opportunities to do discussions like these on what is to come, as the opportunity arises. thank you once again to our you, theand to audience, and of course to our craft technical team, including dj shy areited to doing everything you have done. >> coming up lives today at noon eastern, live coverage of the nevada state supreme court to certify the state's election results. president-elect joe biden and kamala harris will announce their key foreign-policy policy and national security personnel. watch the announcement live at 1:00 eastern on c-span, online at c-span.org, or the free c-span radio app. host: a conversation on u.s. military ready sandnts global

threats we face. our guest is dakota wood, heritage foundation's defense program senior research fellow, served two decades in the marine corps. assessing u.s. military strength, a pretty major undertaking. how does the heritage foundation try to do that? guest: we gather all publicly available information we can come across, official testimony from the pentagon, acquisition reports on major programs, general news reporting from the defense reporting community, our own personal contacts in the services and the pentagon and on capitol hill, and we gather all that all year long, go through a several month analysis and writing process, compare last year's information to this year's information, and then basically issue a report card on the military, and this year on a scale of one to five, we would give it a three, or in the words we use, we call it marginal, and we feel that the

u.s. military writ large is marginally able to meet the demands of u.s. national security requirements, meaning they can handle one major conflict in one part of the world, but not much more than that. we think it needs to be more than that, because the u.s. has global interests and global responsibilities. host: the u.s. military budget is increased under the trump administration. had that made an impact? guest: it actually has. we've seen that mostly in readiness. things like building new ships and airplanes, these are multiyear efforts, and it takes a while to expand or grow the size of the military. the same thing on man power, the number of people that you have in there as well. but readiness, where you get people you have with the equipment they have into the field to train and fly and shoot and drive and all those sorts of things, to be competent incident in what they're doing, that has really improved over the last two or three years.

so if we were going to have one high point in this year's report card, it's increased readiness of the force we currently have. host: it's the 2021 index of u.s. military strength. you can find it at heritage.org. that's what we're going to talk about in this 45 minutes of the "washington journal." phone lines split up this way. if you want to join this conversation this morning with dakota wood, democrats can demall at 202-748-8000. republicans, 202-748-8001. independents, 202-748-8002. zpive retired members of the military, special line for you, doment to hear from you, 202-748-8003 is that number. the report, to want dive into it, mr. wood. one of the key topics, assessing the global operating environment. that's the threats we're facing in the world, where are they coming from? guest: it's actual two parts

you're talking about. the world, is it easier or difficult for the american military to do what we were called upon to do. in that we look at our friends and allies, where we have forces at. do they know how to work in a particular area. the threat section is really, to your point, and we look at russia, china, iran, north korea, and then kind of the general destabilizing influence of terrorism in key parts of the world. and we assess the threat environment in general as high, not the highest category of four on our score of one to five, but in that high category, because the main competitors, like china and russia, have really made serious investments in their military capabilities, expanding their reach, more of a power projection, really improve the capability of the forces with longer range, guide munitions, a lot more attention to training for readiness,

combat, competencies, iran has expanded its portfolio of missiles to 3,000 ballistic missiles. certainly you've seen the headlines with china and what they've been doing in the south china sea. it's a worrisome environment from a threats perspective. from the ally and partner perspective, they have been making some progress, especially in the last year or two, and among nato members, making more investments in their own defense. but they're still falling far short of where they need to be. host: encourage viewers to go to heritage.org, open up this very easy to navigate index, because you can follow along with some of the easy to read charts that we're going to go through for our visual learners. we're showing them the capability of the threats around the world, you talked about russia and china as being rated as formidable threats. on the lower end of the threat scale, are those that you

consider to be capable threats, middle east terrorism falls into that, as well as afghanistan and pakistan terrorism. explain that y that's on the lower level of capability. guest: right, in those tables, we try to use zrip active words. what is a two or four mean? so using our language to convey a sense, is it something you really need to be concerned about, or is this something, you know, that generates a sense of urgency? so when we look at threats, it's a combination of intense and capability. you can't measure intents the way you look at observed behavior. how has a country been behaving, and as it's been behaving more or less aggressively, what are the tools that it has? when you look at terror groups, they don't possess submarines and combat aircraft fleets and large land forces with ballistic missiles and those sorts of things, right? but they do pose an on the ground immediate threat, especially in a politically

destabilizing way. so you could have a terror group like al qaeda or islamic state or al-shabab that is very aggressive in its rhetoric, but their capability is limited to small arms, manufactured bombs, maybe some smaller gauge rockets. so we give them a lower score on the capability side even if their activities have been very aggressive. host: here's a part that have report that those called the active and retired military lines would happen most interested or most respond to, talking about the capabilities, the readiness and capacity of the military branches in this country. and just taking a look at the comparison between the army and the navy, the army rated very high when it comes to readiness, weak when it comes to its capacity. you can see the comparison to the navy here. weak when it comes to capacity, readiness more on the marginal

