hello and welcome to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle the debate over the u.s. defense budget is quite heated well not creating much light why does the woods need such a vast military industrial complex who or what actually threatens american security is the real debate if not a battle over who garners fast profits at taxpayer expense. to cross-talk defense spending i'm joined by my guest in washington anthony shaffer he is the director for external communications at the center for advanced defense studies douglas macgregor he is a retired army colonel author and independent businessman and kelly she is a journalist at antiwar dot com or the folks cross talk rules and i think that means you can jump in anytime you want to tell me if i can go to you first what is

one fact that is not focused enough on this debate and what's the biggest myth about defense spending well i'd say though the one fact that's not focused enough on this in this debate is the fact that we are in a natural downturn anyway having got out of the iraq and afghanistan wars so we're headed for a twenty to thirty percent drop in defense spending anyway that's that's natural what the sequester is done it is forcing the defense department to take a hatchet to the budget and so it is allowing the defense department executives to avoid the real thoughtful smart cuts that should occur anyway and now we see a lot of grandstanding so the first. the first to go will be you know employee employees are forced to go on furlough and we're looking at serious drops in family pay right now and we should be looking at the expenditures across florida that the

bloat and waste and abuse in the defense department as is so i think the biggest thing that we are that is being overlooked here is that politicians are allowed to grandstand because of this sequester when we should be going into a natural downturn anyway ok do we need to fence spending money what do you think about it's a natural downturn but you don't get that idea from inside the beltway well it's not a downturn when you really come down to the numbers with even with sequester to kick in this saturday we're still talking about a two point three to two point four percent growth for duty this is one of those great washington games we're not actually talking about cuts we're talking about cuts in the percentage of growth so what you're seeing here as i said in the new york post i mean a washington. post article is that you're seeing political theater this whole idea that works not deploying the truman battlegroup because of quote unquote cuts is insane the the the money's used for operations on budgets are not being cut

remotely and the bottom line is this as always the wars in afghanistan the wars in iraq were paid for by a burden see funds my goodness sake if the navy actually needs to actually continue its operations it could always go to congress and ask for emergency appropriations so we're not even there yet this is all theater and it's not even good theater at this point in time ok doug theater ok but it seems like bad theater to me go ahead . moore it is very disappointing but we should be surprised it is really a measure of the level of political cowardice that we have inside the beltway no one wants to tell the american people the truth which is we have discretion that where we've got to ultimately reduce the size of our government and reduce spending across the boards we're at least twenty years overdue for fuddle change in the way we organize our forces to defend the united states and we're at the end of more than ten years of failed disastrous interventions that eventually cultivated more

enemies and cost trillions of dollars so you put it all together and we're not at the end of this process we're just at the beginning of dramatic cuts in federal spending and that includes defense we will ultimately cut this is not a serious cut is tony's pointed out but we're at the beginning of that process ok kelly but i thought the united states would be insecure that our enemies will come against us because of this that's what you read in mainstream media ok well no i mean it mean and i think most people know it by this point that that the united states spends more than the next thirteen countries combined on and defense spending per year and let's keep in mind that if sequester ration goes through which would combined with the cuts that went into effect are supposedly going effect last year about a trillion dollars over the next ten years that would only bring our spending levels down to about the two seven to two thousand and seven levels which at that

point we were we were waging a two front war so there is a lot of hyperbole going on in terms of what what the disaster is on on the horizon and i think that tony had pointed out that there's been a lot of rhetoric about pulling ships in from the gulf a lot of rhetoric about not being able to get flight flight time training personnel would be pulled back and i think that's part. kabuki theater but when you look at it on the spending trajectory. this secret tracer would only take us back to two thousand and seven levels and i think that most of us around this table would agree that we were hurting back in two thousand and seven in terms of our readiness so tony this is really all about money it's not about defense right right well as we know from education simply throwing money at education doesn't make people smarter simply throwing money at the military doesn't make us smarter either we're

