.

madison, in an atsual setting, would sit the head the table. her husband was at the center. dolly would direct the conversation and james would be able to engage in intimate or lively conversation with the people to his immediate right and left. set forle today is eight people. there could be as many as 20 people served in the dining room. that would not be unusual. indeed, dolly madison consider dining at montpelier to be so much more relaxing than entertaining in washington. she said it is less worry feeding 100 people at montpelier than 25 in washington. inour encore presentation continues at 9:00 tonight on c- span. balz discussedn

his recent book about the future of elections of america which details the 2012 campaign. this is about an hour. host: dan balz, thank you very much for being with us. guest: thank you, steve. host: the book is called "collision 2012," we will dig right in. in the middle of the book you write that presidential elections are often "retold from the inside out, as power and wisdom flows from the strategists arguing, yet they play out against the reality of an ever-changing country." guest: when you write a campaign book, to try to do is discuss the decision making a went on. to get a better sense of what strategists were thinking about, talking about, the key decisions

and motivations of the candidates. there is obviously another element to this. we could see it in 2012 and every election. one in 2012, it was the economy. was the economy just good enough to make it possible for him to win reelection? or was it going to be just bad enough to make him exceedingly vulnerable to defeat? that is one. also the changing demographics of the country. we have talked about this a lot in the wake of the election. the 27% share of hispanic vote that governor romney got, the problems republicans have, this is a changing country that is becoming more diverse all the time. it has a real impact on the shape on the electorate in a presidential year. the third element that i thought would be important would be a

partisan polarization i have seen. steve, it is around the country as well. if you think of yourself as a republican, 95% of you will vote for the republican candidate for president. similarly, if you think of yourself as a democrat. it is hard for campaigns to overcome those forces. sometimes ads are effective, but not for very long. they work to get out the vote. the obama campaign had an effective get-out-the-vote operation. what i wanted to try to do with that was draw attention to the fact that this is a book that tries to look at the campaign from both directions. host: two things, on the mitt romney side, your interview with mitt romney after the election, it's written about and often a comparison is drawn between what he said about the 47% and what

his father said about the vietnam war. is that a fair comparison? guest: i do not know about that. we know that his father disqualified himself because he said that when he went to vietnam he had been brainwashed by the generals about what was going on there. it was a comment that was comment that crippled him. in this case the 47% comment reinforced the idea the governor romney was out of touch and not in touch with the middle class. host: in your interview at the end of your book, what did he say about that? guest: his defense was that he did not say what people thought he said. we were at his home, and when i raised the issue he said, why did you bring this up? he went and found the notes he had made and he began to read it to me.

he contended that what he said was not that he was writing off 47% of the electorate would never take control of their own lives, and that those were the words he said on that videotape. host: chapter 47 of your book, what was his demeanor when you sat down with him? guest: he was open and friendly. i would not say that he was defensive. it was a good interview. i was pleasantly surprised that he was willing to do that. i was told of you have an hour, he wound up talking for an hour and a half. there were a few areas where he was processing what happened and

coming to terms of why he had lost. there were other parts of the conversation where i thought he was quite candid and open about himself, some of the problems of the campaign the knowledge and that the president had run a more effective campaign than he had. host: it says here that the romney campaign never knew what hit them in terms of the technology of the obama campaign. guest: the obama campaign in 2008 got a lot of credit for breaking the mold about campaigns by using social media and technology, by taking advantage of the internet. jim messina, their campaign manager, said to me early on

that this is a different time from 2008 and technology has changed radically. they have set out to harness and attempt to exploit it, if you will, getting their voters out on election day. host: they hired software engineers, data experts, number- crunchers, digital designers, video producers by the score, hundreds. no campaign had ever invested so hard in analytics. guest: that is the case. they created a very large tech operation to integrate their various lists of voters, people who had supported them with money. they had a lot of different lists. they needed software to talk to one another. you cannot buy that off of a shelf. you cannot develop that in three weeks. they began work on that the minute they went to chicago in

the spring of 2011. even before that, they had in a sense been experimenting with analytics. they modeled how likely people were to volunteer. it was the modeling of the elections in the midterms as a way to test their modeling apparatus. they invested far more than anyone had. the view of the romney campaign was that they had so much staff in florida, initially it was the thinking that this was inefficient, and in talking to the obama campaign their thinking was that this money spent on technology is making more efficient the volunteers on the street. host: i would like to remind viewers that you can join us on

twitter or facebook. in the summer of 2011, there was this exchange between governor mitt romney and some of the people on hand for this traditional, quintessential iowa event. >> social security, medicare, medicaid account for half of federal spending. >> that is a lie. >> about half of federal spending. if we are ultimately not just this year but over the coming decades going to be able to balance the budget without spending more than we take in, we have to make sure that the promises we make are promises we can keep. there are various ways of doing that. >> corporations. >> corporations are people, my friend. everything that corporations earn ultimately goes to people.

>> where do you think it goes? [laughter] [yelling] >> human beings, my friend. >> that line became a defining moment early in the campaign. >> absolutely, it stuck with him throughout the entirety of the campaign, casting him as someone who was more of a friend of the wealthy and less of the middle class. it was an image that he was unable to shake. i spoke to people who were doing other focus groups. that was a repeated aspect of the way the people saw him, as something of a distant figure that did not quite connect. one of the reasons was that thought he was very wealthy and have lived a different life and were not sure that he understood their lives. there is a line that i included

in the book that came from a mitt romney campaign focus group in which one person said that he had been too rich for too long, feeding the idea that he was out of touch. >> here is what he told you in chapter 27, "i recognize that there was a drawback in my candidacy by virtue of my situation, massachusetts and my position of wealth." guest: they were all factors. we now know from this interview and a conversation i had with his son, that was a factor that made him wonder if he was the right person to be the nominee as you is making the final decision about whether to run. i think these factors weighed pretty heavily on him. he said that if someone else had

been out there who i thought would have been better, i might not have run. he specifically mentioned jeb bush as someone, if he had gotten in the race, romney might not have. he said that as the campaign took shape, he felt he was in fact the best of the republican field, but there was a sense of hesitation or doubt about whether he was a good fit for the republican party. he knew that it would be a tough reelection campaign. host: joining us from one of the battleground states in cleveland, ohio, loretta. caller: good morning. guest: good morning. caller: wow, i am going to pick up your book. i am just fascinated with anything romney now.

i would like to know is your takeaway, with the romney campaign, the autopsy that was done. i see that the republicans have learned nothing. they have a war on women, a war on workers, a war on students. war on minorities, blacks, latinos. who is left to vote for them? they have not learned anything. if romney would have taught them anything, it would have been to let's all try to get along. but with their corporate mentality, i think that 47% statement not only to find mitt romney, but also the supreme court, who gave that decision on citizens united. guest: the 47% comment was terribly damaging, and the governor recognizes that in the aftermath of the election.

he tried to talk his way through it, out of it at the time, but he recognized that it really hurt his campaign. but the romney campaign had good moments and bad moments. if you look at it during the primaries, they did a good job of weathering a lot of the storms that came at them. he proved to be a pretty good debater. they had a good plan as to which states they were likely to win and which they were not, figuring out that whenever they had to win a race, they were able to do it. i think they had a difficult time making the pivot from the primary campaign to the general election campaign. the line about self-deportation

put him in a spot for those who were here illegally. that hurt him. he did not find a way to move away from that. it cost him in the hispanic vote. the other thing they did not do effectively was put out in front of people the mitt romney that those around him could see and believe in and who they thought was very likable. there was a debate inside the campaign, a running debate, how do you humanize governor romney? i do not think they were ever able to do that very well. i asked him why he didn't run advertising in the summer of 2012 that was aimed more at his biography and talk about who he was in some of the things he had done. his answer was people would look at them and then of course his wife loves him and his children think he's great and of course some of the people who he worked with would say he is a good person to work with. he said he did not think those would be effective.

he said he felt that the most effective thing he had to do during the summer of 2012 was try to put president obama on the defensive. they were not able to do that effectively. host: the obama campaign to find -- defined the romney campaign in 2012. what was the impact that? guest: there is no doubt that they defined him in the summer. once the republican primaries were over the obama campaign was ready to go with a plan of attack in their advertising. he wanted to go after him over his role at bain capital. they wanted to keep him on the defensive and define a way that disqualifies him from making the statement that he knew better than president obama on how to handle the economy.

the romney campaign came out of the primaries with very little money. they were struggling to replenish their campaign war chest and they had a clear disadvantage on that front. they also chose not to respond directly to those attacks. there are political sciences that look at this and say that in the end that did not mean a lot. the polls by the end of the summer were not significantly different or very close to where they had been during the beginning of the summer. if you talk to the people in both campaigns, they believe that was an important defining defining period of the campaign. it put a ceiling on governor romney. as he was able to start the comeback after labor day it made it more difficult for him to get all the way up to a winning

majority. host: jonathan is waiting from west palm beach, florida. good morning. caller: i have a lot to say so i will try to be brief. the white vote is 70% of the electorate. if mitt romney had gotten 70% of the hispanic vote he still would have lost. president. did doing the math, only 20% elects a president.

do the math, 20%. not all of them are eligible to vote. people stayed home and did not vote in that is what i am curious to know. who are the people who did not vote? if you look historically at all of the elections, it is always 52% to 48% or 53% to 47%. one side is never going to get that 47% because that is usually the difference in the numbers. guest: the question of the shape of the electorate was one of the most important in defining the election. the obama campaign had a much better sense of what the election electorate would look like than the romney campaign. the share of the white vote that makes up the totality of the electorate continues to go down for the reasons that we know, the country is becoming more diverse.

hispanics are the fastest- growing part of the population. the obama campaign always believed that the white share of the electorate would be about 72%. that is what it ended up as. the romney campaign, i think they thought it would be higher than that. it certainly was higher than that in the midterm elections. the midterm electorate is often different than the presidential electorate. the obama campaign knew what that was going to be in the sense that that gave them an advantage. president obama did poorly among white voters. he got the lowest share of white voters as any democrat who has won the presidency in modern times. because white voters were a smaller share and he had a small support of nonwhite voters he was able to win the election. the romney campaign was surprised by the nonwhite share of the electorate but also by

the share of the electorate, democrats versus republicans. >> the other question going into the campaign, what did mitt romney stand for? remember when romney was pro- choice, pro-gay? guest: when he ran in 2008 he got hit very hard for having changed positions on abortion. on gay rights, he has never been for same-sex marriage but he talked in a much more open way than ted kennedy when he ran against him in 1994. in a sense he had moved in that direction. in 2012, there are those that

didn't particularly trust him. there was always an element, he had to convince the base that he was a reliable conservative. he did not play up social issues in the same way they did in the 2008 campaign. we want to make this about the economy. if he is going to win the presidency it is going to be on the basis of the economy. they tried to steer clear of those. in any republican primary election that comes into play. there's an interesting statistic or observation in the book. if you look at the share of the vote in the primary of evangelical christians versus those who say they are not evangelicals, if that was above 50%, mitt romney lost that primary or caucus. if it was below, he won.

it was clear there was a republican electorate that was resistant to him. host: in october the in employment rate came down. the number had dropped. guest: when i did postelection interviews, some people said, explain to me from your vantage point why governor romney lost. that was the first thing they pointed to. in the fall the economy got a little bit better and the unemployment rate had dropped. it was still high by historical standards. that was a psychological boost that they gave to president obama. the romney campaign thinks that was a very important factor in the defeat. host: on the final weekend, of the olympic games, mitt romney

announcing paul ryan. he sat down with bob schieffer in a "60 minutes" interview. let me share with you a portion of what governor romney said about the selection of paul ryan and his budget. [video clip] >> america has a choice, a very clear choice. are we going to continue to spend a trillion dollars more every year than we take in and passed that burden to our children? >> there's no question your campaign has been making this a referendum on barack obama. there are those who say you are making it a referendum on paul ryan's budget plan. >> i have my plan, and that is the budget plan we are going to run on. host: if you select paul ryan, who is known for his budget, why walk away from it one day after announcing he is your running mate. guest: it is a little baffling. it is one of those things that they did not think through that part of it as they made that decision.

host: that was one of the biggest documents paul ryan put forth in 2012. guest: but they knew there was a political risk in picking paul ryan. they knew there is a risk of everybody on the short list. there is no perfect candidate for vice president. i think what they felt was they wanted to elevate the debate in the campaign. they wanted to make this the big issue of spending the role of government. by picking paul ryan they felt they would put that brought topic on the table. there were elements of the ryan budget that governor romney disagreed with. i think in the end he felt that he was the nominee, and he is going to be the president if elected. it is going to be what he thinks, not what the vice

president thinks. it caused them some problems for a couple of weeks as people kept picking away he had to walk away from it. host: if you are joining us on c-span radio we are talking with dan balz. rick is joining us. independent line. good morning. caller: thank you for taking this call. mr. balz makes some rather interesting observations. i don't know how much his book goes into this. in a macro sense, the reason obama got elected was the i.t. people he had, data miners, was the media. the media never vetted this guy.

you have a president -- i am a former military -- i was amazed when fox with the only news organization that showed obama mispronouncing "corpsman" five times. host: was there a double standard? guest: i think in 2008 president obama probably got better press than john mccain did. in 2000 john mccain got great press when he ran against george w. bush in the primaries. in 2008 he was on the other end of that. those things ebb and flow a little bit. i do not think in anyway those are the decisive in the way of

presidential campaigns come out. i think if you talk to the romney people they felt that governor romney was unfair at different points along the way. i used to get e-mails about things that were being written or said or talked about. in general, i think those things balance out. in this campaign in particular there was never any question about vulnerabilities or weaknesses in terms of what happened with the economy. in a sense that both of them had had was they have to deal with. host: on twitter -- guest: perhaps so. especially with his medicare plan and his proposal to make a voucher out of that. i don't know it would have been significantly better had he picked someone else.

