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tv   Washington This Week  CSPAN  May 31, 2014 4:00pm-4:23pm EDT

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we got serious about producing real things getting them in the field, having people trained to actually use them kind of getting out of the wonder worled of the grand experiment. enough of that going on to further the advanced things. but serious things getting into the field. so i too would take my hat off to that evolution over the last 10 to 15 years of the missile defense agency. >> very quickly i indicated that i haven't told about before but i and other senior officials got exactly the same timeline of notification about tests that exceeded this test that failed -- tests that failed and tests that succeeded. and that openness and the understanding that that is the way to operate and it's the way to improve to have that openness within the department and with congress and the american people i think is incredibly important.
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>> question in the back the gentleman in the blue shirt. >> tom, arms control association. question for jim miller. i want to ask you about one of the many decisions you made while on the inside to see if you have any other perspective now that you're on the outside. last march the pentagon decided to deploy the 14 additional ce 2's in alaska if the next test hits which we're expecting sometime very soon. since that decision was taken last march, two things have happened. one is the july test of the ce 1 failed and that led to a decision by the mda to redesign to kill vehicle which has now been firmly embraced by mda, the pentagon, congress, its one of the few thing that is seems to have widespread bipartisan support redesign the kill
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vehicle. so those two things, the failure of the july test and now this effort to redesign the kill vehicle do those in your mind in any way change the decision to go ahead with the 14 additional ce 2's? it's one thing for the next test to lead to fixing the ten that are deployed, but does it change what your thoughts about deploying 14 additional ce 2's now that we know about the unreliability of the system and that we're working on a better system to follow up? thank you. >> no. and to elaborate just a little bit, you have both the quantitative and a qualitative set of issues. as we saw the threat from north korea advancing with a lot of uncertainty still about both umbers and quality of the kn 08 and td 2 but more to the
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point the kno 8 as we look at that hedge that we put in place under secretary gates that his recommendation to the president, if you didn't act to begin to move forward on that hedge to go from 30 to 44, then there was no prospect of making it by 2017. from my perspective given that we had it within our where withal to grow, that it was a modest cost, it wouldn't affect strategic ability and at the same time that our other mechanism that we had planned previously for dealing with the potential threat to the homeland that sm 32 b interceptor slipped to the right not because of challenges so much in its development because of challenges of getting it funded on capitol hill. the combination of those to me indicated and i still -- indicates, that going forward
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on the quantitative side with that modest but important step was very sensible. and on the qual tative side, yes, the mda and indeed the nation need to deal with the quality issues and i think to deal with the ekv and have a technical approach that works. if that ends up working within that timeline to 2017 that's great. if it moves it a little to the right that doesn't mean that other investment to get everything else in place was incorrect in my view. >> so let me just add a footnote. i think it's very easy to say in retro spekt we should have been redesigning the ekv four to six years ago and then we would be in a much better situation. it's also easy to say why don't we stop now and do the ek redesign and then deploy that system as opposed to ce 2. that would be a perfectly reasonable strategy if there was no palpable sense of a
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threat. and i think where people differ on this and where jim has just articulated is there is a sense that the north korean threat was emerging perhaps faster than some thought, perhaps it was becoming more serious than some people thought. and so i think senior decision makers did not have the luxury to say let's look at this as how can we get the best system by 2025? let's not deploy ce 2. let's go with an ekc design. because they wanted something in the field more substantial in the field by 2017. if you take that threat, the uncertainties, and the fact that as a senior decision maker you have responsibility for making these decisions then i think the decision that was made is perfectly reasonable. >> take a couple questions at once. this gentleman in the middle. we'll collect two and then turn
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to the panelists. >> mike from the iiss. i guess a simple question. what is the pacing technology for the evolution of more reliable effective missile defense? is it sensor technology? kill vehicle, boost capability, computing power? just like to get some thoughts on that. >> let's got to gentleman on the blue right there. lot of heard a optimism on lasers and rail guns for the navy in particular, although they're not talking about a national defense system of those, i'm very interested for people to elaborate on their relatively pessism on perhaps a marginal impact and conversely the mention of hyper sonics and boost slide systems. how that could change both the
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offensive potentials as you say russia and china are looking at but also a defensive application as well. >> so the first yes. what's the -- question. what's the pacing technology? >> it's sensors and command and control integrating that stuff together. that's the pacing technology that's going to make this stuff much more effective. >> i would simply add to that it's a tough job and i think we've done very well with it. we still have a ways to go. so i would also throw that into the hopper. >> the second question was the question i had. why the pess mix on this cooling stuff? >> it's realism. >> these are great technologies but they tend to be short change. let's take rail guns. rail guns have a lethal range measured in kilometers that i can count on one hand. maybe two. so i cannot defend the
