AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

TO REBUILD AMERICA’S MILITARY: A CONVERSATION WITH SENATOR TOM COTTON (R-AR)

DISCUSSION:

TOM COTTON, UNITED STATES SENATE (R-AR)

JIM TALENT, AEI

5:30 PM – 6:30 PM TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2015

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/to-rebuild-americas-military-a- conversation-with-senator-tom-cotton-r-ar/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

JIM TALENT: Welcome to everybody. Today marks the release of a seminal report by Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies of AEI. It addresses the needs of the Department of Defense, which I see many people in this room who are very familiar with.

The recent history of American defense planning, dating really back to the end of the Cold War, is one of strategic uncertainty, budgetary decay, and an ongoing decline in capabilities. Every president since the end of the Cold War has sent his country’s armed forces into harm’s way, but none has committed his administration to the long-term strength of the military. And the trend of decline has accelerated drastically during the years of the defense sequester.

Last year, the Independent Defense Panel chaired by Bill Perry and John Abizaid pretty thoroughly rebuked the policies of the last few years and concluded that, without urgent action, America’s military would be at high risk of not being able to defend the United States and its vital interests, which is professional Pentagon language for we’re sailing up the well-known creek without a paddle.

So the next president is going to have to begin the task of rebuilding American strength, whichever party the next president belongs to, but at AEI we don’t think we should give the next 15 months over to the locusts. And so we have produced this report, which we are releasing today. It’s a comprehensive blueprint for restoring the armed forces, but we intend it at the beginning of the discussion, not the end.

And so we’re beginning that discussion today with our honored guest, Senator Tom Cotton. I’m not going to embarrass him with a long introduction, although I could spend a lot of time talking about his accomplishments.

Senator Cotton is proud of his Arkansas roots. He was raised on a cattle farm in Yell County, Arkansas. And after college was well on his way to a distinguished career in the law when 9/11 happened, and he took a different route at that point. He decided he wanted to help defend his country, joined the Army, served with 101st Airborne in Iraq and then, subsequently, in Afghanistan.

After leaving the military, he served one term in the House, and then was overwhelmingly elected by the people of Arkansas to the United States Senate, where he is now on the Banking Committee, the Intelligence Committee, and the Armed Forces Committee.

And I will just say that in the 20 plus years I have been around this town, I have literally – and, by the way, unlike the vice president, I do know what literally means, with all due respect to my old colleague. I’ve literally never seen a senator who has taken hold so quickly and accomplished so much in so short a time.

So welcome. And welcome also to Anna and Gabriel, your lovely wife and son. And we will, with your permission, Senator, just jump right into it.

SENATOR TOM COTTON (R-AR): Let’s go.

MR. TALENT: Our report starts at sort of the beginning of defense planning, which is what the department is designed or should be designed to protect. And I’ve often said that, in a democracy in particular, if people lose a sense of why defense is important, after a while they start thinking it’s not important, which I think is a big part of the problem we’ve had dating back to before even your time in the Congress.

So take a few minutes and talk about, in your view, what are the enduring national interests of the United States that the department, with that we’re – that we have an armed forces to protect?

SEN. COTTON: Sure. Well, Jim, thanks for having me. Thanks for AEI and thanks to the Marilyn Ware Center for hosting this event. More important, thanks for putting together an excellent report that I know will get widespread attention on Capitol Hill.

MR. TALENT: Thank you. Our first endorsement and one of the most important, so thank you.

SEN. COTTON: Because it is such a comprehensive account of where we are and where we need to go.

So the United States, like any nation, has a certain set of enduring national security interests that don’t change with the president. They don’t change really with time because I would say that these go back to our founding. But they are unique to who the United States is, you know, that we are freedom’s home and freedom’s defender and that we have been since our founding.

If I could go from maybe the most concrete to the highest level in terms of these interests, first, very clearly, is to defend America and to defend Americans. That’s one reason why we went into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and we had been attacked from there. It’s one reason why we have Special Operation Forces to conduct hostage rescue missions when Americans are held hostage by terrorist groups.

So that’s the most concrete and immediate and ever-present national security interest that we have that our military is designed to secure.