host: jim messina asked to pledge that they do not rerun the 2008 campaign. jim messina explained that in their bid for reelection, both jimmy carter and george herbert walker bush tried to rerun their first campaign. guest: the point was the world changes from the first election to when you run a reelection campaign. he was a now a president with a record. he was not the bright person he had been in the 2008 campaign. they knew the country was polarized around his performance in office and around him. on the one hand they would have

to run a more negative campaign than they had run in 2008. he was trying to say we cannot try to replicate the mood of that first campaign. as we have talked earlier, technology had changed dramatically between 2008 and 2012. jim messina was struck by the use of smart phones and communicating through smart phones. he was saying to the president we have to find a way to make this a different operation. one thing the president said was, whatever you do we want this to continue to be a grassroots operation. that was a hallmark of the 2008 campaign as it was in 2012. host: you've written about this before. what was remarkable was the 16

year span on the campaign website between bob dole in 1996 and where we were in 2012. guest: technology changes everything, whether it is the telegraph, radio, tv, or the internet. it has had a profound effect on society and politics. the way politics is practiced and conducted, i have no doubt 2016 will look different than 2012. there are things on the horizon that you or i may not have any idea of at this point it will have an impact on how people conduct campaigns in 2016. people are going to go to school on what the obama campaign did technologically. it will be hard to replicate in many ways simply because it took the obama campaign a lot of time and money to do that. most of the people running in 2016 do not have organizations yet in place that could begin to do that. the other thing is if you try to replicate that campaign, you

need to run the campaign in the moment. what did the obama campaign do? and how do we make that better based on stuff that is coming online? host: his new book is "collision: 2012." our next caller is on the line. caller: he would say anything to win the election. he was so far to the right. and then he leaned back toward the middle somewhat. that was the etch-a-sketch moment. guest: the etch-a-sketch moment he referred to was from romney's key spokesman. he was asked what was done to make the pivot.

he said it is like and etch-a- sketch. you shake it up and you get to start fresh in the general election. there are some people who took that as a sign that governor romney was going to abandon all of his conservative positions and there were some conservatives who were alarmed at that. to some extent it is not an incorrect statement. at the beginning of a general election people do take a fresh look at the nominee. the question is, how do you make that shift from appealing to a primary electorate? how do you make that pivot to talk to the country at large? particularly talking to the people who are one-sided.-- undecided.

this was hard for governor romney to do. they struggled with this and there are some people who think that it wasn't until the first presidential debate in october that that mitt romney reappeared, the more moderate mitt romney. host: i want to get to that point in a couple of minutes. let me ask you about two convention moments. first of all, at the republican convention. you write about clint eastwood and what was happening inside the bubble of the romney campaign as they were watching clint eastwood on stage talking to a chair. guest: they were just as astonished as anyone else. if you are an average person watching that, you probably thought this was what was planned, that he was going to pull out a chair and talk to it as if it was a president sitting in there. they thought he was going to do what's was that republican fundraisers, make a pitch on behalf of government romney. instead he got out there and began to ramble.

he was scheduled to talk for only a few minutes. he talked for 12. they watched this and they could not believe what they were seeing. if you're clint eastwood you figure you do what you want to do. the interesting thing is the romney team had talked to him, going over in an implicit way how it is going to unfold. they thought everybody was on the same page. as they watched this, there were several romney people sitting together, they were talking among themselves and check their cell phones trying to figure out what in the world is going on. this is not what they wanted.

host: one moment from the democratic convention, vice president joe biden -- [video clip] >> my fellow americans, we now find ourselves at the hinge of history. and the direction we turn is literally in your hands. it has been truly a great honor to serve you and serve with barack, who has stood up for you for the past four years. i know the incredible confidence he has in all of you. i know this man. yes, the work of recovery is not yet complete. but we are on our way, the journey of hope is not yet

finished, but we are on our way, and the cause is not fully accomplished, but we are on our way. i say to you tonight, with absolute confidence, america's best days are ahead and we are on our way. in light of that horizon, for the values that define us, for the ideals that inspire us, there is only one choice. that choices is to move forward and finish the job and reelect president barack obama. host: for those that remember, ted kennedy's speech in 1980 echoing the hope still lives and the dream never dies. your take on the vice president's role in all of this? guest: his role was to be as supportive as he could be to boost the ticket and to speak in many ways to the democratic

base. one of the goals of the obama campaign was going into the convention was to make sure the democratic base was energized. there was some question about it. i think they thought they were going to get democratic votes at the percentages but would they get the turnout that they needed? they went into the convention. vice president biden is good at speaking into the base. he played an important role after the denver debate. the president had a bad night in denver. governor romney had a very good night. there are a lot of democrats wondering does the president really want to win reelection. why wasn't he more energetic? why wasn't he more enthusiastic in that debate? what is the matter with him? there was some demoralization in the rank and file among democrats. one of the things vice president

biden was asked to do was go into the debate with congressman ryan and bring that base back. he was very tough on paul ryan, mocking him in some ways and verbally going after him. it is exactly what was needed. the vice president played that role very effectively in that debate. host: we have that moment from the first debate in denver. going back to your point about a new media landscape that younger voters get their political information from left-wing comedians. colbert and jon stewart has played the political narrative. guest: no question about it. they are a big force and it does affect younger voters.

host: joining us from canton north carolina. good morning. caller: good morning. what you just said about the comedians, the comedians are part of our biggest problem, as are the republicans. we put an african-american on the ticket, to be an uncle tom and a token to the white man's ways, in 2008, we had a woman on the ticket. in 2012 we had a woman in the primaries. both of them were deemed to be ignorant, stupid, and comedians like bill maher says they are sluts and whores and obama still takes his million dollars.

my question is we are not going to get a fair shake. guest: democrats feel they will never get a fair shake through conservative talk radio. i think the larger point that is raised by this question goes back to something that we talked about, the degree of polarization in this country. people's sources of information are now somewhat polarized. people tend to go find information from sources that sort of agree with their point of view of the world. as long as you have that, what you have is moments or media that reinforce people's positions, rather than creating a discussion across the gap in the gulf that exist. host: tony is from littleton, colorado. caller: thank you.

for me, i think the big issue that impacted the 2012 race and will impact races going forward in 2016 was the impact of the tea party on romney's positions. he seemed like the tormented candidate throughout the campaign, picking positions that he did not really believe in. can you give your perspective on the emergence of the tea party in what i think was 2009 and how it impacted in 2012, and if you think it is going to have a big impact on 2016 going forward. guest: very good question. i think there is no doubt that the tea party in 2009 and its influence on the midterm elections in 2010 had a very powerful effect on all of the republicans who were seeking the republican nomination. they recognize there was a very sizable elements of the party's base.

they wanted to make sure that they got their share of the majority of that vote in the primaries. i think it did push all of the candidates, including mitt romney, somewhat further to the right during the primaries. it is then hard to get back to get back to the center or of what constitutes as a center in american politics. the question of what happens going forward is an important one and i think the republican party right now is somewhat split on this. we have seen a lot of fissures in the republican coalition right now over issues ranging from immigration to spending and other things. we don't know until we really get into the 2016 campaign how powerful the tea party movement will be in terms of mobilizing votes or in shaping the debate. i think that the republican candidates will in some way have

to make a choice as to how much they say they want to go for the tea party portion of the party or how much they want to get some of that that we don't want to do that in a way that compromises us for the general election in 2016. host: on a more serious note, do you believe the romney campaign ever accepted the fact that they overestimated themselves? guest: one, incumbent presidents are hard to defeat. the notion that the romney campaign should have easily defeated the president is something of a misnomer. there is no doubt in my mind that the obama campaign had a better fix on how to run the campaign than did the obama team.

the obama team had some very good people and smart people operating. they did some things that were effective. they did misjudge what the electorate was going to look like. to some extent they were not able to focus on the issues in the way they had wanted to. there was this question of would the campaign be a referendum or a choice? would it be a referendum or a choice between two candidates? i think starting out the romney campaign thought this would be a referendum on the economy and that the economy was bad enough. in the end people would turn to governor romney. obviously it was going to take more than that. that was part of the reason they were not able to win. host: obama versus romney and the future of elections of america, robert is joining us from new york city. caller: good morning.

i wanted to make a comment, i happened to be a member of the dnc during this period. i continued, there was a strategy by the president and by the party. they went out of their way to recruit 4 million poor people who had never voted before. i think that made all the difference in the election. many of them were given obama phones. they managed to get all of those people out who they enrolled for the first time. that made a difference in this election. i want to hear what they have to say about that. guest: the obama campaign looked at the electorate in every state.

it was a campaign in a series of battlegrounds. as they were preparing the campaign one of the things they tried to do was figure out what kind of vote they would need to get a majority. and then how you would assemble the number of people they needed to do that. they needed to register a lot of new voters to get the number of people that they needed to win. they did very sizable voter registration drives. then they had to figure out, particularly for new voters, how to get the mobilized and how to get them out to vote. a lot of the targeting operation

was about that. host: which states do you think swung in the president's favor specifically? guest: the hispanic vote was an important part of that victory in florida. in colorado it was important. i would cite those two states at a minimum. the margins made a difference. host: this is from the first debate in denver. guest: it was one of the most interesting moment of the election. it shook up the campaign but not in the ways we might have thought about the time. host: here is the exchange between president, governor romney, and jim lehrer. [video clip] >> with regard to 97% of the

businesses they are not taxed. those businesses that are in the last three percent happen to employee half of all the people who work in small businesses. those are the businesses that employ one quarter of all of the workers in america. your plan is to take their tax rate from 35% to 40%. i talked to a guy who has a very small business. he has an electronics business in st. louis. he has four employees. he said he and his son calculated taxes. federal, state sales tax, state property tax, gasoline tax, it added up to 50% of what they earned. your plan is to take the tax rate on successful small businesses from 35% to 40%. the national federation of independent businesses say that will cost 700,000 jobs. i don't want to cost jobs. my priority is jobs. what i do is i bring down the

tax rates, lower the deductions and exemptions -- the same idea behind bowles-simpson. there's nothing better to getting us to a balanced budget than having more people working, earning more money, paying more taxes, that is the most effective and efficient way to get this budget balanced. host: we had the split screen so you could see the president's reaction throughout. why was that an important moment? guest: because he did badly at that debate, governor romney was at the top of his campaign. he was very well prepared and the president seemed lethargic. he seemed like at some point he did not want to be there. he was not aggressive in responding to some of the things governor romney was saying and doing. it created an impression of a very effective republican nominee against a lackluster performance on the part of the

president. it shook up the campaign for a number of days. host: richard is joining us on the republican line. caller: people are uninformed. i want somebody to love my country. obama does not like my country. we all know that now. mitt romney created jobs. the keystone pipeline that obama planned, he would have gotten rid of. it is a disaster. i investigated rush limbaugh, he is great. what did obama really do for five years? nothing. and now the country is going in a wrong way.

i cannot understand how mitt romney lost. host: you put up a point which gives me it chance to talk about this piece, this column in "the washington post." the question you pose, which ,irection for the divided gop what is your answer? caller: both governor romney and president obama love the country. there is no doubt about that. i know people can disagree on that. the question for the republican party is in presidential election years, as we now know, the electorate at this point is somewhat democratic. the republicans are going to

have to figure out how to get from 47% or 48% to 51%. how do they do that he echo do they go in a more conservative direction? there are some republicans who think they have not had a true test or the right candidate to make the argument on behalf of a conservative philosophy, that governor romney was not able to do it effectively, john mccain was not able to do it effectively in 2008. they want to see someone who can make the republican conservative argument more effectively than those two candidates have been able to do. you hear from some republicans. we have to figure out a way to address the new america that now exists. if we are as reliant on white voters as we are, we are going to struggle to win presidential elections. we have to reach more minority voters, particularly hispanics.

i think that is one of the debates that is going to play out particularly in the nomination fight in 2016. host: larry is joining us. caller: good morning. how did "the washington post" let democrats get by -- he was a cancer survivor. we don't do that in georgia. you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. host: you need to explain. guest: i am not familiar with that. host: this is about martin o'malley, democratic governor for maryland. there is a crisis of confidence facing the country and getting the clearest terms yet that he is thinking seriously about running in 2016.

guest: it is not a surprise he is thinking seriously about it. we have known he is looking at the possibility of running for some time. it was interesting the way he framed a message there as trying to do something about a crisis of confidence in the country. there is such declining confidence in the government's ability in washington. that element that he is going to go after if he decides to become a candidate. anybody thinking about running for the democratic nomination in 2016 obviously has to think about what it will be like to run against hillary clinton if she chooses to become the candidate. we don't know if she is going to do that. for martin o'malley preparation is probably wise.

host: for democratic women, a headline, hillary or bust. guest: i would make a broader point, which is that the democratic bench is not particularly deep as you look to 2016, obviously former secretary clinton stands above everyone in terms of popularity within the the party by a large margin, including above vice president biden. the rest of the potential candidates are not particularly well known. if she chooses not to run than the party is going to be in a much different situation than if she does. host: your column on whether republicans in 2016 will take a less confrontational approach. let us talk about rand paul and ted cruz.

guest: they represent a younger guest: they represent a younger generation in the republican party, and a particularly hard edge of conservatism with ted cruz. he is kind of the conservative message. and he is exciting republicans around the country with that message. rand paul has a libertarian brand, which is different from some other elements of conservatism. he already got into a dustup with gov. christie of new arsey, but he also has conservative set of views that he thinks might play better with some in the party and others. new're going to run island, hampshire and south carolina. they're thinking about what they are trying to say. they're trying to figure out what kind of response they can

basis ofunning on the their candidacy. for dan balser of the washington post. balzst: last call for dan ." the "washington post the policies of rand, whohe -- ayn wrote the fountainhead and atlas shrugged. her policy was that only the rich should win. this has been a republican policy for 30 years. one of the debates

going on in the republican party right now, not terribly visible, but will top out at some point, it's how they do a better job of speaking to the middle-class. there are some on a hill fiending about this. some people who are running for president to our thinking about this. they recognize that was a deficiency in the campaign of 2012 message. find a way to marry the conservative philosophy with something that is appealing to the middle class, that they will struggle in these elections. there is a way to talk about the without compromising principal or radical change in their policy, but to try to find ways to target those policies more effectively to the middle class. you writeour book "campaign 2012 settled little. --

guest: we always think that elections, in particular presidential elections settle arguments going on in the country, and sometimes they do. are in a time when the elections are in an ongoing debate where the sides have different views about what is going on and the shape of the country and these elections do not necessarily resolve those debates, particularly when you end up with a divided government as we have. if they hadt clear control of all three there would be a lot that would be

different. the president has been talking to some republican senators and it has not produced a lot yet. but the senate has passed an .mmigration bill the reality is that we are quite a polarized nation. essence, the red parts of the country have gotten more red and the blue parts more blue. is decided by five or fewer points in only a few states. to two are having a struggle .alk to one another is the author of a book called collision 2012. thanks for being with us.