going to affect a defense that's right we need an effective defense not an expensive defense and this is the key i mean when you look at other spending let's take china for example one of the rhetorical points here is oh my goodness the chinese are spending more on their defense but they don't look at the entire picture for example the chinese are spending as much and researching and trying to support sources of potable water just think about this they're spending as much on trying to find water for their people as they are on defense so if you look at it in context they're not really doing anything extraordinary there are bird large country so this is where i think we have least half truths put out there to justify bad behavior so this is where again we have to look at what the real threats are and is as doug said we i would fundamentally say we need to look look at everything from the defense and the national security act of one thousand nine hundred seven on we are structured to fight a cold war which ended in one nine hundred ninety so this is time now and of course the other thing is. kelly was talking about we haven't even done accountability for the money we've spent we have the pentagon refuses to do an actual audit so you

don't even know where the money is going to you have spent so how can you justify not spending money that you do have for things you know you must do it's truly insane ok dixon who is running the show the pentagon congress the american people who. well i think at the moment we have to say that it's a combination of force stores in the department of defense and people on the hill who are of course tied to people in industry who are interested in maintaining the money flow for big ticket items look there here's a serious problem that no one bothers to discuss and i think your viewers will appreciate knowing this during the second world war when we had a live in million men in the air force and the army we had only four four star generals to command that force today we have about eight hundred eighty thousand men in the army and the air force combined and we have twenty three four star generals which what we've got is this a norm of bloat in senior officers that came about during the cold war as we

multiplied the numbers of headquarters we have a similar bloat when it comes to the price tags of big ticket items in the defense industry it has been a feeding frenzy in washington for money since the mid ninety's and the last ten years only made it worse so we have an entitlement culture that says first of all we deserve to have all of these headquarters we deserve to have all of this money and anyone who challenges us is essentially unpatriotic and by the way here all the grossly inflated threats that you're paying to defend against it's all nonsense it's all going to end because physical reality is beginning to intrude ok tell you what an article about the revolving door ok industry in the pentagon i mean this is what also drives and of course. absolutely i i think the american people would be appalled to realize that the state of things in the pentagon today. i think that you know one example you know after

undersecretary carter ash got on television last week and he said seaquest ration would cause us to have to pull back our ships it would cause us to not be ready for other wars quote unquote it would cause us to stop training flight times would be pulled back. i think that that was a real alarm bell to him the american people as though we would not be able to fight a war well if this goes through the next day we see through that we see in the news that the f. thirty five is costing this government the an untried and fairly flawed f. thirty five is going to cost the government or has cost it four hundred forty billion dollars and the juxtaposition and as doug mentioned between are big ticket items that the spending on those items the fact that these major

defense companies like joakim are in northrop grumman boeing. all get about eighty percent of their revenues from the federal government they are living off the federal dollars their best interest is to make sure they have an army of lobbyists up on capitol hill every day. fighting for their pet projects for their for their for their budgets the essence now these lobbyist are basically people who have worked on the hill they hire them right off the hill and then they turn and they hire our generals are retired generals and admirals so we see this this sick sick killer. situation where we have retired military we have people straight staff straight off the congressional committees the armed services committee the intelligence committees who are going into the

a lobbying squads of these major defense contractor in limit let me just when i want to go to tony we go to bring together the minutes before we go to the right here so his term was america's greatest biggest welfare program. absolutely that's one of the issues i mean when the supercommittee had pat toomey from pennsylvania and patty murray from washington state senators from different parties both having boeing as part of their constituency i predicted this committee would fail because neither side wanted to actually see that well it's all right so i want to i want you to finish it off after our short break and after a short break we'll continue our discussion on the fed spending states that are to . be.

