and i'm going to take a page from something brent scowcroft has said many times. he said when he was national security advisor there was one big thing which was the soviet union, and at any point in time for a couple small crises to manage. and with the soviet union we knew what the strategy was but we disagreed or five over the tactics. but if you're a national security advisor now, you -- the pressure to be crisis manager is enormous. think about it, as i said, putting on a 12 burner stove and each burner has a part in each burner as -- it's close to boil and the pot as a spoon in it. national security advisor tends to go to pot the pot stirring them to keep them from boiling over. there's a limited bandwidth in the white house. and by the time an issue comes to the white house i think it tends to be one of crisis by the time it's become a crisis, a lot of your good options are gone. the options for economic and diplomatic activities that take time to mature. so it's frontloaded if you will to sort of temp people to go quickly to the military options fairly quic

i'm sitting next to brent scowcroft, and i never saw a better model of how to do national planning coddling together from what different agencies do. i learned at his knee when i was just out of britches. [laughter] to gordon adams, readiness for what, united states record, of course, in predicting where and what kind of wars it are fight, five or even ten years and sometimes even one year ahead of time is terrible. nearly zero. so you have to have a certain flexibility in what you're preparing for. that said, not all regions of the world are of equal concern. and so then the safer world and the reason that that's consistent with the kind of budget approach i'm talking about is i'm imagining a force that is actually more reassuring because it is readier though its overall structure is smaller. instead of having to generate, you know, ten times the force so that one-tenth of it is available on station. i'm also imagining a world in which you invest in your strategy and your force structure while times are safe so that you are readier and have a more useful force structure when times are not