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] theere is a preview coverage of the iraq war from the new america foundation. >> i was not coming home and seeing my history of the war reflected. i did not see what i knew reflected out there. the american people in particular did not seem to know what i knew. i was learning all the time from my colleagues. the book is also an oral history. i was thinking, the american people don't know this at a certain point. and they won't know unless i do something to collaborate id or collect it. it is basically putting the

material in one place. all of these things are floating around out there and just need .o be put together i think it applies to a lot of photojournalist. and there were some great newspaper articles and magazine articles, but i did not see it all in one place. i talked to a lot of photographers and i said, are wary taking these pictures? you know you could not get them published. it is the burn, charred bodies of the american contractors that were there at the bridge in 2004. there's a crowd of people stepping on them and mutilating them and then there was no way we're going to let these pictures be published, no way. the photographers why

they took them. they said, we take them for history. we know we cannot get them out there now, but someday people will be ready to look at this. and these pictures will be there. and i'm not trying to glorify the violence. just the opposite. book, these photos, hopefully, they will stand as a warning. hopefully, there will be something that we look at in the future and not want to repeat. >> that discussion hosted by the new america foundation today at 6:00 p.m. eastern and c-span will host a town hall about media coverage of wars, including censorship and national security. we will be taking your phone calls and comments beginning at 7:00 p.m. eastern tonight. spoke at the

global education summit hosted agency for international development. here is part of what he had to say. >> when i was in the government the first time, i felt that when i left to the car to give one of the key notes for the world that it was so much work to get together the facts to right back. and i vowed that when i left, and weber was in the government would not have that. that is -- whoever was in the government would not have that. that is where barbara and i collected the spirit we wanted it one place all of the amazing economic data that shows that education is good for growth and agriculture and reading and

health and infant mortality. we put it with all of the studies so that it was available and easy. and i've been told that other people have done it, but the humility that i have always remembered is that all of that work and research did not even come close to the impact of wind -- when the cameras started putting the pictures on the face of little girls in afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. people just simply sat there and saw those faces and they said, that is just wrong. why shouldn't they be able to go to school? why should a terrorist be able to keep this little girl who wants to go to school from going to school? and our kids are here are praying -- and rain for a snow day every day. inyou can see these remarks

the c-span video library at c- span.org. president obama is in california today visiting with troops at camp pendleton. he will be breaking remarks later this afternoon at 3:50 p.m. eastern. we will bring them to you live here on c-span. ♪ >> if we turn away from the needs of others, we align ourselves with those of falsehoods that are bringing about the separation. >> we are to take advantage of it. of aesity is nothing short public health crisis in this country. especially when someone has their own agenda. >> there is so much influence.

>> i think there is a window on the past to see what was going on with american women. >> she is really the only one in the world he can trust. >> many of the women who were first lady's, overwhelmingly, where riders. >> in many cases, they were probably more interested in them as human beings because they are not defined by political ambition. prexy go to the white house today -- >> if you go to the white house today, it is edith roosevelt's white house. much lookingtoo down and i think it was a little >> i think, in every case, the first lady is -- has

done what figure personality and interest. >> she later wrote in her myself neveraid, i made any decision. riley decided what was important and when to bring it to my husband. stop and think about how much power that is. that is a lot of power. >> part of the battle against cancer is to fight the fear that accompanies the disease. >> she transformed the ways we look at these bugaboos and made peopleible for countless to survive and flourish as a result. i do not know how many presidents realistically have that kind of impact on the way we live our lives. >> just walking around the white house grounds, constantly reminded about all of the people

who have lived there before, and particularly, all of the women. >> first ladies, in flint and image. produced in cooperation with the white house historical association season two premieres september 9, as we explore the modern era and first ladies from edith roosevelt to michelle obama. c-span, we bring public affairs events from washington directly to you, put you in iraq congressional hearings, white house events, briefings and conferences -- putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, briefings, and conferences. created by the cable-tv industry 34 years ago and funded by your local cable or satellite provider now you can watch us in hd. institution'sgs

michael heyman tuesday said the defense cuts coming next year -- theael o'hanlon said defense cuts coming next year could be the most harmful. he was joined by others from the american enterprise institute. he said that there is no way that america can't achieve its strategic goals if the sequestered -- can achieve its thetegic goals if sequestered remains in place. >> good morning, ladies and jehlen. -- gentleman. i am marvin mckelvin. i resident senior fellow here at brookings and a senior adviser here for a crisis reporting. august 2011 which is only two years ago congress passed and the president signed into law

-- >> way back in august 2011, which is only two years ago congress passed and the president signed into law a legislative monstrosity called the budget control act. it was a way of doing something when nothing seemed worse. at least at that time. a joint committee was set up to control the spiraling deficit. congress warned that if they fail to come up with a solution sequestration would automatically although. these cuts have now begun. -- would automatically follow. meaning, massive cuts in defense and other programs. those cuts have now begun. the pentagon was already prepared to cut 150 billion dollars over the next 10 years. sequestration would require $500 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. last week check hagel warned -- defense secretary heigl soberly warned that cut of that magnitude would not only affect entitlement such as salary, housing, education and the like but it would since readiness and capability.

if the u.s. had been ready it is necessary to fight two wars at the same time with these cuts. that would no longer seem to be possible. what to do? defense strategy would have to be radically altered. what do we do in the macro and micro sense? we have asked highly effective budgetary experts to explain reality and options to us. they are a resident fellow at the american enterprise institute's and if i got this right, during the last presidential campaign she helped governor romney. mackenzie egland. the governor's loss should in no way be extract to mckinsey. [laughter] the other is a senior fellow here.

michael o'hanlon. recently our panelist turned out an ope-ed "urging congress to reverse sequestration." why don't we start with you? then we will go on to mike and i will ask you a question and we will finish at 11:30. >> thank you for moderating. it is a pleasure to be here. that's only do we recently author the op-ed in the wall street journal about some of these issues, we met with secretary hagel at a meeting last week. we talked about some of what was discussed during that conversation.

i think you have set the ground very well. sequesters not the starting point. so much in washington feels like we are always starting at square one. this is the fourth year of budget cuts. the job done has been well under way. there were a series of capabilities ever since. there has been almost $1 trillion taken out of current or past defenses every year before sequestration. they are constantly banging the drum. that is why you hear them talk endlessly about how damaging sequestration is. this is not the first dollar of defense cuts nor is it the first capability or capacity that is being unwound.

a lot of the things we will talk about our overdue. overdue. so many of the choices that the pentagon had recently laid out, i think that should have been under consideration for years ago. .- four years ago not to say that a lot of the defense cuts were not of value or utility. this is not their first efficiency journal. -- efficiency drill. there were a lot of things done rightly and wrongly. i'm not sure the lessons learned have plugged in. what we have now is the defense department and congress that continues to have to go back to the same money and priorities for dod every year. we're doing this on an annual basis. we are doing it piecemeal. it is chipping away at the cuts -- bigsed to big richer

picture strategic planning, inking about this. -- thinking about how we do this. we really do have to live with this. how do we handle this for 10 years? we see what we saw in 2013. we're going to start to talk about serious change in planning. and it does not help to have a trillion dollars have already on the table. >> pick it up. by the way, mackenzie cannot be lamed by governor romney's loss. she has been polite enough to not remind us that she is from georgia. and the event the braves are something like a 100 games ahead of the washington nationals. i appreciate her restraint very much. this has been very well framed.

some of the additional budget cuts that are now being considered i think are ok. we do not have the exact same view. i do not want to suggest that everything i say she would endorse. we think there are room for efficiencies. some of them are that you can accomplish then. the congress to authorize them and get people to reform at way of places like the department of defense,they are worth doing. in the briefing that we heard last week from secretary hagel and his team, which develop some of the ideas that were also expressed by deputy secretary carter. we saw an estimate that perhaps $40 billion could be saved over 10 years for new efficiencies. that is on top of the other efficiencies that were already identified as part of other budget cuts reviews. it is worth pointing out, and congress is not yet authorized many of those previous efficiency. we are even deeper in the hole than we thought.

toare not going to have persuade congress to change their minds or find other ways to save comparable amount of money. let's say these are authorized. some of these efficiencies could save somewhere around $40 billion over 10 years. every time he asked the pentagon to try harder and go deeper they will probably find another 5 billion or 10 billion there. on balance there's never going to be the end of all cuts. 40 billion. let's say we can do that. then there is another examination of possible savings which we wrote about in this wall street journal op-ed 10 days ago. they have to do with things like reductions in certain elements of military compensation or reductions.

these are not easy. they are not inherently desirable. [cell phone ringing] the idea that we should cut the compensation is not proper phrasing. we would like to make sure that every possible benefit that can be proposed that the received. certainly wounded warriors. certainly the families of deployed soldiers. certainly troops trying to get a g.i. bill so they can transition. all these people deserve compensation that is not hindered or compromise. -- butple would be the there are certain ways that military benefits have not always been modified or streamlined to accommodate the way in which we live. an example would be the prevalence of commissaries.

they have plenty of walmarts and others. they are not trivially easy. i would not call them efficiencies. they are cutting back on the compensation or at least the rate of growth of compensation for our volunteer force that has done so much on behalf of all the rest of us over the last 12 years and before. you add up all of those savings, which are more or less along the lines of what i would agree with an similar to the ideas that we had in our op ed, that is another $85 billion in savings. if you add those, we are up to about $105 billion in additional -- $125 billion in additional 10-year savings. the good news it is almost the amount the president is proposing to save over his tenure latest budget plan. ofdo not have to make a lot cuts into military muscle. there is room for some cutting. in my recent book, i wound up

advocating about $200 billion in 10 year savings. i was prepared to recommend certain specific weapons programs. havel are going to different takes on what the right number of army divisions over grades or joint fighters or brigades or joint fighters we should purchase. my take was that in addition to this hundred and 20 or so maybe another 75 or $100 billion from cutting muscle. the pentagon seems to have arrived in a different place, in a similar place. then i had to keep going. this is not a criticism. this recent review, or skimmer it is called, by people who do not like having again from the pentagon budget. the idea here is that we're going to have to look for ways

to save this 500 billion dollars. sequestration is currently the law of the land. above and beyond the kinds of changes i have artie mentioned, the $400y mentioned, billion and efficiencies, the $85 billion in compensation reform, then some modest tweaks to capability. they did a couple of things i really do not like. i'm not sure the authors like it either. one of them is to downsize the u.s. army quite a bit more than is already being planned. and the way for other discussion topics. let me give you a sense of what is being considered. the u.s. army right now is just over half a million active-duty soldiers. it has grown up to about 560,000 during the peak of the iraq and afghanistan wars. we also mobilize a national guardsman. all of these numbers are quite modest compared to the 1980s,

the cold war. they had 800,000 were says. we have had a much larger u.s. army totals during korea, vietnam, world war ii. being down was a girl from the -- been down around 560,000, it was a growth from clinton years and from secretary rumsfeld's early thinking. it was not huge. --did not reverse because of the cuts that were made at the end of the cold war. now we are planning to go down to basically where they had been. the skimmer is envisioning reductions of maybe 420,000 are -- or perhaps even lower. i think this is a bad idea. the only problem i have with -- the -- the only place i

have a disagreement with the administration as they want. we do not want to do these counterinsurgency missions. this is the largest sentiment we had after vietnam for sentimental reasons. that sentiment when taken to excess leads you unprepared. you might have to do a counterinsurgency whether you like it or not. there is the old saying that you may not have interest in war but it may have an interest in you. we may not have an interest --more and counterinsurgency in counterinsurgency but what happens when not just syria stays mired but it begs even lebanon and jordan. what happened when the only --ential way out may see a

might be an international force in a trusteeship for some time? i could go on with hypothetical examples. they are going to sound a little crazy. they are going to as crazy in 2000 if i had mentioned afghanistan as the source of the 9/11 attack. you cannot always anticipate where war has sprung up. we have a lot more to discuss. the kind of cuts to the u.s. army at least being considered within the skimmer process i think are highly imprudent and leave us catching on to the latest fad in warfare. let's just pretend that we can decide in washington that we will never do it can. -- do it again. we made that kind of mistake before as a country. we should not do it now. >> thank you very much. let me ask all of you a quick question. do you think by the end of this

year congress will have acted on sequestration specifically for the military? and pulled it out of the law? >> they would have acted separately in each chamber. there will not be any change to the law. >> we can realistically look forward to the implementation of sequestration. >> i fear she may be right. if you look at the 2014 budget, the cuts that would be required by sequestration are so harsh for that year and there is no way to facing realistically, it -- to phase them in it's is even a worse debacle then sequestration over the 10-year horizon. it dwarfs even what we going through this summer. if compounds what we are going through this summer when almost half the airports and we are not fixing the stuff we need to i think congress may ultimately save $52 billion need to be softened.