The second is what you might call broadly freedom of movement and trade. There’s a time when this was called freedom of navigation on the seas. That’s in part because that was the only way you could really get around other than on land. Over time though, that has changed and expanded. It’s gone from the seas to the air, to space, and now, increasingly, to cyberspace as well. And one of the quickest ways to get into a war with the United States over our history is to impede on that freedom of movement.

MR. TALENT: Go back to the War of 1812.

SEN. COTTON: Go back to the War of 1812 or the Barbary pirates or what have you.

And the United States has an interest in controlling, controlling the seas, controlling the sky, space, and cyberspace, and certainly ensuring that no other country tries to control it as, for instance, China may be trying to do now in the South China Sea. And particularly our expeditionary forces, our Navy, and our Air Forces are critical in preserving that kind of freedom of movement and the kind of freedom of trade, if you go back to the Open Door policy in the 19th century, or the policy that we will not allow a country to monopolize a critical natural resource, whether it was rubber in the 19th century or oil in 20th and 21st century.

A third critical and enduring national security interest is preserving a favorable balance of power across the old world, whether that’s in Europe, whether that’s the Middle East, whether that’s in East Asia. Consistently, we have not allowed an anti- democratic, anti-capitalist country to rise up and dominate any of those regions or to dominate the old world at large.

That’s in part what was behind the Monroe Doctrine. A lot of people say that was an isolationist doctrine. In fact, it was the opposite of that. It was anti-isolationist. It was recognizing that if a country like France or Spain can – was able to reclaim control of the continent, then they might be able to reclaim control of their colonies here in the New World.

And, therefore, in a balance of power between the new and old world, with Great Britain and the United States, we were able to keep those countries out. We relied on Great Britain’s stronger power to maintain the balance in Europe at a lower cost to us.

But, ultimately, the same kind of thinking is what took us into World War I and World War II and the Cold War. And it’s the same kind of thinking that our military has to apply now across all three theaters that you mentioned in the report: East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

Fourth, and finally, the highest level interest I would identify is the preservation and the extension of the liberal, democratic, capitalist order. We’ve invested tremendous effort in ensuring that Europe was rebuilt after World War Two, that countries like South Korea make the painstaking movement towards being allies that share our values and our principles.

And that has been driven not only by the soft power we have, by our economic might and our cultural influence, but also by our military influence. The Marshall Plan was very important. Would it have succeeded though if we didn’t have so many troops in Europe? Same thing we’re trying to rebuild countries like South Korea and Japan after World War II.

And it’s very important that we continue to use not just our soft power to try to continue to integrate the world and move the world in a liberal, democratic, capitalist direction but that we have the military to protect that soft power as well.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. I think it’s very important we talk about this, and America’s an exceptional country, to note that we define our national interests in a benign way, which I think is exceptional historically for a nation.

SEN. COTTON: The way Churchill and Reagan both put it is, imagine a world at the end of World War II in which the United States was not the sole possessor of the nuclear weapon but the Soviet Union was. And imagine what the world would have looked like under those circumstances. No one except perhaps the Soviet Union was truly afraid of the United States and what our intentions were, even though we were the sole possessor of the world’s most powerful weapon at the time.

And that just goes to show just how benign American influence always has been. We’ve always been a very dangerous nation. We’ve always had the world’s most dangerous military. But, in the end, we put that dangerous military to the purposes of justice and the purposes of safety for the world and for our citizens, not for conquest or domination.

MR. TALENT: I’m glad we have one senator who understands the vital interests of the United States. I can say that. You probably have to be more collegial.

You know, you talked before about soft power. So talk – because this goes to where the military fits in the national security architecture, which is another thing I don’t think people focus on enough. So discuss the relationship between hard power and soft power. Are they complementary? Can one substitute for the other?

SEN. COTTON: Well, we need to use all tools of national power to influence our allies and our adversaries to advance our interests. It’s always preferable to use the tools of soft power – to use the tools of diplomacy, trade, finance, culture and so forth.

But ultimately, without hard power, soft power is just softness. It’s not respected and it cannot advance your interests. It’s amazing how effective diplomacy can be whenever you have tens of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed overseas or stationed on the country’s border or you have the capability of delivering precise global strike from the continental United States anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. You know, you talked about a thought experiment before, is another interesting one to go through. Suppose that the Obama foreign policy had been everything it’s been for the last six years, the foreign policy, but instead of America’s military power declining, we had been building it up at the same time. It’s – you know, it’s my belief that much of what he’s done would have turned out better anyway because against the backdrop of strength rather than weakness, a lot of his gestures would have been taken as magnanimity rather than weakness.

