skies this is retired lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow for both the center for advanced defense studies and packed america tony thanks so much for joining us tonight now you were just on the show so good weeks ago talking about this and you said that you think it's all a good make no one's actually going to make any cuts here but it seems like perhaps they found exactly where they're going to cut are they going to go for benefits. well i think that's one of the easy fixes they always go for to begin with you have to remember that the veterans are not a large lobbying group they do have representation in service has somewhat of a. but they really can't match the funding or prowess of a boeing a lot. of any of these large corporations which frankly make a turn of money off of defense programs so frankly what you're going to see is them pushing very hard to maintain maintain the status quo while others are going to be asked to pay the bill and i think that's what i think we've talked about there both on and off the air and frankly at best for a huge appeared to be pushing this whole issue

to discuss this is retired lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow for the center for advanced defense studies and impact america tony thanks so much for being here having me now only on or off like that involved just not to have this this is become her driving mission ever since she took over as the house foreign affairs committee chairman but what do you think i mean i feel like there are some possible reforms comes to the u.n. peacekeeping missions when it comes to the voluntary payments that some people are actually out there willing to debate but it also comes with a lot of threats but i think it's part of the issue i think anybody who's looked at the u.n. would. understand that there are areas to reform commodify and to basically update i mean let's face it the organization has been around since going to war through pretty much understandings which we could do better they can do better we could all come to agreement on what i think this is meant to do and for better or for worse i'm not here to comment on the wisdom of it is to make a point she's saying this for one particular constituen

and this guy says if we have lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow at the center for advanced defense studies and he's also still serving as a reserve lieutenant colonel tony thanks so much for being here today rather than ok so a lot of this is speculation of course they haven't voted on it yet hopefully we won't do you call this is going to go through and you know you know as well as anyone else that i fundamentally believe that we need to cut defense spending but defense spending does not equal half of our budget exactly so it's kind of a big deal that if this trigger would be unleashed defense spending and domestic spending would be treated as it's. back to the same thing do you think that's fair why i think it's not practical i don't think it's ever going to happen i think it's a gimmick and let's be totally honest with each other here they're trying to accomplish this by the twenty third of november and the whole idea is that they will make hard decisions between now and then it's not going to happen and one of the things that's notable is that when you look at the defense budget matter

he's now senior fellow at the center for advanced defense studies. and kanran bakar, director for middle east and south asia analysis at stratford. welcome. let me start with you, tony schafer. what are you sources telling you about what's happening on the ground? are we really near the end of this? >> well, you're near the end of the combat, per se. but we just don't know what's going to half next. one of the things that people i think have not really internalized is the fact that this is tribal. this is east versus west. one of the issues they're looking at now is the folks from benghazi and all those tribes which were mostly loyal to the old monarchy are the ones who've been really driving this. because of this, the intermediate -- the ruling council is very reluctant to start pushing itself, insinuating itself on those folks in the west who were mostly loyal. and let's remember that as the uprising happened, most of the country started in the east. went west. stopped for a while in miz ral ta a misratah and moved on. >> just building on that, what

this with me is retired lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow for center for the center of advanced defense studies and packed america excuse me ok. messed up your job there for a second tony so of course if we compare what we've seen over the last couple days to what we're seeing going on now it's pretty clear that something wasn't adding up to me we heard the rebels claiming that that's a tripoli had been taken over that the gadhafi regime had fallen like a house of cards today we saw and you know i think we should bring in of course his sons into this hama it was so that said to have been arrested turns out he's escaped or it's safe was also reported to have been arrested the international criminal court was the first one to report this they said that they would be bringing him to the international criminal court he rolls up in a white limousine to prove to everybody that he's still alive and to send a message there so where is the breakdown well it's chaos and i think that's what we're seeing here no one is really in charge and i think that's what people should be most frightened of any time yo