they do not do anything that is fundamentally changing the basic logic of sequestration. this is possible just because the specter of sequestration next year so horrible for the armed forces. >> if that be the case, we're working with the reality of very massive cuts. you have given us a hint about the practical effect. the military exist to fulfill the desires and the strategic aims of the country. as i mentioned earlier, we have lived in this country for a long time with the belief that we will fight two wars at the same time. i assume he meat iraq and afghanistan. account not take into that there could be an outbreak

of hostility in korea which would involve the united states momentarily. the -- militarily. if we look at the strategy now and we look at the amount of money that is going to be available to be spent, what do you think will be the of that on the strategy itself? what would you recommend to the president? and he does listen to republicans, so it is okay. what would you recommend that he begin to consider as a change in the strategic aims of the u.s. to conform to the economic reality? >> i would not want to advocate that. they are already disappointed that they have officially moved -- the the outstanding longstanding contract. i am already disappointed that they have officially moved on from the outstanding contract. our planning are formally changing quietly to move away

from the two war simultaneous capability. >> where are we going now? >> the department is sticking by its guidance. they have the guidance last january. because the rebound to asia. it is basically an increasing emphasis on asia and to hold this in the middle east. it is at the expense of capability in other regions of the world. the military is shrinking. the budgets are falling too quickly. we do not have a choice. we do not have a single ship in southern command. you cannot say it is not eurozone. it is a relatively sound strategy. the independent panel called for a similar -- qdr

independent panel in 2010 which was a stress test for obama's first defense strategy. some argue the bush administration started this. it is a sound strategy so long asit is not zero-sum. i do not see any scenario where the congress could continue. what you are saying is that economically we will not be able to do that? >> their artie moving away from that in realistic time. -- >> what you're saying is we will not be able to do that economically. >> they are already moving away from that in a realistic time. the previous position is to not break the strategy. we also heard this reiterated at

the pentagon last week. the reviews were to move it as is. was evernow that it fully resourced. a quarter trillion in defense of budget cuts proposal by senator patty murray, larger than the president in his latest budget process. -- thatld have been the bend end the strategy -- the strategy. the full sequester would have stopped it. based on the double and triple whammy hold, we are not just talking sequester dollars anymore. we are talking about readiness holes that is also its own tab. that is something that we should talk about later. all of this combined me that any scenario is that a minimum bending strategy. i think it is a sound one.

i do not know how you can keep it. >> you have written that you go from two wars at the same time concept to one war plus two. smaller you mean engagements. could you spell that out for us? are think it is good you focusing on the strategic choices as we think about different levels. otherwise it seems like just moving around. there is room for debate even within the budget. it is not as if all wars came in the same cookie-cutter shape. the basic logic is that we thought we would have to fight iraq and north korea at the same time. it turned out to be iraq and afghanistan. you can debate whether you had to do both but we did do both. our military was too small. we were a little bit off in our calculations.

gatess why secretary ultimately had to increase the size of the army and marine corps. in the 2010 defense review, --y solved it to have it be the administration began to that the second war be definitive immediately. this is a 20 year old, if not more. whether there is room for the second one to be a little more gradual and a little less definitive. startedpresident obama to move a little bit away from that robust rhetorical emphasis. saddam hussein was gone. verythough iraq is still turbulent it is much more likely to be in overland invasion fed to it measures. -- and overland invasion threat to its neighbors. iran is still there.

it is also relatively unlikely to be an invasion threat. it could eat a lot of other threats to the invasion. that was 2010. are012 this guidance we referring to, the january --dance softened a little, the administration softened a little further and talked about the second war not needing to be thought of as an all out war at all. there is still the notion that you may have to punish an aggressor. there is some semantics here. with is like playing reality. >> a little bit. i would support the logic to that point. we did have to shift more of our focus towards our war with china.- the rise of not that i expect a war with china, but maturing china.

and also toward iran. bese are both unlikely to classic big land wars. they could be more maritime or a tear, cyber, special oriented complex. separating this i think was ok. now what we are seeing with the sequestration specter is the possibility of going down to something like one war and nothing else. maybe you can still do korea, maybe. entire armyt your is available for it. this is often not how the world works. we all know that our good friend mark just let things to try to -- martin just left brookings to try to negotiate this. in the unlikely event that he succeeds that could be an international implementation force backstopped by american troops to make that successful. they hit one of our embassies in one place and then we call a truce and then we go back to

normal. that is pretty optimistic. there are a number of scenarios. chance to havet to reinforce some of our allies in the gulf with american forces. that is why i talk about one plus two. you should be able to do one all out war and to simultaneous smaller missions. like korea, heaven forbid. and the two smaller missions could be long-lasting. hopefully they are multilateral. they could be long-lasting. that is where i come up with an army that should be around 420. other estimates are 400,000 or less, and i think that is too small. >> what is the part of the world that the united states military must be focused on more than any other? >> in this moment it is the middle east. strategically, the defense

department has to do both. they have to think about the world as it is in this very moment and reality. what is happening? and things simmering and brewingand conflict breaking out in crises everywhere. then think of buying 10 or 20 years. they need to do both. >> presumably they are. >> they are. if you look at the example the budget request from last year, the immediate concern is the middle east. i think that is exactly right. >> that means what? break that down. mike spoke about iran. one could think about syria. one could think about the huge problem in egypt. there is everything going on in north africa. what the middle east mean to us now? where? what?

>> what it means to us is probably debatable. >> you military experts. dodet me say quickly for right now it is iran. looking at the capabilities that might be required to deter conflict breaking out or miscalculating in international waters or prevailing in some type of military efforts, whether we are supporting someone else are undertaking our own. there are many other things happening. they went to a special forces and counterterrorism missions. that is certainly not what we are limited to. there is ongoing planning. ano not know, that is example. >> i'm trying to get at this. i have a feeling we are talking theory, not necessarily reality.

think about it. you have both spoken of iran. if the united states in the next year or three decide that and must take on iran and the --lear program and korea the and triet the reps, it is not a korea of a -- and if , it is not a matter of a small operation. korea is big-time. we arty have troops in south korea. the idea of one plus two, the idea of whittling down two, sounds to me as if it is not related to reality. united states has to be in a position whether it is 1 plus two of taking on any combination of military challenges. can the united states do that realistically and might of what

-- in light of what is happening in the american economy? in light of what is happening in american politics. in light of the fact of sequestration. we are having strategy being determined by people up on the hill who may not have a clue as to what strategy is all about. is that right? >> i am glad you are framing these very starkly. it is our national security after all. we have to get away from a theoretical discussion. i threw around numbers. beyou ask me why we have to able to do to smaller missions at the same time, i would say typically because that is the area we are doing. afghanistan is moving from a war to one of the smaller missions. the expectation is that we will keep 10 or 15,000 u.s. troops there for a number of years. middle east peace is president obama possible. goal.sident obama's and rightly so.

i do not know what kind of force may stop it. probably one or two brigades. the probability of war against iran is probably in the 30% range. hopefully not 50%. if we do wind up in that kind of a strike we should remember we do not always get to decide when wars and. -- when end. you may get to decide when you start them. you usually do not get to decide when they are over. having to show up on the persian area is a pretty plausible notion. when he thinks are the smaller missions we are likely to do two and maybe three at a time. i am not even talked about my preference which will be or an ultimate bosnia style solution in syria where the u.s. deployed them there as part of an ultimate peace deal and probably not within reach this year. and not as an invasion. if anything i've understated the requirements. 450,000 troops in the active- duty u.s. army i think is small.

it is an economical way to design a ground force. it is not throwing him teen --es of cash at an already undetermined piles of cash at an already bloated pentagon. >> mike talked about the army and it affect. what about the navy and the air force? can you give us some sense what if these cuts take place will happen to the u.s. navy in the u.s. air force? -- and the u.s. air force? >> sure. the consequences are pretty stark for both of these services. of course in the marine corps as well. it was framed to us as part of the pentagon presentation that this is one of our forces globally. one of our heads presence presence fordge

ces globally. they are out there ready to respond. that is leaving out the air force that has just evacuated personnel last night from u.s. citizens from yemen and other places. the marine corps does have that significant role. we taught navy cut i will include them as well. it is pretty consequential. let me start with the air force. the air force is the second biggest loser under the budget debate and not strategic. it is clearly outlined for the budget. this is not strategic driven. why everyone in washington is frustrated. we can say that upfront. i do do not think anyone disputes it anymore. the army is getting a lot of attention and rightly so. michael is so eloquent and talking about why that is a problem. the security of defense outlined that he is going to change the so-called golden ratio of the service budget shares, the historical amounts. the recently historical amounts. the implication there was that

the navy is the relative winner but no one is the winner because everyone is coming down. about who is coming down less than the others. the army is the most significant and heavy but the air force is a close second. in this briefing it is on tactical fighting forces and on some lift forces. there is certainly more that was not mentioned as part of the briefing that requires a significant chunk of our forces. -- that retires a significant chunk of our forces. these are old and it should be considered anyway. when you need numbers, and you really do need them, that could become a really worrisome outcome. if you consider your air force, your swing for us, global your service death, -- your service depth, which i do

this is disconcerting. these are the kinds of things you will give up. the air capabilities, the secretary talked about these groups. 2 or 3 strike carrier groups. all of the associated shifts -- >> two or three cut down from where we are now? >> correct. is what? >>technically it is an 11 carrier force with a waiver of one. >> we have come down to eight is -- and we would come down to eight if the sequestration went through. >> that is the prediction. >> tell me in a practical way how that may end up hurting the united states. >> i will talk until 11:30 a.m.

on this question alone. these carriers, there are lillyly pads -- global >> these are global lily pads we can take anywhere that is water. we can use it to use whatever we need to do. primarily they are a deterrent force. they are a fourth multiplier. the navy does not have a choice. cannot recall who mentioned it. if you look at the u.s. navy budget and composition, 60 of the navy touches something that has to do with the aircraft carrier. whether it is what is on top of it, the staff that supports it, what goes into it, the ships that say with it, etc. you can see the damage that would be done to our world wide forces. i reference the marine corps. we would be giving up a lot.

we saw this partly in iraq. to inability for us negotiate in any sort of military service for the long term would have ambushed with a lot of intelligence. which would have primarily with a lot ofd intelligence. in the region we would have had naval support as well. we gave it up to iran as part of the deal. >> help us out a bit. on the navy and the air force, would you like to add to what she is already given us? >> great points. they're looking to do things differently. there's only so far this can possibly go. i will look at why the cuts that she alluded to would be too extreme. for example, going down to an

eight-carrier force. last spring a sequestration was about to hit. they decided not to send a second carrier to the gulf. a lot was made of that. for the sailors who were about to go, it is unfortunate they were asked to jen up and then stand down. i do not worry that much about what it did for the country. i do not think it was that important to have two carriers to the gulf all the time. if we end up fighting iran a could be. an idea that i am trying to promote is since we have this rising threat of iran in the broader middle east and a lot of other countries agree with us that it is a threat, i think we can be a little less skittish about putting combat aircraft on land in the middle east. historically we have not wanted to associate ourselves with the autocracies of the gulf cooperation council and the arabian peninsula. they have not always wanted to

associate themselves. with a great champion of israel we did not like it when our airbases got attacked. we agreed after the invasion in particular just to scale back. we still have some airbases in the region. cuts are elsewhere. qatar and elsewhere. we did not have a lot of combat aircraft. we could change that. we can get them to host 50 fighter debt each. -- fighter jets each. that way you do not put any eggs all in one basket. if you do that you do not need light as many carriers. -- quite as many carriers. the carriers need to be cycled in and out. got to transit the oceans and work their way back home. you wind up needing five in the forest uses saying one. it is a great way to have combat airpower if you do not

know where you're going to have to operate and you need flexibility. that is an example of where i would be able to see this in one ship. maybe even two. on the other hand, china is adding $10 billion a year to its military budget each and every year. i do not expect us to fight china. i do think we have to sustain a very robust presence. ableld like to see us be to ramp up our carrier presence in the pacific. that has been a focus of secretary panetta and secretary hegel, the rebalancing to where the asia pacific. we are trying put 60% in the pacific. he used to be more like 50%. if it is 60% of a rapidly shrinking pie,you not going to achieve the desired effect. i think the navy can shrink a little. even if you put these kind of

ideas on the table and you are breaking a lot of china to do what i said, this is how you get to maybe $200 billion in additional 10 year savings. not the way you get to sequestration. sequestration to me as just a bridge too far. >> i think i'm asking this as much for myself as everyone in the room. bitare giving us a little of the flavor it is to figure these things out now. in a realistic way, the united states is hurting economically. you have to cut the budget. you have to cut the pentagon budget. there are two questions that come to mind. of is what about the rest the american budget, not just the military side? withem to be a sort more -- to be absorbed more with the military side of the budget and complaining about cut their

family are about the rest of the budget. i appreciate military needs and all of that. is there somebody in your experience at the military side who was saying we are only part of this problem and we have to be aware of everything else in american society that is going to be affected by sequestration? do you even hear the in your discussions? guys even hear that in your discussions? >> i have heard it from the secretary and the last secretary of defense a lot. even the predecessor talked about security efforts beyond dod. foreign aid, state department diplomacy, other capabilities that we have outside of the defense department intelligence. there is a great concern at a political level about this. to be fair, reason so much is on this and particular is there

has been these efforts. they are putting in more dollars relative to its own size than it is the largest. -- relative to its own size than all of the rest. and it is certainly the largest. it is only fair and my mind and certainly as unique and turned its constitutional mandate. it is not that unique but it is reasonable to have an emphasis on the defense department in particular. this is the fourth year of budget cuts. almost all of these agencies are coming off a budget wave of good news. we have the stimulus bill and the first year of this administration. that was a plus of every agency but defense. that is when the budget started

going down. i will defend this for a moment. >> i am not seeking to criticize the pentagon. i'm trying to put it into a context involving the entire budget and all of the needs of the united states, not just the military needs. if you turn it around and say that we live in an extremely turbulent world and maybe we would like, after afghanistan and iraq, to pull back. and do nationbuilding at home. are we capable of doing nationbuilding at home in a world that remains as turbulent as it is? the am going to cite opportunity i had recently to write and op-ed with david petraeus. one was this week and one was earlier this year in the washington post. thatve tried to argue these deficit deals that have been proposed would be

wonderful to have an many ways. they are not essential. what you need to do, given that america's economy has so much promise, what you need to do is tip the curve on how we are increasing the debt. a we lower our expectations little we can wind up in a reasonable place for the next five or 10 years. long-term entitlement is a big challenge. our colleagues have written eloquently about this. guyer not going to solve that problem. -- and i are not going to solve that problem. in the short term, if you had a modest increase in either income tax rates or a modest cap on deductions the way mitt romney was proposing last year and you had a couple percent change in the cost-of-living adjustment for social security for social security recipients that would accumulate over time, you could achieve half the cuts in the discretionary accounts that sequestration would impose.