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. welcome back to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing the u.s. defense budget. ok tonight i go back to you don't you think maybe in the longer term this is a good this crisis quote unquote crisis is a good idea because it makes people more fiscally responsible because that's the only thing that threatens the united states itself well i'd like to believe that a problem is like i said general eisenhower warned us in closing speech about the

military and industrial congressional complex that's why as mentioned before the break senator patty murray from from from washington state democrat pat toomey republican senator from pennsylvania both have boeing is a commonality so you get people who actually are more worried about their reelection than what's doing what's best for the american people because when i sat on the super committee i predicted they would naturally do anything productive actually rein in these issues regarding the defense side of the house with that said because actually the most creative of the super contractors because they actually had been a small burger their president comment that the fact that they're going to basically accept that they have to cut and therefore is a productive hard productive company producing aircraft they're going to take some of the military side folks and confirm to the civilian side to the commercial side which really is the right thing to do we should have all contractors doing that sort of thing instead they're digging their heels in as doug stipulated and as as kelly stipulated that all they're trying to do is basically lobby the hill to to continue the gravy train at the expense of all else does seems like

a national unity threat to me go ahead. well look you just said something before tony spoke that's very important you talked about leveraging this fiscal and economic crisis to do some things that make sense you're absolutely on target that's what needs to happen now what we need to do is to go in and perform surgery to a den of fire the capabilities we need today and begin to cultivate capabilities we will need in the future that means changing the structure of the organization of the national defense establishment that means finally building a national defense strategy has no national military strategy was going to do this though the pentagon well i think the congress within the next six to twelve months is going to be so absorbed in the deal best stick crisis that is coming as a result of our fiscal irresponsibility we're well on the road to greece and italy that the next secretary of defense and the president will have quite

a free hand to make rather profound change in the military establishment the question is will they do it or will they simply cut away incrementally and leave us with effectively a hollow military one with lots of generals admirals and headquarters not very many people that can actually fight lots of chiefs no indians kelly is there any courage in washington to do exactly what we just heard. i am i am not very confident that i was talking with a senior navy officer last night you know i just happened to be. by myself in this conversation and i asked about what the feeling was and and the feeling now is a lot of despondency because i think within the military there is a strong contingent of of of officers enlisted people who see the the circus going on in washington and what they're concerned about is that the see

question allows the department defense to slash and burn at these places that really are more theatrical then they are helpful so what they're talking about is the flurry of e-mails and on the civilian side an active duty side saying they are talking about these furloughs these furloughs are actually going to happen and how that affects the active duty side is the active duty side is going to have to do is that is going to likely have longer deployments so what we're hurting is the actual families and the service members with and allowing the politicians and the lobbyists and the bureaucrats on the hill to avoid all of these awful. changes and reforms that doug was just talking about so it would really pains me is that we do have this this this this this window to actually make changes with the politicians that the baby is allowing the theater to happen and the only people

that its it is going to hurt at least in the short term are service members and i think americans given their druthers what would not want this service members the health benefits the veterans benefits to be the first thing on the chopping block they would want the expensive bloated big ticket items that doug talked about first on the chopping block the waste to me the world looks like it's turned upside down here ok go ahead judge a boon for your circuit or respond kelly who said subsidies for. important about deployments an awful lot of our trouble stems from this thing we call presence it's this assumption that is built into our military establishment that we need to have forces air land and sea everywhere all the time everywhere if we are not visible everywhere all the time that the world will come apart it will collapse into conflict this is nonsense and we've got open and completely scaled back this notion of presence in fact we can make a good case right now that the more visible american forces are the more trouble we

have in the world tony you're agreeing there go ahead jump in if i could jump in to let me jump in to doug doug i've panetta panetta has been basically derelict in his duties because he is continuing what doug is talking about and they know inside of the pentagon what's going on pick kelley's correct the line officers know what's going on the guys that have to do the work know that this is all nonsense going to hurt them because all the politicians to the freakin generals michael for the cause of politicians in uniform that's what they've become and frankly you know panetta put it this way this five point strategy put out in and on the eighteenth of december of last year where he states what we knew about seaquest ration but we decided to do nothing what come on are you kidding me you should have been figuring the worst case scenarios to actually do the cuts of things that you don't need you can live without instead they double down on this five point strategy basically status quo and frankly if i received this five point strategy that pineta gave get put out if i received it from one of our in turns that our think tank i would give