level. explain the differences to that and why you chose those rankings. guest: on capacity, it's very important to understand our scoring. we think the u.s. military needs to be able to handle two major problems. so if you got tied up in the asia pacific region, you know, some kind of a problem or a conflict with china, it's not that you can leave the middle east or europe when you've got iran and russia, so you have to have a sufficiently large capability that you can address u.s. interests in multiple regions, and that's why we think there's capacity is so critical. when we look at the u.s. navy, we look at the army, they just don't have the numbers of units. it doesn't mean that the individuals, say soldiers, or anything like that, extraordinarily competent incident people. we just don't have enough of them. the army has paid a lot of attention to the readiness of its forces, sending its brigade combat teams to its national training centers, really making

the shift from counter terrorism sorts of focus operations to readying itself if it had to go into a large-scale conventional conflict against a major opponent like a russia or a china, something like that. so their readiness is almost off the charts. i mean, them spent a lot of time getting their units back up to speed. whereas the navy has had some really problematic maintenance areas, you know, keeping ships out at sea, doing a quick turn to shipyards and all the back log maintenance that occurred over many years. so when you look at those scores, the force we have today, not the one five years from now, if it was called upon to go to war, the forces are too small for the task that we think they would have, and they really need to do a lot more focus on modernizing their equipment, which is a lot of money from congress that's needed, and then spending time and attention to make those forces competent and proficient. so that's kind of explaining

some of the scoring metology we used in those charts. host: if you agree or disagree, take it one dakota wood directly, defense program's senior research fellow at the heritage foundation. that line for active and retired military, again, 202-748-8003. mr. wood, that's where we're going to start, ed from jacksonville, florida, retired military. go ahead, ed. caller: good morning. i was just wondering if your report looked at the reserve component included in your report. guest: we addressed the criticality of reserve forces, especially in that introduction chapter, if haup to download it at heritage.org/military. there's so much complexity in the political establishment of our national guard and our reserve forces. a lot of variability in different units across the country, depending on what their particular focus might be and whether you're talking individual ready reserve or

actually selected units. so what we do is we look at the active component in these scores, and we use those active combat units as kind of a bellwether. there are representative components of the total force. so our active units would be those probably first thrown into the breach. we have to make sure they're there, but they can't do anything over a sustained period without the reserve forces. the ones we score in those tables are the active component elements. host: one of the top-line conclusions from the report, it notes that america's leadership remains in question, and its security interests are under significant pressure. challenges continue to grow, long-standing allies are not what they once were, and the u.s. is increasingly bedeviled by debt that can strain its ability to sustain its forces commensurate with its interests, that from the 2021 index of u.s. military

strength. focus on long-standing allies are not what they once were. guest: when you think about nato, nato members and the forces they used to have, at the end of the cold war, west germany alone had 5,000 main battle tanks, pretty sufficient navy, very competent air force. today the combined germany, 20, 30 years later, has fewer than 300 tanks. so 5,000 for west german, only 300, actually fewer than that today. two years ago, they had no operationally deployable submarines. they had to contract out to civilian dops get their military pilots sufficient time and helicopter cockpits to maintain certifications. so it's an example. the british military, the totality, the size of the british military, air power, navy, royal marines, and the army, the total of that is smaller than the united states marine corps alone. they only have 17 surface ships

in their navy. china has added that number of ships to its navy just in the last two years or so. so when we look at the investments of our partners and our friends, they have really fallen short for about 20 to 25 years. there's a lot of ground to make up. and we talk about the importance of allies. if you're going to go to war, you want people helping you out, and you want to be there to help people. but they're not doing what they should be doing, it's a greater burden on the united states, which increased our costs and necessarily increased our risks. host: chris in massachusetts is next, line for democrats. good morning. caller: hi, quick question. unlike iran and russia, united states is in jury without an invitation from the internationally recognized government. but the united states is in syria without congressional approval. the united states is in syria without united nations security council authorization. in fact, the united states is

there as an occupying force, and it appears to be looking after the interests of the emirates, the saudis and israelis. do you have any commonets that -- any comments on my observations? guest: sure, talking policy decision, right? so policy, the use of military force is different than the condition of military forces. so the policy debate that has gone on in washington, congress continues to fund the defense department. they haven't forbidden the use of military forces. so almost by default we have the u.s. congress, representative branch of the american people going along with this use of military power. when those forces were introduced in syria, it was absolute chaos. you had a lot of civilians who ere being massacred by the recognized government under bashar al-assad, use of chlorine gas. it was just mayhem. so there was an international effort, at least by coalition partners, to try to introduce