if you do that, you if you do that, you have prevented the debt from getting bigger relative to the size of the economy. then all the things we have going for us, our energy resolution, the advanced manufacturing, the gradual recovery of the real estate markets. all of these things can kick in. washington does not need to see itself as a location of this great showdown of loaded government versus liberty and the tea party. we do not have to be quite that melodramatic about our role in washington. it is an important role. the private economy and american people will do a lot of the heavy lift and based on forces that are already out there if we can just get the darn debt to start growing relative to the size of the economy. you can actually live with deficits in the range of $300 billion a year or $400 billion a year. we sometimes make the problem seems so impossibly hard.

it is not impossibly hard. with reforms well within these we can tip the deck curve to the point where relative to the size of the economy it is no longer growing, it may be shrinking a little, and let these other positive rings happening take over. >> i have no objection. let's turn to you all. if you have questions, please raise your hand. ask your question. please, no speeches. i see a number of people in uniform. i will try to get to them as well. >> they added a second that deputy of stay. they have a small cabinet department. secretary hagel has spoken of an enforcer to help make sure the efficiency cuts and other things are done. would it make sense for the

defense department to establish the second deputy to establish the resources? >> you have a smile on your face. do you have an answer? >> thank you. a couple of problems. yes and no. i am always loath to grow bureaucracy and add new positions without them taking away somewhere else or figuring out a way at the defense department, specifically this appointment class. the department of defense has made recent changes to bring in a management officer. my colleagues and other things have faced off on that question. he makes an eloquent case that there have been times where we have had two deputies and works very well. i would argue if you are

current, and there's no way to argue without sounding like a cruise is a of the man and job, but like a criticism of the man in job, but if he can be executed from his office maybe we can expand this elsewhere. what we have seen before now in the last decade plus, and i'm talking about one of my colleagues. we have seen a lot of policy heavy and this is with people with backgrounds. i do not like that. that is what i do not like. i would prefer somebody who is coming in from the outside, someone who has been in the industry or run a business successfully or who has overseen management. they have had this model for the defense department in the past. this model has proven that it works. i am not knocking the guys who are in a job. perhaps this was the right way to do it. where we are right now is we need a strong deputy. that is more important than the secretary of defense portion right now. >> the idea of this market being a bloated leas, all kind of dough is being spent unnecessarily. do you think that would actually

help? >> i think i come down where mckenzie does. the position is supposed to do this. i think ash carter is doing a good part. there is no clear budget ahead. it is not doing as good of a job as past congresses. this congress has been unwilling to do it. it is time to ask congress to step up its. >> thank you. >> my question is virtually sequestration has become the law of the land. across the board there are multiple hires right now. in yemen americans have been asked to rate by air live. the usa is the world leader. it has the cutting edge technology. >> what do you think? >> without defining the foreign- policy, in the case of al qaeda, are we making more friends or enemies? what are we not doing? >> you are raising a very good question. to me it is a fundamental question. the military is there to implement a policy.

mike was alluding to this a moment ago. i think he was being too diplomatic. it is not just a matter of the people who put the budget together. it is the people who run the government and have to run the strategy. they have to perform really money. in many ways it has. now it is operating in a world with uncertainty. you have a conflict that is obvious and not easily resolved. >> the power searcher is often this debate. defense policy is the child of a parent call foreign-policy. that is how it is opposed to work and it has not worked that way at all. we see this coalescing of the debates.

what we're really talking about that are foreign-policy issues. we are now having a meaningful debate. it is being done so poorly and inefficiently. >> from the back. yes, please, right here. thank you very much. >> it is important to note that skimmer is not something the administration necessarily wanted to do. it is a cumulative effect that is having a real impact. it is sequestration that is the problem now. if you look at structure levels below 450,000 for the army or a cut to the navy flow, it is not something the administration is interested in doing. when secretary hagel made his presentation the other day, he had this interesting strategic choice between capacity and

capability. i would like you to talk about that a little bit. capacity is about structure. capability is about modernization and at the edge.

obviously, you're not going to choose one path or the other. given the strategy, could you look at capability and that choice and tell us? thank you very much for that question. the administration is not

enthusiastic about these additional cuts. the place where i was having a slight difference with them was almost more tone. they suggested that cutting the army down to the low 400s would follow the logic of the defense strategic guidance from last year. i do want to challenge that guidance. i think the notion that we can conclude this to be over is a little bit of a historical way it thinking about war. with the issue modernization and capacity versus capability,

there are so many different angles to take. let me take our joint strike fighter. i am a fan of the joint strike fighter. it has had trouble. it is doing better. i am a fan. i am not sure we need 2500. it is sized largely to replace structure. not quite the more or less. i think it should be set more. there are certain places in the world.

we flew them over a rock for a dozen of years army did not have any problems with aircraft getting shot down. there's always an extra margin of the. is it worth $100 billion to the country? what i have tried to lay out in my own writing and why i reasonable room exist is scaling back the joint strike fighter to something that in my eyes would be roughly half the size. that would be toward high-end efficiency. possibly some strikes against iran or north korea. otherwise your air force structure to the extent you need to keep most of it with a greater combination of existing fourth-generation planes. or you refurbish the ones you got. you may be leaning to unmanned

systems. if you do that you do not save cap the budget. you may save 20, 25%. you still wind up with far and away the best combat force that the world will see for the next- generation. that is the way to strike a balance. when you start doing cuts you wind up with this kind of a choice. either zero or an army of less than 400,000. obviously, there are other ways you could do it, too. i do not think we should live with either of those choices. we have to look to rethink. i think we can cut a couple hundred million dollars in the plan than what was in last year's budget, what obama is proposing, but sequestration is too deep. >> i love the question because

it is the question. what we should talk about and continue to focus on is strategic debate. your question is now this is where we are and where do we go from here. two problems with the capability and capacity choice that the secretary outlined, and it is

pretty stark. it ignored the fact that capacity is in part a function of capability. leaving that aside, it presents a binary choice for policymakers as if those were the only two. i have a problem with that. something not being debated enough is the department of defense's choice to maintain readiness at all costs, the portfolio part of the defense portfolio. let's put aside if that is good or bad. let's talk about that that is an option. the leadership claims there is no consistency -- and there is a budget and the departments reflect that. it is a very expensive proposition.

it is not that it is just expensive, but it is a relative state of being, meaning that chairman of the joint chiefs said this is the most ready military in modern history. there is arguably a debate that could be had, capacity, capability, and readiness, so there are options that are not being discussed. the secretary -- it is a foregone conclusion that we will have to take from capability and capacity. the second point is it is an illusion of choice. it is going to actually be -- the numbers we are watching multiple times, sequester, the readiness hole, and efficiency is never realized. they are going to take from both and they already have been. the notion that modernization among the capability portfolio will be a disproportionate thing when it already has been in the last four years of defense budget cuts. these are already happening. these will just accelerate the choices. that is unfortunate. >> i love your phrase about the illusion of choice, and i recommend that be the title of your book. on this side here, yes, please, right in the middle.

>> arms control association. i think in washington it is easy to get a consistent that sequestration is a disaster, a terrible way to cut budgets, a terrible planning mechanism. if you could imagine yourself at a town hall meeting this month with a member of congress, i wonder how you would explain to the crowd there who is responsible for sequestration. why can't we just end this? what do you think an honest answer that question would be? >> thank you for that question. >> i am happy to start. i think that the genesis of the idea -- we have all read our "washington post" accounts, and i hope it continues to do its excellent journalism. there and elsewhere, who first talks about the idea two years ago, jack lew or somebody else. i would not criticize anybody because at the time it was

pointed out that at the time it seems better than doing nothing and now we have our doubts. yeah, it is now worse than nothing in terms of how it is affecting, not only defense, but other discretionary accounts, like you're allowed to cause. they are seed for the future -- science, education. i care about these ideas from a national security point of view just as much as i care about the defense budget. they are being hit by sequestration, entitlements, and tax reform are getting a free ride. that is exactly the wrong way to go. i would say sequestration is worse than nothing. having said that, why have we

not been able to move beyond it in the last year or so? that is the other part of the question, because the origins of that arm will shared origins. here if i had to allocate land, i would sort of say 65% to the tea party wing of the republican party, a 35% to the staunch defense of entitlements wing of the democratic party. the only reason why i give -- there's plenty of blame to go around. 35% of blame for democrats is not meant to be a pass or a soft critique. maybe i could be talked into 60%-40%. president obama's budget request this past spring was plausible, looking for compromise. and he is the top policymaker in his party. where i would criticize the president is he does not like to talk about it very much. he is not trying to rally a spirit of shared sacrifice around the country the way some of my heroes, paul tsongas, warren rudman, and bob dole and

bill clinton, some of the people from the 1980's and 1990's who were willing to talk about the reforms they did not like in order to try to create this spirit of national solidarity. there has not been anybody doing that very well, including the president, although his budget itself is better than what it was or better than the tea party budget it, in my judgment. the president has moved to a good intellectual place. his budget is a perfectly reasonable compromise between the different points of view. he has not done enough to sell it. and the tea party has treated any kind of tax reform as if it is likely to be the end of our economic growth, failing to recognize that historically tax rates now are lower than they were under reagan and clinton, and failing to recognize that entitlement growth is something that we are all collectively responsible for. mitch daniels and others have said that. i give them credit. the tea party has talked about the growth in entitlements like it is a runaway train. over the next years, it is. in the short term, i do not think we need to break medicare and medicaid in order to make progress. we can scale back the rate of cost increase in social security, for example. that is a more palatable near- term mechanism, what we continue to have the big debates about longer-term reform. i'm getting a little bit off my defense specialization, so let's say there is plenty of blame to go around.

i will finish on that note. >> i wonder if i could pick that up. i do not want to leave that die. mike said a moment ago that the president is ready to compromise, and mike has written about with david petraeus recently. this idea of the advantage of

compromise, the need for compromise, and i think mike is absolutely right in saying that the president has demonstrated in a number of ways a desire to reach out and a desire to compromise. the tea party has not done that. and that is a fact. and i think that we lose the spirit of the madness of washington politics right now if we forget that one side of the argument is not wishing to compromise and the other side appears to want to compromise, and you cannot get a deal in this city ever in more than 200 years unless the two major factors have come together and agreed to do some kind of compromise. my editorial is at an end. next question. yes, sir, right there. >> thank you very much. my question is talk about how the various cuts in the defense would affect perceptions of u.s. military power both in our allies and other countries. thank you. >> just this morning i was

reading deputy secretary carter's remarks to that effect, which sounds qualified, and he was reflecting reality. everybody is watching and taking notice. the times -- you get the sense in washington that everyone that the people making the decisions here in this town. what he is referring to is friends and foe are potential foe alike. our allies are worried that we have got a cut-and-run planned, that we are putting on a happy face or lipstick on a pig. they see the numbers shrinking or our presence shrinking or the capability shrinking, but they hear everything will be fine, pivoting resources, all is well, and they intuitively are sensing things are different. and those who would seek to capitalize on a moment of perceived weakness, i guess you could say they are also watching, and i would argue calculating differently about the timing of accelerated nuclear progress in their

programs or any other kind of challenge from terrors like assad. your question summarizes the answer to me, that, yes, everybody is watching. >> let me give you an example of what we have been trying to do, and we have referred to it as that rebalancing towards the asia-pacific. as you know very well, jeffrey, that rebalancing is a multifaceted strategy. it was well handled by people like hillary clinton in the first obama term. the president himself deserves primary credit. it was relatively notable for its modest steps. there is not too much huge

change in the rebalancing. that is a good thing because we want to remind the region and china that we are still an asia- pacific power without leaving confrontational or giving the impression of a containment strategy in the making. i agree with what it amounted to. if you actually cost out the changes, the changes, the reapportionment of defense resources towards the asia- pacific, i did a back-of-the- envelope, and it is a $10 billion or a $12 billion effect in terms of the budget your spending elsewhere, spending in the asia pacific, roughly speaking. this is a way to think about this question you are making. we can try to protect that $10 billion increase to the asia- pacific, but it is hard to do so when it accounts for much of

your global defense spending. the overall numbers are coming down, and you will try to claim that your efforts have been increased relative to what it was before. the math does not add up. $10 billion that you're tried to protect while you are losing $50 billion out of the overall defense budget. rebalancing to the extent that i support it, to the extent that i think many in washington of both parties have supported it as a carefully calibrated and appropriate way of reasserting our interest in the broader asia-pacific theater is now being directly challenged if not undercut by sequestration. in the short-term, there's no big deal. in the short-term, the pilots can take the summer off, we are

mistreating our civilians, and i am frankly a little upset about how we are treating our civilians with these furloughs, but from an asia-pacific point of view, , i'm not sure adversaries or neutrals scare that much. we are putting a few more weapons in lines waiting to get repaired down the road. we are not cutting the grass on bases. you can try to talk your way of the sequestration and say the effects are temporary or modest or will be repaired next year. if you sequester again in 2014, i do not know how you sustain the argument. we have to admit sequester will have trumped and essentially undone the rebalance. >> thank you, mike. yes, please, right here. thank you, sir. >> national defense university. a little bit of my question, so i will push mackenzie on the illusion of choice. some of our colleagues at another institution, less prestigious than the two represented here today, say there is a strategic choice, a real strategic choice about the temporal dimension and the risk we are currently facing. which is a pushback on marvin. war's frequency and cost is specifically perceived by some people as being much less today empirically.