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continental united states with a rail gun. or if you think you can -- i'm sorry? [inaudible] >> talking about a 100 kilometer range. >> i am not aware of a technology that has that range. but let's put it this way. a 50 caliber machine gun is a great boost phase technology if i can get within a kilometer or less of an icbm launch site. so kin ectic project tiles if i can get close enough, if i can knock them down. that's the problem, i can't get close enough. for terminal defense, the threats coming at you, great applications. the same is true for laysers. they have relatively limited range here that's not in the single digits but double hundreds of kilometers perhaps. . i still have to get fairly close. so they don't work very well for mid course because a laser is not very effective against the hardened arrow shell of a reentry vehicle but boost phase
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and terminal i might be able to do something. boost phase i have to get close. you start thinking how do i get close? people put it in space. can't get close enough. air borne platforms maybe. there wasa air borne laser there was an attempt to do that but you have to worry about the defense systems that adversary puts up. with the current and technology i can see for the next decade or so you can't get close enough to have this be an operationly effective system. terminal defense, threats coming at you with a laser now i can start doing some interesting things. certainly if it's a conventional let's call it an anti-ship ballistic missile. it's got seekers, trying to do things to find me. i can use my laser against his seeker and burn it out, for example. well, that will defeat a terminally homing convention anti-ship ballistic missile. so i can see what i call niche
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applications and i think we will see those evolve in the next couple decades. but for homeland defense, for defense of europe, japan, broad area defense, i don't see anything that is going to provide that capability except for mid cours intercept and then you've got to work the sensors, the command and control, the mid course decoy problem which is a sensor in the software agga rhythm issue. i am not pessimistic about being able to solve that at least with respect to the north koreas and irnse of the world. so i think -- irans of the world. so it's not pess mix it's realism. >> could i add in case my earlier comments were misint rhetted. first i would defer to the technological wizards dean and bob and but second based on my degree of knowledge, i see no evidence to suggest that in the 2030 timeframe we'll get to
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something that would allow national capabilities with either rail gun or directed energy but point defense will be vaveble. but what happens is two kinds of filters are applied. the first one says well if i'm russian or chinese or if i'm the united states looking at their capabilities i have to think about not just what they have today but in 15 years so i will be projecting forward. second there's a degree of uncertainty associated with what's present today as well. so it means that even as we see the potential early deployments of tactical uses we need to be thinking about their implications and the perceptions of our partners and of russia and china as well. >> the time for one more question. yes right there. a twin dynamics at work and i'm unclear which one
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might emerge dominant. and this relates to what president obama said today about the u.s. needs to work on coalitions. on the one hand i see us taking off and really exceeding the capabilities of allies and partners in many of these areas. on the other hand, these technologies might make it easier to promote integration of sensors and so on. i wonder what the panel might think where the balance might lie. is it going to make the u.s. as often occurs in a dint realm altogether making it if anything we will seek partners and just for political cover as we pretty much do our own thing? .> i'll reply i suggested this i think in my remarks and that is that we have tremendous opportunities for cooperation today on missile defense as in other areas and we move forward
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whether it's european phase adaptive approach working in the asia pacific with japan and south korea in particular or working in the middle east with israel with the gulf cooperation council states. those i think technology will help us find new opportunities, new specific opportunities and it is imperative for our national security interests that we do so. and in order to do that, as i said in my remarks, we've really got to change the model that we currently have for export control and for technology security and for disclosure we have to make it so our allies and partners can not just plug in more effectively but can get involved in the process and coproduction in a way that is much more substantial than it typically has been in the past. we are not going to keep the technological edge by overprotecting. there are some key technologies, a small number of so-called crown jewels but we'll be able to protect that
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technological edge by partnering with our partners and by innovating more rapidly. that's a much more promising path. >> let me add one thing to that. it was interesting when ashe carter came into office one of the things that he said that he was going to accomplish, he was going to change the whole itar situation because in his words it was not clear in my words it was quite clear i thought that our holding on to our own technology and by definition holding out other people's technology was now starting to work against us rather than for us. and he saw that clearly. unfortunately, he wasn't able to do much about it even in the position that he was in. but i think it's another area that really needs to change pretty fundamentally.