SEN. COTTON: And you could argue that a lot of Reagan’s policies were similar, that, you know, Reagan had some truly, truly revolutionary concepts, like he wanted a world without nuclear weapons at the same time that he was revitalizing our nuclear arsenal and forward deploying missiles into Europe. But President Obama has turned Teddy Roosevelt’s maxim somewhat on its head, speak softly and carry a big stick. We’re speaking softly and we’re breaking our stick.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. And we discuss all these sort of introductory threshold concepts in the report because you really have to to get a sense of what the military ought to be.

Again, another important planning concept is the force sizing construct or standard which – you know, traditionally, since the end of the Cold War, the department has, at least in theory, been planning for a force that is sized and shaped to be able to fight two regional contingencies at the same time or almost simultaneously.

So given what’s going on in the world, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, you know, what do you think about that two-war construct? Do you still like it? Do you think something else would be more appropriate?

SEN. COTTON: Well, I have to say, as someone who had to spend a lot of time with Army doctrinal manuals in the last decade, I don’t always find them to be the most concretely written and persuasively argued documents.

MR. TALENT: It’s a good exercise in self-discipline, was it?

SEN. COTTON: I mean, the two-war concept – I mean, while it’s important that we be able to fight two wars, hopefully so we have to fight no wars, is a little abstract.

There is a world out there, there are a limited number of countries in it and a limited number of adversaries, and we should think about the kind of adversaries that we have.

We have a declining but still very dangerous power in Russia, which most generals and admirals testifying before my committee have said remains our greatest single threat in part because they’re the only country with the nuclear arsenal that could destroy our way of life.

We have a rising power, like China, that is rapidly modernizing its military and taking very aggressive actions in places like the South China Sea or the East China Sea.

Third, we have the threat of rogue nations – countries like North Korea that already have nuclear weapons, or Iran, that are on the path of getting nuclear weapons or, as Iraq was in the past decade or Libya before they turned in their nuclear weapons.

And then, fourth, we have the continued ongoing threat of transnational Islamic terrorism now in the form of the Islamic State, but also in the form of al Qaeda. And that is spread throughout the globe.

And we have to be prepared to confront those adversaries, who are our concrete adversaries, with specific kinds of force structures that are designed to deter them and, therefore, hopefully, not have to wage a war with them in the first place. Or, for the ones who are implacable, like many of our Islamic terrorist adversaries, to find them and kill them.

MR. TALENT: And if you do – if we do have to fight and – I mean, the first priority of American military power is to deter conflict. And if you do have to fight, you don’t want to have to commit your whole force because then you’re not able to deter conflict in other places.

SEN. COTTON: Absolutely. I mean, you have to have a strong reserve. And my son is just talking about the condition in which we’ve left our military, that we can barely fight one war, much less be able to deter a second war as well.

It’s awful, isn’t it, Gabriel? (Laughter.)

MR. TALENT: It looks to me like he’s having a pretty good time with mom over there.

SEN. COTTON: So just – you know, if you look at the forces we had to commit in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 15 years, in some ways, it became an invitation to adventurism for countries like China in the sea and the air and the East China or in the East Asian space, but also to Russia and places like Georgia and now Ukraine as well.

MR. TALENT: You know, you mentioned the forces we had to commit in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I’m going to skip ahead on my little outline and bring something up I wanted to talk over with you because you were there, so you have a unique perspective on this.

But I’ll just take a minute and give you my perspective. I was new to the Congress in 1993 when the bottom-up review occurred, which was not the worst plan in the world. But what I focused on – because Ike Skelton, who I don’t know if you ever got to meet Ike, great congressman from Missouri on the Armed Services Committee.

SEN. COTTON: We need more Ike Skeltons in the Democratic Party.

MR. TALENT: Well, I agree with that. Neither party actually would be good. Ike focused immediately on the size of the Army. And he had a great subcommittee hearing. Four retired four stars or three retired four stars from the Army just took apart the bottom-up review end strength of the Army, which was about 485,000 men.