do we have less risk today that we should be smart about and invest in modernization for the future? is the industrial base fragile and weak and is it at risk and should we invest in modernization? at another question, what should be investing in because there is an idea that we know what we are investing in, what kind of wars we want to fight. mike wants more adaptability and the defense should provide guidance. is that what should be doing, present tense, readiness, modernization in the future? >> illusion of choice. >> frank is so eloquent. going back to the war game where we conducted the shadows choices in management review, and you

should be familiar in think tanks, i will speak to them because we have recited each other's pitch by now. there is some great points that came out of that, and one is that it is debatable. that is what i was saying, that the defense department is setting up a varied choice capability when there are many other options that cou b considered. one is duly cut readiness. how much, across what components come across the services, how would you execute it, and what impact would it have on war plans? i think that needs to be open and up for discussion, because it depends on what you want to do. if the focus is in the near term, mortgaging the future for the near term. you won't mortgage capability for readiness now, or do you

want to take more risk? those are the kinds of choices that the secretary left out of the strategic choices and management review, but i think the point of an event like this is to raise that awareness. on the industrial base, i think there is no doubt, i think there is a perception problem that the industrial base is very relatively well on the large-cap side under the sequester, for a variety of reason. there are better planners at dod who saw this coming and prepared years ago. leaving that aside, the perception is that everything is fine and manageable. i worry about the medium suppliers and vendors. that is a concern here. i will give, depending on the credit, there has been a great emphasis on the industrial base

review, sector by sector. it has been underway for years now. i am not sure how much has been taken up for action, and not sure how much they can do. their intent is good, but the dollars are not going to be there to take care for the long term. you pick up the third one. >> i was going to come back to readiness, because i am glad you are raising it, but i also would like to put in a word in defense of the traditional notion of keeping readiness high. have a lieutenant colonel who, if the marine corps needed him, you are looking as fit and trim as ever, and you could be a great war fighter. if you miss a rotation of reserve duty, it is a big deal. sometimes we get into this idea that a lot of our military is working so hard, give them a break, let them rest. the army was trying to do that for much of the last decade. they realized this focus of being readied all the time was less important than letting people just see their families and take care of their mental health. it sounded touchy-feely at first, but the army was right. however, you would be quick to understand this better than i,

frank, let's remember the recent recruit, the 20-year-old who has never properly trained up to the standards that we have come to think ever since tom cruise in "top gun" taught us in peacetime training that never had that standard. now they are being told you can't go shoot ammunition. we still have life ammunition for your rifle, that is good news, and you can read any books at your base that you want, but the exercises were you drive down the road to the neighboring base where there is an area for a small maneuver, we do not necessarily have all the resources for that, and we do not have the resources to fly you to one of the national training centers to do the large unit maneuver warfare training that historically has been what has made the marine corps and the army so darned good. we do not have that kind of money right now, because you will cut $52 billion out of the physical 2014 budget.

you will have to take a lot of it out of readiness. the debate which is important, and we would agree over the longer term you have to wrestle with that. in the short term you take it out of readiness and out of new contracts for industry. those are where you can go for money in the short term. now you have your 20-year-old recruit who is potentially up for call for korea or somewhere else who has never in his or her life done a proper large unit maneuver training exercise. i think that -- it will not take us back to the hollow force of the post-vietnam era, but it is a little bit of a risky decision and potentially very unfair to that recruit. >> thank you, mike.

thank you all. i want to conclude with sort of a small little war game. we are not a war game involving military strategy, and that involves the south china sea, a relationship with vietnam, a relationship with the philippines, with taiwan, and, of course, with china. now, as all of the military people are thinking through how many planes, how many tanks, this and that, there are things happening right now in the south china sea. some people regard what is happening as threatening. some things that are threatening on the near horizon, others push it way back, 15, 20 years. the people who were in vietnam see it as an immediate danger. people in the philippines, same way. taiwan, same way. the chinese are doing things that you could argue all great powers do. and china is now a great power. it has to be regarded as such. how do we respond intelligently within the constraints that you both have articulated so well, i think, when you see a problem like the south china sea, does

that mean you have to send more ships there, more planes they are, does it require a different kind of nonmilitary diplomacy? when the secretary of defense goes to vietnam and says we are developing a commitment, you and i, that is a loaded word within the context of the u.s.- vietnamese relationship. when the u.s. begins to talk about commit to the defense of vietnam, against whom? obviously, china. vietnam and china have fought each other many times over a thousand years. what is the smart thing right now, taking this military review

into account for the u.s. to do? and i will start with mike. >> the smart thing is directed nice that our strategy has been working. for all the ways that we have to stay vigilant toward the rise of china, and towards the real enemy, which is north korea, the overall approach we have had has been successful. we have been present, have strong alliances. china is growing to the point where it is not going to be an unrivaled kind of american superiority, but the last thing we want to do is accelerate the pace of transition. and this is not necessarily -- to china being equal to the united states in the asia- pacific militarily. there may be a day, although we have great allies and experience in our armed forces and that will be a long ways off before they get to that point. i do not think we want to accelerate the perception of american relative decline. i'm not sure that "decline" is the right word to use, and i

would prefer to avoid creating that impression. and therefore i do not want to see sequestration because it will undo the rebalancing. one more point that your question raises, and i will try to make this brief, but some people say if we cut the military, at least we will not have the temptation to go fight as much. if the japanese want to fight over the islands against the chinese, let them do it. we are better off staying out, and if we have a smaller

military, we will be disinclined to get involved. i do not want to fight the chinese over the islands, but leave that aside, if you look at when we fight and when we do not, i do not see a correlation between higher defense budgets and greater likelihood of intervening. the world wars began when we were unprepared. the korean war again when we were unprepared. the vietnam war was little more complex, and you know that case well, but if we fast-forward to the reagan years, in many years the reagan years are still -- people can correct me if they

wish afterwards or whatever -- but the reagan years are still seen as the golden years of american defense policy, because we built up the budget and we did not really use the military. isn't that a wonderful outcome? it is not all ronald reagan's great judgment that led to that, that there was no correlation

between increasing the budget and increasing the proclivity to intervene militarily. in the 1990's, for operations are supported, we cut the budget and increased the number of overseas activities, and george w. bush did not run for president -- if you go back to his campaign, he did not run promising a big defense buildup and he was not intending to make foreign policy the centerpiece of his policy, and he ended up making the most fraught decision about the war in iraq. i do not think cutting our military will be the best way to keep us out of trouble in the south china sea. i want steadiness and resolve and let's sustain the rebalance. that means we can make modest cuts in defense. >> amen. i feel like i should applaud. i think that was very powerful on michael's part. i would not put all my eggs in one basket. i want peace through strength or a modern-day version of it because i want a military that deters. i want other things, too. i want strong allies, our partners' capacity to be robust enough to defend themselves if needed and take care of their neighborhoods, so to speak. i want all of our tools of soft power to be effective, partly through the reinforcement from our hard power. i want a lot of things. i want economic strength, etc. but the pointy edge is to have this tremendously capable military that just gets into their mind a little bit, right? >> is their mind the potential adversary? >> friends and potential adversaries. >> friends as well? >> that is what we call shaping and influencing, but we see every day with our own kids. as a parent, you want to be the one shaping and influencing your kids, but then they go to school everyday and somebody else is telling them something. but you always wanted to be a calculus. and like i said, it is not just the defense part. i want to be strong and being strong. i would second everything michael said and say where we are not heading, which is a depressing way to end this. >> i want thank you. you are both terrific and a very important, interesting rich kind of discussion of a very competent at problem.

and i know that i speak for everybody at brookings in saying thank you all for coming, and thank you all for being with us. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> at the marine base in

california, president obama is set to be here momentarily to to the true spirit we expect the president any moment. this is live coverage on c-span. welcome for this very 44thal event, the president of the united states visits. jill is deep in the pacific rim inducting business with allies. congressman davis, local representatives, we want to thank each of you personally for your continued support of the great base and the many thousands of military members and their families who call this their home. we are honored by your presence. we are humbled by your presence. thank you for joining us today. we are also honored to have on deck wounded warriors on the wounded warriors battalion west.

100 members of the first marine expeditionary port. the president is a great friend of our core and no stranger to visiting marines, sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and coast guard. yes and around the world. around the world. he ensures resource equipment and manpower to win our nations battles. the president understands it is our mission to be most ready when called upon to respond to national emergencies. , marines and sailors stand proudly on duty in 19 nations around the world, whether in afghanistan, or under security missions in s ornse of u.s. interest working closely around the globe. obama,st lady, michelle is also also no stranger to camp pendleton.

is obama and dr. joe biden have in a formidable force for good in mobilizing the nation is a port of military families. you are ready to meet your commander in chief and give him a warm welcome that he will never forget third are you ready? -- forget. are you ready? ♪ ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinguished honor and privilege to introduce you to the 44th president of the united states and your commander in chief, president barack obama. [applause] make some noise, guys. [applause] ♪

[cheers and applause] >> hello. hello, camp pendleton. listen, it is great to be here at the home of the first marine expeditionary force. and one of our nation's oldest and most decorated military units, the legendary first marine division. i think i see some proud navy folks here, too. let me thank the general for the introduction and for his outstanding leadership of

marines in iraq, at anniston, your commandudes+5 -- afghanistan, and that includes your command of the per brigade, which we recognize with a presidential unit citation. thank you. i want to thank all of your commanders for welcoming me today, including the generals. i want to recognize your incredible's task, noncommissioned officers, a hitting -- including -- i want to salute abby nichols theebbie nichols and all spouses and family that are here. -- we understand they are the force behind the force. just like michelle is the force behind me.

[cheers] a big everyone to give round of applause to the amazing families who serve along with you. [cheers and applause] and i want to acknowledge members of congress who are here, including soothing -- susan davis. [applause] now, i have got to tell you the truth. i have been looking forward to this visit because -- and this is tricky to say this -- my family and i, we have got a special place in our hearts for the marine corps. part of it is because every day in the white house, we are surrounded by marines. we have probably got some folks

here who were at the white house who are now here at camp pendleton. ?ee echo -- see [laughter] i figured as much. i need a hot skip and a jump somewhere everyone -- every time i get on marine one, i rely on some of the best aviators in the world. i have seen your honor. i have seen your courage. i have seen your commitment. whether in protecting our diplomatic post surround the world, or preparing to them -- to employ to iraq or afghanistan or recovering from wounds received in battle. a few years ago, you gave a great cam pendleton welcomes my is not asnd i know it exciting when i come to visit, but, she says hi. am kind of like the army general who once said, the

more murray is i have around, the better i like them. -- the more marines i have around, the better i like them. all men and women in uniform have formed in this time of war, ever since that awful september morning, when our nation was attacked and thousands of innocent americans were killed. we have been at war against al qaeda. our fight in afghanistan, nearly 12 years here it it has gone america's longest war. i am here because we recently marked another milestone in this war. as of this past june, for the first time, afghan forces have taken the lead for security across their entire country. instead of leading the fight, our troops have a different mission, to train, to advise, and to assist afghan forces.

what that the goals is our war in afghan is and has entered the idle chapter. more of our troops are coming home. we will be down to 34,000 this winter. by the end of next year, in just 17 months, the transition will be complete. take full response though before their security, and our war in afghanistan will be over. applause]d none of this progress would have been possible had it not been for you. all who have served there, especially our camp pendleton marines. after our nation was attacked, you were some of the very first forces in afghanistan, raising in, hundreds of miles by helicopter, and driving al qaeda from its hands area -- camps. then in iraq, you were there,

opposing a dictator. through years of combat, your courage added to the glories of the marines long and lustrous visit. we will refocus on afghanistan, you led the way again. surging in the helmets, pushing the taliban out of its stronghold. when future generations study those fights, they will stand in all of the unparalleled sacrifice of the third reins.on -- marines. hold close the memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in these years of war. that includes 326 fallen heroes

from camp pendleton. we honor all of them. every single one. their stand with families, like the gold star i had an opportunity to meet with. we are grateful to them. we are grateful for their sacrifice. they have given a piece of their heart to america. america will always honor the sacrifice. of you recently returned from afghanistan. on behalf of a grateful nation, welcome home. to all our prayers those who, in this very moment, are still in harms way, ,ncluding regiment seven coming home this month. some of you are getting ready to to come. the months it is a hard fight. our afghan partners have stepped up here they are bearing a bigger brent of the firepower.