forces, keep back some of the wars parties, support the civilians that were really under assault, and really a lot of freedom fighters, if you wanted to call them that, that were a representative form of government. things have consolidated a bit in the last year or two, especially because russia and iran came in to help support the assad regime. but i don't think anybody is saying that bashar al-assad and his military are advocates of peace, stability, helping out their own population. so from my understanding of the role of u.s. forces, it's so combat the remnants of the islamic state to try to provide some kind of a peaceful enclave to try to facilitate the support of humanitarian assistance that's flowing into that region, things that the syrian government wouldn't be supporting. so i think that there are sometimes situations in which, if you can't get consensus among the international community, the right thing to

do is go in, use military force for the right reasons, and then see how the situation evolves. host: our sarasota, florida, steven, republican, good morning. caller: good morning. thank you for taking my call. i was wondering, it seems like some of the news, some programs seem to be a form of propaganda to help other countries and why we don't see or haven't heard much in the last several years, other than maybe some of the conservative channels, i watch both conservative and liberal channels, and i hear things like the russians targeting americans, and sort of like propaganda, nothing -- they don't talk about any of the good things that's going on in our military. i was always wondering why are we being used to hurt ourselves or why is our left, some of the socialist -- not socialist, but some of the networks that are almost anti-american. it seems strange to me that we're hurting ourselves. guest: well, i think the past

year has pointed out the differences of opinion across the united states. we'll see what the electoral college decides on who the next president is. it does appear to be remaining in joe biden's favor on that. but even with that said, 74 million people or so voted for the current president. obviously more voted for the contender. so it's just an example that people hold very strongly held views. there are differences of opinion on the role of the united states in the world and how it executes that role. is it primarily economic and diplomatic? is it primarily military? is it a mixture of all of those sorts of things? and i think what we've seen in the news media establishment writ large is really kind of picking sides on that, that there is a political philosophy that pervades across of the reporting based on either the journalist involved or the editorial board or whoever is writing the checks for a particular news outlet, and we

see this kind of preference for viewpoints coming through that. so i think a really educated consumer of information, as you appear to be, taking in multiple different streams, left leaning, right leaning, what's going on on the web, looking at international reporting. you know, what are the germans and brits and japanese and australians writing about? i think it's really the only way to get a holistic view of what's going on in the world. and then you throw your voice in as you've done on this particular program. host: coming back to the issue of assessing u.s. military strength, and the trump administration, one person said america has been told that we are the strongest. you seem to have a more negative position on that. guest: well, strength is relative. so fern for person, unit for unit, we would dominate, i believe, on any battlefield. we just have really good people, good leadership, kind of the american model where we punish initiative down to the lower ranks, as opposed to other models, which are much

more authoritarian. they don't have the kind of free play where personal initiative really comes up. and they don't, frankly, have the experience. the last time china went to war with anybody was against vietnam in 1979, i believe, and they didn't fare too well. that doesn't mean you don't recognize your shortfalls and try to improve your situation, which is what china is doing. so where we have a negative view on these things is, if you had to go more than one place at one time, we just don't have the capacity. the military skills we have are great, but we're using equipment that is 30 and 40 years old. the average age of an air force fighter aircraft that we see flying around on the news is 30 years old. more than half of the navy ships are greater than 20 years old. mat reason core still uses ones purchased in the 197 owe's. it's a comparison thing. where would you put a u.s. force on a map against an opposing force if that's all they have to be concerned

about, we're pretty sure that they would win in that conflict. but if it was more than that, if you had to be more than one place, oldie quiment and too small capacity to handle those sorts of challenges. host: we have a space. what can you say about assessing the strength of the space force? guest: it was an easy move to take individuals in the u.s. air force who focus on space operations and carve them out into a separate service, but we still have 20,000 or more space-oriented service personnel in the army and the navy that are not part of that space force. so it's a great first step. we think it's needed because of the unique nature of space, space operations and the different sorts of platforms you can put up there for various reasons, but it needs to continue to expand. and that's just in the military service. you still have the intelligence community that are huge consumers of space and space

products that aren't part of that space force. so we think that the initiative is good, they've been very aggressive in trying to get their feet under them and develop an sandeist culture, which will take time. but the efforts l effort needs to continue and it needs to be a much more comprehensive. host: it's the index of military strength, the yearly index put out by the heritage foundation. dakota wood is the senior research fellow there, served two decades in the marine corps, taking your phone calls this morning as we talk about that report. up next, woodbridge, virginia, independent. good morning. caller: good morning, sir. thank you for taking my call. i've been trying to get a hold of c-span for the last seven months. host: well, you're on now, lynn. what's your question or comment for dakota wood? caller: i have a comment. civilian n ordinary citizen. and i just have a comment about