But they all assured us – I mean, the administration assured us, well, we’re planning the assumption we’re not going to have to put large numbers of boots on the ground for long periods of time for the foreseeable future. And this was the view all through the 1990s. Some of us screamed bloody murder about it. And then, of course, we ended up with guys like you on the ground.

So give me your – I mean, it has always been my gut that we could have done those missions quicker if we had had a bigger rotational base, and certainly with less of an impact on the individual men and women in the Army and in the Marines. And, by the way, if we had wrapped those up quicker, think how much money we would have saved, which is the lowest order concern, dwarfed the savings that we achieved by cutting the Army in the first place.

So give me your view. If you disagree, tell me, but –

SEN. COTTON: No, I don’t disagree. I strongly agree that because of the reductions in manpower, particularly in the Army and the Marine Corps throughout the 1990s, we were unable to fight Iraq and Afghanistan from the very beginning, as we should have been able to fight it.

Afghanistan in particular, once we started the war in Iraq, this meant that those wars took longer. This means that the wars were conducted in ways that didn’t mean victory as quickly as we could obtain it. And, as you say, it took a great toll on the lives of the soldiers and Marines in particular who had to fight it – obviously the ones who were killed or wounded, but even the ones who simply had 15 and 16 month deployments or the ones who had repeated deployments, and less than a year rotation, or the National Guardsmen and the reservists who were deployed in an expeditionary capability multiple times for the first time in modern times.

So there’s no doubt the reduction in the end strength of the Army and the Marine Corps in the 1990s had serious consequences for the way we conducted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it should dispute the notion – although it’s been in some of the current administration’s planning documents – that we’re not going to have major combat operations on the ground again. I certainly hope we don’t, but the best way to ensure that we don’t is to have the combat forces capable of doing that.

So if you just look at the postwar period, there was barely six – or barely five years from the end of World War II to the Korean War. You know, 10, 12 years from the end of the Korean War to the Vietnam War. Then from Vietnam, 15 years until the Persian Gulf War. And, in the middle, you had Granada, and Panama, and some other expeditionary deployments. In the 1990s, repeated deployments in the Balkans, and then, of course, just 11 years after the Gulf War you had the Afghan and the Iraq War.

So history disproves the fact that we’re never going to have these kind of major ground combat operations again. Now, again, I hope we don’t, but the best way to avoid them is to be prepared for them in the first place.

MR. TALENT: I think Bob Gates said at one time that our national security planners have a perfect record of predicting the next conflict. They’ve always been wrong. We’ve never predicted it – I think a lot of people in town believe that if we’re not prepared – that if they don’t want to fight a particular conflict, the best way to avoid fighting it is not to prepare for it. And the irony is that you fight it anyway. It just takes longer than it should and –

SEN. COTTON: So there’s an aversion to a strong and capable military in part in some quarters because of the idea that it might militarize your foreign policy – that it’s an invitation to adventurism. It is an invitation to adventurism but only among our adversaries. And, in fact, if you have a military that is capable of fighting and you have political leaders who are willing to fight, you’re much less likely to have to fight in the first place.

MR. TALENT: All right. I’m watching the clock carefully because we want to leave plenty of time for questions, but take a moment and – I do sense that there’s a growing bipartisan consensus that we’ve got to reverse these cuts and do something. So I don’t sense a lot of purpose in the administration, although they did propose some increases this year, to be fair.

So what do you think you and your colleagues in the Congress can do over the remainder of President Obama’s term? What are you hoping for? I think it’s going to take a new administration to really do this decisively. But I know you don’t want to let the next year just be given over to the locusts, so as I said in my introduction.

SEN. COTTON: Yeah.

MR. TALENT: So what do you – what are you hoping to be able to do?

SEN. COTTON: Well, first, it’s important to appreciate just how bad the circumstances are right now. Our base defense budget is more than $100 billion below what Secretary Gates recommended for this fiscal year in 2012, which the National Defense Panel, bipartisan, unanimous recommendation last year said should be the floor – should actually probably be much higher if you look at how the threat situation has deteriorated around the world.

We’re not getting back to that level, 611 billion (dollars), which is what Secretary Gates recommended, in the next year, but it’s important that we do begin to build our military back up.