a lot moreaken on casualties. they are in the lead. we it is still' tough and are still needed. here is what i want every single one of you to know. because of you, the 9/11 generation, we are a calm pushing what we set out to do. of you, osama bin laden is no more. because of you, al qaeda's top ranks have been hammered. core of al qaeda, in afghanistan and pakistan, is on its way to defeat. that happened because of you. because of you, more afghans are reclaiming their immunities, markets, schools, their towns, and they have a chance to forge their own future. areuse of you, more afghans trained and stepping up in defending their own country. and preserving

the gains we -- you fought and fled for, we will ensure afghan is never again a source of attack against our country. applause]d that happened because of you. the war in afghanistan will and for you, that means fewer deployments, training time, getting back to what marines do better than anyone else on earth. it means more time here on the homefront with your families, your wives, your husband, your kids. , the end of the war in afghanistan does not mean the end of threats to our nation. as i have said before, he's an -- even as we decimated the al qaeda leadership that attacked us on 9/11, al qaeda affiliates and like-minded extremists still

threaten our homeland. they still threaten our diplomatic facilities. they still threaten our businesses abroad. we have got to take these threats seriously and do all we can to confront them. we have been reminded of this again in recent days. i want to take special time out to salute all of our brave to format and intelligence and military personnel who have been working around-the-clock to a start our embassies and our consulates and our total americans serving overseas, including all those vigilant marines standing guard at our embassy around the world. they are doing and out and in job. [cheers and applause] as for these extremist, here's what those who cowardly attack civilians do not yet. -- get.

the united states will never retreat from the world. we do not get terrorized. we will keep standing up to our enemies. we will keep standing up for the security of our citizens. we will keep standing up for human rights and dignity for people wherever they lived. we will keep working with our allies and partners. we will keep offering a future of hope and progress in stark contrast to terrorists who only know how to kill, destroy, and name. -- maim. the united states of america will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known. you are an integral part of that. , serving in you do uniform every single day. not just a job for our military. it takes diplomacy, development,

trade, intelligence, to stay true to our values as a nation. this is a consultative time. time.plicated the world is going through changes. a militaryhave strategy to protect ourselves. we have also got to lead with our values and our ideals and all elements of our power. keeping our mean military the absolute best in the world. we have got to be vigilant about that. there is a war in afghanistan -- as it ends, it is true, our military and marine corps will be leaner. but this will be tighter. it is only natural. war of ending a responsibly is moving off a perpetually wartime footing. it is time to use some of the money we have been spending on

were to do nationbuilding at home. [applause] cannot do is repeat the mistakes of history. , where,seen in the past after a war, we hollowed out our military. we left our military unprepared. we have got, right now, the best led, best trained, best equipped know terry in human history -- military in human history. groupnest exhibition area in the world. as long as i am commander in chief, i will keep it that way. we are going to need help out of washington.

congress could not agree on a plan to reduce the deficit in what i consider a sensible way. instead, what we have got is these take, across-the-board cuts called the sequester. the sequester kicked in. .t included defense we are already seeing the effects. here at camp pendleton, you are feeling it. our working folks are getting furloughed. families getting by on less. fewer ships available for your we can do better than that. that is not how a great nation should be treating its military and military families. cuts in other nondefense areas in the budget affect our troops and military families as well. our military -- part of what makes us best is we have got extraordinary recruits. if we want the best qualified

recruits, we should not be cutting investments in education. we should be increasing our investment in education. [applause] , ourounded warriors veterans, depend on new technologies for the recovery and their healthcare. we should not be slashing investments in science and medical research. we should continue to be the world leader in science and research. that is why i will keep on working to get rid of the sequester. you do your jobs every day. let's make sure washington does its job. what makes me frustrated sometimes, the very folks who say they stand with our military proudly, the same ones who are standing in the way of fixing the sequester. it is important to look at deeds and not words. , it is true for our

national security, we have always got to make sure we are dealing with our deficits and debt. our economy is strong. that means the military is strong. if our economy is weak. our deficits are falling of the fastest rate in decades. we cut them in half. they keep on moving in the right in that context. congress needs to agree on a responsible plan that reduces our deficit but also keeps our military strong. also investing in education. also investing in research. also investing in infrastructure. that's what you deserve. that's what your families deserve. that's what i'm fighting for. that is my commitment to you. [applause] keeping a military strong

require something else. that is taking care of our extraordinary wounded warriors. here at pendleton, you are doing extraordinary work. for those who can, we want to get our troops back to where they want to be. brainose with traumatic injuries, we're going to to make unprecedented investments in new care and treatments. for those suffering with posttraumatic stress, we are going to keep saying it as loud as we can -- it is not a sign of weakness to ask for help. it is a sign of strength. we are here to help you recover, stand tall again. we got to make sure we're doing everything we can for our wounded warriors and i'm pleased to see the hospital here is making progress. that's going to be an outstanding new facility that will be helpful. strong meansitary insuring the safety of everyone who puts on the uniform.

withoutary can succeed discipline, trust, cohesion. i want you to hear it directly from me, the commander in chief. it undermines what this military stands for and it undermines what the marine corps stands for when sexual assault takes place within our units. that is why we are going to work us -- to stopl of these crimes of sexual assault and uphold the honor and integrity that defines the finest military on earth. that message is coming all the way from the top. [applause]

keeping our military strong means keeping our military family strong. and joe biden's wife, dr. jill, they have made this .heir mission because of their efforts, joining forces, more americans are stepping up to support your families. that includes more companies hiring our talented military spouses. after everything you've done for america, every american ought to be doing something to support your families. [applause] as the time of war ends, some of you will be kicking off the uniform and returning to civilian life. just as we gave you the tools to succeed on the battlefield, we ought to make sure we are giving

you the tools to succeed in the next stages of your life as well. we have improved transition assistance. we want to find you a job that is worthy of your skills. we are helping you and your family pursue your education under the post-9/11 g.i. bill of making sure that instead ripping you off, schools give you the education you paid for and they are being held accountable. statesmaking sure more and more industries are recognizing your military skills with licenses and credentials you need for civilian jobs. when i first came into office, i was meeting medics who have been treating people on the battlefield and they went back to school to be a nurse, they had to start all over again in nursing 101. here they are dealing with some of the worst injuries possible and they are not getting any credit for it which means it's costing them time and money. we are changing all of that.

if you have done the job on the battlefield with bullets coming at you, you can sure as heck do that job back here in the united states of america. [applause] we issued a challenge to the private sector and so far american businesses have hired 290,000 veterans and military spouses. they have committed to hiring hundreds of thousands more. jobs.ets are finding the unemployment rate for debts is coming down. saying tong to keep every company in america, if you want someone who knows how to get the job done, hire a veteran. hire a veteran. [applause] your generation carried us through this time of war and you're going to help us write the next great chapter in

american history, right here at home. few embody that truth more than today,y in who is here captain matthew langford. he is one of our marine special operators. he and his team were in afghanistan cleaning out a compound. in a terrible instance, and ied took both of his legs. matt survived. soon, he had a new mission -- getting back to his unit, adding back to his team. once a marine, always a marine. that endured excruciating rehab, therapy that could last all day, month after month, rebuilding his strength. recovery was slow. taking his first shaky steps on

prosthetics, a new pair of knees, full legs taking him back to full height, stepping forward with two canes, then just one, again,n-learning to walk in his uniform, then body armor. 18 months after he was injured matt, a both legs, double-amputee, returned to his unit and redeployed to afghanistan. [applause] for a time, he even served as team leader. today, they're preparing for their next appointment to the pacific.

marinee, camille, also a , is working to become a test pilot because she likes to fly aggressively. this inspiring marine couple is looking ahead to serving their country for many years to come. matt and camille, please wave. [applause] thank you so much. thank you so much. [applause] know, there are stories like matt and camille's through the marine corps. they represent what is best in our marine corps. semper fidelis. meaning of your life, always faithful, always faithful to each other, the few and the proud, always faithful

to the call for 237 years. always faithful to your country, for whom you where the eagle. after all you have given to our , you have to know that your nation will always be faithful to you. as your commander in chief, that is my commitment to you. americathe commitment must uphold to you and your families for all of the years to come. semper fi. god bless you all. god bless the marine corps. god bless the united states of america. [cheers andç;ç; applause] ♪ é

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obama wrapping up his two day trip to the west coast here at camp pendleton. and some of the fiercest combat at iraq and afghanistan. later today, taking a look at news coverage of the iraq war. at 6:00 p.m. eastern, the new york times photographer on photojournalism in war. he spoke a little earlier this summer at the new america foundation in washington. here are a few minutes of his remarks. >> the answer is simple, really. coming home and seeing my history of the war reflected. i did not see what i knew reflected out there. the american people in particular did not seem to know what i knew.

i was learning more all the time from my colleagues, you know. the book is also an oral history. american people don't know this at a certain point and it sort of became this thing where i cannot live with myself if i don't do something to collaborate or collect and collate all of this. book.tures are not in the it is basically putting material in one place. all of these things are floating around out there. it just needed to be put together. it is oururnalists, history of the war. it applies to a lot of the journalists out there. for whatever reason, there was some great journalism done, but i just did not see it all together in one place. i talked to a lot of photographers. i asked why they were taking pictures if they knew they could not get them published.

he took a picture from fallujah and it is just really burned, charred bodies of the american contractors that were killed there at the bridge in 2004. there is a crowd of people stepping on them, mutilating them. there was no way we're going going to get this paperless -- pictures published, you know you go -- you know? i asked them why we took them and they said, we take them for history. someday, people will be ready to look at them. these pictures will be there. i'm not trying to glorify violence. just the opposite. hopefully these photos will stand as a warning, you know. hopefully it will be something people look at in the future and the next time we think about rushing out for a military adventure. >> you can see all of his remarks from the new america foundation on c-span this

evening at 6:00 p.m. eastern. at 7:00, a live town coverage -- sociall of the role of media in conflict, the relationship between government and journalists, censorship, national security. we will take your phone calls, tweets, and facebook comments live on c-span. >> 150 years ago, our nation was engaged in a civil war. 1863, our nation was reminded of its revolutionary past when henry wadsworth longfellow produced his tales for the wayside and one of the entries began, "listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of paul revere." in 1863, the revere name is being elevated. however, at the same time, the revere name is being chastised because one of his grandsons,

joseph warren revere, reviewed here in a row of the army of the potomac, is up for a court- martial for his actions at the historic battle in virginia in early may 1863. this grandson of one of the revolutionary war heroes get in such a mess? >> the life of general joseph warren revere. part of american history tv, every weekend on c-span 3. state john kerry announced today the creation of a new office for outreach to religious organizations around the globe. this morning at the state department, secretary kerry introduced a new head of the office. this is half an hour.

>> ladies and gentlemen, the secretary of state john kerry, and shaun casey, and the executive director of the white house office of faith-based and partnerships, melissa rogers. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much, good morning, everybody. please be seated. thank you very much. sorry to be a moment late. i apologize. really delighted to be here this morning for this singular, historic initiative. it is a great pleasure for me to be taking part in this. i'm convinced that all of you agree that one of the toughest challenges that we face in terms of global diplomacy and

relationships around the world between peoples nowadays, from the secretary in a strife to the challenges of many intractable, frozen conflicts, to the challenges of simply understanding people, one people to another, or even monumental challenges, like the sectarian strife that we see tearing countries and regions apart, as well as challenges of global climate change, which really is a challenge to our responsibilities as the guardians, safe corridors of god's creation. as secretary of state, and before that, as a senator for 29 years, i've met with faith-based leaders all across the world. i had the privilege obviously of

running for president of the united states, met with many members of our faith-based community in our country. i met with people of all religions, of all life philosophies and belief systems. and that experience has only reaffirms my belief that there is much more that unites us and should unite us than divides us. gandhi called the world's religions beautiful flowers from the same garden. i had the privilege of giving an address at yale university a number of years ago to a gathering of evangelicals from around america, and imams, clerics, from the muslim world. an improbable gathering, you might think. for three days, people worked and struggled with the effort to

find a common ground. and there is common ground between the abrahamic faiths and in fact between the abrahamic faiths and all religions and philosophies, whether you are talking about hindu or confucianism or any of the other many of the worlds different approaches to our existence here on the planet and to our relationship with the supreme being. all of these faiths are virtuous, and they are -- most of them -- tied together by the golden rule as well is fundamental concerns about the human condition, about poverty, about relationships between people, our responsibilities each to each other. and they all come from the same human heart. as leaders and citizens,

particularly people in public life, everybody talks about how we draw strength from the example of our faith communities, but not enough people actually translates those words into action or policies or life philosophies. and so i think, whether it is our teachers, activists, religious leaders, who worked to heal, we learn a great deal, which stands in stark contrast to violent extremists who seek to destroy and never talk about building a school or a community or providing health care to anybody. so we need to recognize that in a world where people of all

faiths are migrating and mingling like never before, where we are this global community, which we always talk about, we ignore the global impact of religion, in my judgment, at our peril. i have talked at length with people liking a bella in saudi arabia, or prince ghazi in jordan and others who engage in interfaith efforts, all of whom recognize that their religion, islam, has to a large measure been hijacked by people who have no real depth with respect to what faith in fact preaches, but who interpreted in ways that lead people to conflict, and even to violence. so it is not really enough just to talk about a better dialogue. i think we have to stand up and deliver one.

and that is why i'm very proud today to announce the creation of the office of faith-based community initiatives here at the state department. its mission is as clear as it is compelling. it is to engage more closely with faith communities around the world with the belief that we need to partner with them to solve global challenges, that there is an enormous partnership i believe there for the asking. many of you know that we already have a number of leaders here at the state department that work on issues related to religion, including our ambassador at large for international religious freedom.