him a freakin f. that's how bad it was and it was very clear that panetta like others are all about the status quo and not actually want to do the hard things in determining what threats we should focus on and then try to fund those threats instead they don't want to do the hard work without pointed out you have got to where i want to be in this program kelly who will what threatens the united states today and how can the defense budget be justified. well i think my friend doug over there would say that we our own greatest threat well i think my colleagues on this panel to agree that we need a full scale reassessment of our grand strategy so to speak because right now we have this web where we have to parse out what are we where the threats that we're actually causing by by having this huge footprint across the globe which are what are the actual threats we have a cyber security that has to be sort of caused as your another front in the global

war on terror that we are pouring billions of dollars into right now and that's a whole other discussion because a lot of the money a lot of these contractors now they're smart they're shifting a lot of their resources over to cyber security right now because they know the money might not be there for some of these weapon systems and and the contracting that they've done for the war so i think our greatest threat right now and i hate to be. cheeky about it is i think is our our lack of imagination our lack of our lack of intelligence when it comes to our grand strategy where are we going from here as a nation in our defense policy doug jump in who's who is america's greatest enemy right now. well right now we have forty million americans on food stamps ok our economy is shrinking people want to add fifteen million illegals low skilled low education who will join the underclass if we allow to happen our borders are

open they're not secure we don't really know legally or illegally who's coming in regarding immigration all of our problems are here inside the united states when it comes to foreign threats it's a long term view that we need to take our principle interest is prosperity and economic power we need to regain that prosperity that means we need access to markets we need to trade with people that means that we have a permanent interested no one power or collection of powers dominate the eurasian heartland that's not very likely right now and i don't think we're going to see anyone who wants to fight a major war to be perfectly blunt for at least ten or fifteen years so what we can afford to do is scale back much of what we're doing right now and begin to think very carefully about the kinds of forces we will need over the long term that's not happening and that's where we have to think right now tony why is that happening because it isn't lucrative what do i do that's a problem that mean there are certain threat areas as doug pointed out that i think

there will generally need to look at but they're over the horizon and we're not doing the hard work notably during the ramp up to war two we did something called the rainbow plans a plan orange was one which we looked at were guarding that continue to the potential of the japanese become a competitor and basically we were ready to go in war two because we actually looked at the long term threats and try to position ourselves to be there at the time we needed to we're not doing that now we're spending all this money on the status quo on a cold war infrastructure and frankly that's the issue is there a cyber threat absolutely but they're only giving it lip service and i know there's been a lot of money but not effectively keith alexander the current commander cyber command is probably the worst possible guy to be the commander because he doesn't understand the issue and trust me i says the clinic is a. critical issue so we do have that is an issue that is far more likely to emerge and so this is going to suffer a cyber a vent of some sort attacked or hurt by an al qaeda attack were completely spending money in the wrong areas and a four star general completely back up that i talked to former commander of central

command would completely back up what kelly said he said in a meeting we had on capitol hill that the problem with our defense department is we have no grand strategy so if you don't have a grand strategy you fund everything and accomplish very little and that's where we're at right now ok kelly kelly what are you the last word in the program forty seconds where is this all going when we could be saying a year from now well i think a year from now we're going to be saying why didn't we have the smarts to get away you know the budget effectively the majority jordi of americans you know and these are polls running right up until yesterday believe that we should cut spending that is important and where that where should we cut we should start with the defense department so i think that the politicians ought to start listening to the american people because the next election they're going to come back in they're going to say why oh why did you why did you cut my pay you know i'm a civilian defense we're going to have to jump in here were brought out of town the general should be listening to you guys many thanks today in washington and thanks

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