our military system. i am so proud and impressed of what our president trump has one for the last four years. even though that i'm a very citizen, but i watch the correct news, and even you can feel it, you know it, that we are in much safer place for the last four years than for a long, long time. that is just my simple comment. host: are we in a safer place? guest: i think we're more realistic. so in that sense, yes, we are. but during that period of time, the world doesn't stand still. so you do have a china that has dramatically expanded its capabilities and improved its skill levels.

i mean, they've gotten more serious about a power projection sort of force, to secure its commercial routes from china proper through the south china sea into the indian ocean, the middle east. so it's a much different china. while we have gotten better in terms of our focus, less counter terrorism, counter insurgency, in places like afghanistan and iraq, and much more on this great power competition that people will talk about, our adversaries, our competitors, have also made improvements. so the first step in dealing with any kind of problem is recognizing that you have a problem. now it's what am i going to do about that? so we've talked about improvements and readiness, very important. the military services have really matured their requirements. you know, what they believe they would need to prevail in a larger scale conventional conflict. so that's great. we're much better off there. where we still fall short is the funding for the programs

needed to give the forces what they need. and defense spending, twhile does increase in real dollars, it does not keep pace with the ravages of inflation or the premature wearing out of equipment that has occurred in these continuing operations for the last nearly 20 years. the price of outfitting the average soldier has increased 16 times the rate of inflation since the vietnam war. it's five times the rate of inflation, more expensive to buy an armored vehicle, a tank, for example, in that time period as well. i think the realities of these numbers just have not been shared with the american public, so it seems odd that $700 billion isn't enough, but it falls far short of what we had to spend, let's say during the cold war, when you had a global contest against one competitor, and today we still have a global contest with four major competitors in very different parts of the world.

our government just has not done a good job at conveying that reality, and so people find it kind of shocking that our military is falling short in terms of what it has in zperms capabilities. host: dave is in seattle, a democrat. good morning. you're on with dakota wood. caller: hello, yes. i had a couple of things to say. when i was in the army a number of years ago, i was in an infantry unit, and it seemed like we did a lot of training. it wasn't individual enough. we didn't learn other people's jobs well enough. in combat, you can lose a squad leader or machine gun or n no time at all. the other people in the squad didn't know anything about a squad leader or machine gunner or working the radio. but it seemed like everything was for show. let's go out and put a good show on, and the officers would say, gee, look at that practice attack, that's just wonderful. that's not real combat, i didn't think. there was a deficiency in our

training. and also, my dad, he worked for a shipyard for a number of years, and they used to make destroyer escorts, lot of them. that was nothing. i don't think the shipyards even is in seattle anymore. but you don't hear anything about making ships or anything. host: dave, let's take up the two subjects. dakota wood? guest: we're talking about professionalism of the force. spent 20 years, u.s. marine, really, really well led. other offices or units that i was in, you kind of scratch your head, and we thought we were going to get something a bit better, and that's just human nature, differences between companies, sports teams, family members. it's people being people. so when we talk about small unit leadership, small unit training, whether it's individual or aggregated up to larger size units, it's incumbent upon that service,

the operating forces, various levels of command to try to figure out what it is they should be doing, and do you have quality people who are held accountable for how well they're training their forces. and that will vary from year year, unit to unit, person to person. on average, we have really good people trying to do the right things for the right reasons. but you can always find shortfalls where something has gone wrong. you have the skipper of a ship that's relieved of command because the higher command structure has lost confidence or something really bizarre happens in the operating space. so there will be those instances because we're talking about human beings. but i think we're lot better postured today than we were perhaps in past years. as far as the industrial capacity, this is a 30-year problem. sort the end of the cold war, no soviet union, no major competitor, china wasn't a global economic power that it is technology today.

technology didn't enable other countries to become an aspiring nuclear power with long-range ballistic missiles. the u.s. military shrank dramatic until the 1990's. we went from 770,000 soldiers to now today of 480,000. 550 ships in the yeave. today, fewer than 300. i think it's 298 or so. the air force is 2/3 the size in some cases one half the size behalf it was than we had in the early 1990's. so if you don't have as big of force, you will don't need as many companies making as many things. and if you don't have business, you go out of business. so our defense industrial base in terms of major manufacturers if we take you live to nevada where the supreme court is certified the results of the presidential election, where joe biden one by 33,000 v.