i want to say that i have great respect for and enormous gratitude for their efforts, and these leaders are important and will remain equally as important, but i believe that their work will be enhanced by this effort. and the office of faith-based community initiatives will grow our ability to be able to reach out to more communities and to create greater understanding between peoples and countries. the office grows out of the recommendations of the state departments religion and foreign policy working group, and i want to thank its members, many of whom are here today, for their leadership. it also grows out of u.s. strategy in religious leader and

faith community engagement, which underscores the obama administration's commitment to working with communities of faith to advance our shared goals. and you will hear in a moment from our representative from the white house with respect to that. engagement -- the engagement i am talking about is a two-way street. our job at the state department is not just to proclaim or stand up and pontificate about the things that we want -- we have to listen to people about the things that they want. everybody here today has played a valuable role in promoting the development of countries or preventing conflicts, advancing human dignity all across the globe. so we launched this office with a clear intent to keep our door open and to work as cooperatively as possible with

all of you. i am genuinely excited about the possibilities. around the world from egypt to ethiopia, from peru to pakistan, religious leaders every day are taking on some of the toughest challenges that we face. they are healing communities. they are providing counsel to families. they are working in partnership with governments for the enduring health of our planet. and its people. so i say to my fellow state department employees, all of them, wherever you are, i want to reinforce a simple message. i want you to go out and engage religious leaders and faith- based communities in our day-to- day work. and listen to their insights and understands the important contributions that they can make individually and that we can make together. you will have the support of this department and in doing so. and you will have great leadership from my friend, dr. shaun casey, who is going to lead the charge to integrate our engagement with faith communities with our diplomacy

and with our development work. i met shaun back in 2005. mike mccurry, who i see sitting back here, introduced us at a dinner. we became friends in that process, pilgrims on a similar mission, if you will. a professor of theology, who has always been interested in politics, and a politician who was always had a lifelong interest in religion. in fact, if i went back to college today, i think i would probably major in comparative religion because that is how integrated it is in everything that we are working on and deciding siding and thinking about in life today. we have had many discussions, and over the years i have come to appreciate shaun is a deeply thoughtful person who cares about the place of faith in our public life. i want to emphasize this to everybody because i know the question will be out there. is this a departure from the norm? no. we approach this with a full

understanding of thomas jefferson's understanding and admonition about the wall of separation between church and state. but what we're doing is guided by the conviction that we have to find ways to translate our faiths into efforts that unify for the greater good. that can be done without crossing any lines whatsoever. one of my favorite passages from the scripture sums up what shaun and i think this effort is really all about, it is a familiar gospel of mark in which jesus says to his disciples, for even the son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for the many. i believe that public leadership is now and always have been and

should be a form of service. it requires a bona fide effort to give to others and do -- and do for others, and it is the kind of commitment that shaun has example five throughout his life, which has been selfless and devoted and heartfelt. each of us, i believe, needs to do our best to answer this call to service, and to help each other injury with a common spirit of obedience, humility, and love. i am enormously grateful that shaun has answered that call. he has been willing to come into the department to help us integrate these policies and really to magnify, augment, grow our capacity to meet the challenges of this planet. no one would sit here today, or anywhere else and suggest that we're doing such a good job

everywhere that we don't need to bring more people to the table. it is clear that the numbers of failed states and failing states and growing youthful populations around the world that feel disenfranchised and disconnected and unable to find jobs or get the education they need -- we have work to do together, and we need everybody at the table, and that is what this is about. ladies and gentlemen, dr. shaun casey. [applause] >> thank you, mr. secretary, for your kind remarks. i am humbled that you have asked me to help launch this initiative, and i'm thankful to you for the opportunity to contribute to your work as secretary of state. i see so many of my friends in this audience. i am not going to begin to call names or we would be here very long time, but i am deeply touched that you were here. i am blessed by the fruit of long and deep conversations i've had, so thank you and bless you

for coming. i want to recognize my wife and my daughter, sarah, thank you for your love, patience, toleration that they have given to me over the years. [applause] yes, please. but i am deeply touched that you were all here. mr. secretary, several years ago, you and i started a conversation about the rich, diverse, complicated public complications that religious belief in practice. some believe that religion poisons everything, while others were saying that religion would save and solve everything. you do, however, that the reality was somewhere in between. i remember thinking at the time how unusual it was for a public figure to see the potential in

and the power of religious groups tackling extreme poverty, convincing people to combat global climate change, fighting for global human rights, mitigating conflict, and building peace, even at a time when others focus on those religious folks who committed acts of violent extremism, perversely claiming justice in the name of their own faith. from that day forward, i admired your willingness to defy the conventional wisdom that dictated religion was a purely private, personal choice and the community founded by faith must be entirely left outside the discussion of policy. that is why today engage in these communities in the context of policies have always struck me as being a matter of a very great and deep importance. let me briefly describe why we are expanding religious engagement and how we will go about doing that engagement. the answer to the why question is straightforward. as really just leaders and faith shape their environment, they also shape our own foreign- policy concerns here in the united states. it is essential for the united states to understand them and bring them into our diplomacy

efforts. the obama administration has emphasized me out that they need to bring strong relationships with the religious actors and to collaborate with them on a variety of fronts. from conflict prevention to promoting human rights to fostering development. the presence of my good friend melissa rogers here from the white house office of faith- based and neighborhood partnerships is evidence of the commitment from the obama administration from the outset in this arena. how, then, will we proceed to do this form of engagement? first of all, we will ensure

their engagement efforts will be consistent with the united states constitution and other laws both in terms of the sphere and letter of the law. second, we will collaborate with the immense talent already working in the state department in terms of various aspects. secretary kerry has worked for the creation of this new office. let me mention some of the people who are already working very hard in this space. ambassador at large for international religious freedoms, susan johnson cook. i am deeply impressed by the depth of talent and commitment already in this building on this range of religious engagement issue. our collaboration with my office is not to design and create a new silo. we are seeking to multiply the engagement with religion across

the bureaus and offices of this great organization. thirdly, we seek to be fair, we seek to be accessible and transparent in our engagement. among other things, we have much to learn from our partners across the globe. our engagement has to be a two- way or sometimes multiway dialogue. it builds trust so that we can make process toward our mutual goals. i am reminded today of reinhold niebuhr, a man who walked these halls some 60 years ago, trying to dispenses advice to anybody who would listen to him at the ranged through the hallways here. especially that how the united states should navigate the complex foreign-policy in the aftermath of world war ii and during the birth pangs of what we now know as the cold war. i think we find ourselves today in a similarly complex in between time as was the case in the late 1940's. niebuhr feared at that age that it would leave the country astray, perhaps a pride in our

own virtue, and the absence of a clear path of how to negotiate a post-world war ii path as well as a communist plot. in contrast, he was preaching a message of chastened wisdom, in which the united states government engaged in a slow and sometimes difficult process of diplomacy, willing to courageously pursued justice and peace while exercising american leadership in a very muddled and confused world. i like to think that niebuhr would approve of our efforts today as we too navigate some very perilous times. thank you very much. [applause] and now i want to introduce my friend, melissa rogers, director of the white house faith-based

office and neighborhood partnership. melissa. [applause] >> thank you so much, shaun. good morning. i am honored to be here today. let me thank secretary kerry for his leadership, and my friend, shaun casey, for the leadership he will provide any days and years ahead. secretary kerry has chosen the right person for this important path. i want to thank everyone, including the many who are in this room, who have labored for years to bring this day about. this is your day, too. and it is a cause for celebration for all of us. let me say a word of thanks for your visions and your work. for many people here in the united states and around the

world, faith is a fundamental part of their identity. it shapes to they are and how they understand the world around them. it provides a sense of community and a network of support. we have seen the power of religion throughout human history, and our own country, we see religious leaders join with others and champion causes like abolition, civil rights, and the eradication of poverty. in so doing, these advocates have often led our nation to heed the better angels of its nature. similarly, around the world on issues ranging from health to education to conflict prevention, religious and other civil society leaders are tackling some of our most

pressing challenges. they help create more peaceful and secure communities. as we know all too well, there are also times when religion is abused to promote violence and destabilize community spirit of the potential for religious communities to spark both positive and negative movements makes it a central for the united states to understand these communities and to engage with them. as the state department doesn't work around the world, it must have a firm grasp of these dynamics, and it must know how to address them in ways that are informed and intelligent. under shaun's leadership, this new office will help the department to accomplish these goals. the office will also spearhead a new administration strategy that encourages engagement with the religious and other community actors to advance three objectives. first, promoting sustainable development and a more effective humanitarian response. civil society organizations and leaders, including religious ones, are addressing key issues such as poverty reduction, hiv/aids prevention, and child survival. by working in partnership with religious and other community leaders, and with other governmental agencies of course

like usaid, we hope to better protect the most vulnerable among us. and by ensuring that humanitarian assistance programs are mindful of the very important religious aspects in a context where these ribbons were administered, we hope to under overcome some of the misunderstanding surrounding our assistance. the second objection is advancing pluralism and human rights, including the protection of religious freedom. our engagement with religious and other civil society leaders should strive to promote pluralism and respect the human rights of all people, including members of minority or marginalized groups. now, we understand that sometimes civil society leaders and institutions may disagree with our positions on certain

issues, but we are committed to having the conversation. increasing out of engagement with a diverse -- will help us to underscore the universality of these critical rights. here at the new outfits, of course we work closely with the office of international religious freedom. the third objective is preventing, mitigating, and extremism. strategic engagement with religious leaders can help us to break cycles of violence conflict. as shaun and secretary kerry have said, a guiding principle for all this work will be that our actions must be consistent with the united states constitution. employees of our government can and should engage faith-based leaders and communities on u.s. policy priorities, just as they do other civil society leaders

and communities. at the same time, our precious religious freedoms guarantee that the first amendment mean that we must observe special rules when we engage religious actors and matters, such as ensuring governmental neutrality toward faith. all diplomatic and consular posts will receive guidance and continuing assistance on these important issues. from the start, the obama administration has emphasized building strong relationships with religious and other civil society leaders, and working with them on a variety of issues. it has already been mentioned that the state department has conducted a dialogue with civil society, a project that includes the religious and foreign policy

working groups. this group has helped lead us to this day. and it will continue to be a valuable resource. in addition to our own white house office of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships, many federal agencies have centers for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships that regularly work with community organizations, both religious and secular, to serve people in need. by the way, i would like to thank joshua dubois and -- kelly who have provided terrific leadership on these issues for many years. thus, we are building on a strong foundation as we see to institutionalize our outreach across departments and agencies to make engaging religious and other civil society leaders a routine part of the way we do business. and under shaun's leadership, i have no doubt that this new office is going to play a key

role in advancing that agenda. of course, to do this work effectively, we will need your help. we are so grateful for this new opportunity that this office and the strategies provide to partner with you in new ways, and we will look forward to working with you to advancing the common good in the days ahead. thank you so much. [applause] >> thank you for coming. you are dismissed. [laughter] they told me that -- >> how are you?

>> been little more than an hour, news coverage of the iraq war with "the new york times" photographer michael kamber. here is part of what he said on military funerals.

we lost probably 5000 americans over there including the contractors. most have never seen a picture of a dead american soldier. >> just the casket as they come over. >> even at arlington when the families invited photographers to the cemetery to photograph funerals, they were not allowed. you are not allowed to have a photographer come in and photograph the funeral. husband was killed and you saw this as a tribute and he wanted to have this memorialized, the pentagon says it's off-limits. they couched it saying that this is an issue of privacy for the soldiers. they have a right to privacy. this is what i was told repeatedly. because they posit themselves as the defenders of

the soldier and they put us in the position of the people who want to disrespect the soldiers. that wasn't it at all. first of all, if you're going to enlist in the military and go halfway around the world and invade someone's country, that's not a private event. click you can see all of his remarks from the new america foundation here on c-span in just over an hour from now, six :00 p.m. eastern. at 7:00 a live town hall on media coverage of wars looking at the social media and the conflict, the relationship between government and journalists. we will take your phone calls, tweets, and facebook comments live at 7:00 p.m. eastern on c- span. >> i and not some sort of anti- suburb her son who thinks that everyone needs to live in new york city. -- i'm not some sort of anti- suburb person. a condo-dwelling

elitist. that's not why i did this book. i understand why people like the suburbs, you know? i get fed up with daily life in new york city a lot erie the trends were just so undeniable down the that there was a shift in the way that urban america is perceived is too big a story to ignore. theeigh gallagher on where americans are moving. part of "the tv." -- "book tv." >> next, an update on the worldwide terror alert. host: our guest is chad sweet, former chief of staff at the homeland security department. thank you for being with us. they are pulling out of yemen over what they call an immediate

terrorist threat. this morning, the bbc is reporting that yemen says they have foiled an al qaeda plot to seize some of the country's main ports. as someone who has been on the front lines, what's going on? guest: they are serious about stepping up operations. we have seen the country have abs and flows and they did release, as you recall, a list of 25 top value targets within their own country and i think thatis a good faith effort the host government which has the main responsibility for abroad.ng our assets why is this such a hotbed of terrorist activity at the moment?

failed statestes, are where they are wanting to take route. centrals a weak government. it is tribal, historically a tribal country with difficulty having an extend control through the region. abuts saudi arabia which has been a key source of tension in that cup, one of the holiest cities in all of islam has been there and it's a rallying point the kingrns about demand united states, so the ,ombination those two have made yemen for a national rallying point. week, the president and the white house meeting with the president of yemen. our relations with the

government of yemen is what? the new administration in yemen wants to demonstrate that they are not the same as the prior administration. they have taken actions, like we are seeing today, where they are trying to put their own security forces out front. we are also seeing, for >> they have accepted training and continue to allow us to conduct drone operations. all of those are signs that things are improving. the recent visit by the u.s. in part was to deliver the message that we need to see stepped-up operations in light of the intelligence we're receiving. host: the "washington post" reporting there have been four drone attacks over the last 10 days. and in comparison, seven months have passed with no drone attacks. guest: right, that shows you right there that, two things, they're trying to show