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we don't own technology any more and there's good stuff out there that our regimes are working against us and we really need to rethink that. so how come you failed at that? >> i actually spent a lot of time on that and secretary tes was brilliant if not the a predominant impetus to moving forward on export control reform. in fact we did migrate, the good news, thousands of items off of the u.s. munitions list. and to the ccl, which is owned by the commerce department. and that we then identified if i remember right 36 countries who are strategic trade authorization partners where we could just have a presumptive ok for moving that technology. that's the good news. the remaining work is that that
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only touched in a sense the low-hanging fruit and didn't get to the center of the issue where real technology sharing is what our allies and partners want and what we've got to be able to provide as we go forward. >> i would just add a footnote. i think one of the i want resting things about missile defense is that it can perform a very interesting role for alliance e, cohesion, and joint development, unlike the strategic technology of the cold war, mainly nuclear weapons those were truly crown jewels you could not share much at all of the technology. at best you could have basing rights in other countries and that was the form of sharing. but here you can do a lot in terms of joint development, the sensors, the focal plane arrays, the radar, the interceptors. so i think it's a much richer set of technologies that you can use for joint development, eyelyance cohesion, eyelien, intgration, joint exercises with these systems.
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and the like. so i would certainly echo what both jim and bob said. >> great. this has been a really excellent discussion. i learned so much that i learned that i know even less than i thought i knew if that makes sense. but please join me in thanking our panelists for a really fantastic meeting. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014]
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>> the taliban has been marking time and telling people ok remember they're going to be gone and we're going to be here and we will remember all of those who helped them. and we have members going over there all the time that are checking on things. one of the specific things we've had is several of our women members have gone over the last several years on mother's day. they give up their mother's day with their families to be with women over there who are engaged in this fight. not the military fight but the political fight. and many women have expressed concern to these women members of congress that they know they will be the first ones killed if we pull out precipitously and leave the taliban to come back in control. that's what happened in iraq. the al qaeda's now in charge in
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fallujaha and ramadi, place that is we fought hard to kick them out of. when we left without leaving any kind of residual force behind, they have now taken back over and we do not want to see that happen in afghanistan. the reason we're in afghanistan is to protect ourselves against having a place where al qaeda can train as they did to attack us on 9/11. so i think saying that we're going to pull these troops out have of them in 2015 all of them by 2016 just exactly sends the wrong message. they should be there as -- until and as long as it takes to complete the mission. i think a couple of years is probably going to be sufficient. but why should we tell our enemies all of our plans? it doesn't make sense to me. >> you can watch the entire
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"newsmakers" interview tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. and again at 6:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. >> you can now take c-span with you wherever you go. >> next, proposed changes to the u.s. sentencing system during a discussion of the house judiciary overcriminal bization task force formed in 2014 one of the issues they talk about deals with mandatory sentencing requirements. this is two hours.
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>> the committee will come to order. the chair is allowed to call recess at any time. our witnesses today. an adjunct professor at georgetown law holding a number the federal in government. the u.s. attorneys office for the eastern district of virginia, counselor to the enforcement administration and special counsel to president
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george h.w. bush. he's written several op-ed .ieces he has been interviewed and quoted from "the new york times" and has testified as an expert witness before congress appeared on various programs and is a contributor to blogs. he obtained his undergraduate at the university of north carolina and his jurist or it -- juris doctorate. thechair recognizes chairman from north carolina, mr. holden, to introduce our second witness >>

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