A lot of people forget that when Jimmy Carter was finally mugged by reality in the last 15 years of his administration – or in the last 15 months of his administration, there was in fact a defense supplemental that gave the military a running start for the Reagan build-ups becoming – coming in 1981. I hope we can do something like that in the budget talks.

Now, the Democrats have acknowledged that we need to substantially increase our defense spending, yet they have put a blockade on all spending bills because they are insisting that there be at least one dollar of domestic spending for every one dollar increase of defense spending. I think that’s personally unwise for a few reasons.

One, I don’t believe every dollar of spending is equal. A dollar spent on a soldier, a dollar spent on modernizing our submarine fleet or our bomber fleet is, in my opinion, much better spent than a dollar spent on pork barrel projects for some congressman or senator.

Second, it ignores the fact that, in 2009, an $800 billion stimulus threw open the doors to every agency of government to come reset their budget except for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

It also neglects the fact that, ultimately, these kind of short-sighted defense cuts don’t put you in a better position because your enemies catch up with you, as they are increasingly catching up with us, and you spend more in the long run to restart programs or rebuild capabilities than you would have spent if you had just kept them at a steady state of growth.

So I’m hopeful that we can have some kind of budget deal with will increase defense substantially without breaking the bank on other domestic spending.

MR. TALENT: So we can at least start it.

SEN. COTTON: Yes.

MR. TALENT: And you’re so right about a planned steady state of funding. It costs so much more to try and recover across all parts of the budget, including readiness.

SEN. COTTON: Yeah.

MR. TALENT: And I hope we can do something about that, than it would ever have cost if we just had regular appropriations and authorizations.

SEN. COTTON: And I certainly think most people in the Republican Party recognize this. I offered an amendment to our budget back in April –

MR. TALENT: Right. I was going to ask you about that.

SEN. COTTON: – that would substantially increase defense spending, and it got a sizeable majority of Republican Senate Caucus. Many of the people who voted no did so for procedural or tactical reasons. They said they still supported it. And I think virtually every one of our Republican presidential candidates – it’s hard to keep track of all of them – agree and have said on the record or even submitted plans that would increase defense spending back up to a level where it needs to be.

MR. TALENT: You know, as an aside, Senator Wyden used to address – I worked a lot with Ron Wyden. And he’d talk about how many senators were running for president at any given time. And he said he’d get asked at town hall meetings whether he was going to be – whether he would ever run for president. He said, no. He said, I consider myself like the designated driver and after everybody else – I’m going to drive them home. And thank you, by the way, for that budget amendment which you offered with Senator Rubio.

Take a minute if you will and talk about what the authorization bill does. I’m springing this on you a little bit but it just struck me because you mentioned about – we’ve been talking about budget increases. And there are some really good, I believe, acquisition reforms in the conference report, and if we can implement those in the next year and then begin to buy in multi-year and in volume, those two things alone I think are going to make the department a lot more efficient. Do you want to talk about that for a minute?

SEN. COTTON: No. Those acquisition reforms are important. They’re designed to give more flexibility to respond to the new threat environment, but also, as you say, to try to reduce the levels of bureaucratic dictates in the process, in the level of centralization, and also recognize the power of block buying, just like – you know, you go to Costco or Sam’s Club, it’s a lot cheaper than when you go to your local CVS of Walgreens because you’re buying in bulk.

And, as you say in the report, the single greatest cost savings we could see is a massive ramp-up in the purchases of the F-35. Likewise, you know, with the new long- range strike bomber. You know, there’s been an arbitrary cap placed on it at $550 million per aircraft. It would be better if we would just accelerate the development and, ultimately, the production of it and spread all those fixed costs across many more purchases. And you’ve seen this in other services as well. You mentioned one, the V-22 Osprey, in your report too.

So that kind of, you know, reform that decentralizes, de-bureaucratizes the process and recognizes the power of block buying. It’s very important to rebuilding the capacity that our military need but also ensure that out taxpayers are getting the right value out of these purchases.

MR. TALENT: OK. I’m going to ask one more question and then we’re going to open this up. So be thinking about your questions. And I should say housekeeping detail. I should have mentioned at the beginning. We’re going to have a reception afterwards. And it’s right out there, isn’t it? OK. Good. And everybody’s welcome.

So one more thing, and it’s not really having to do with the report, but you’ve been saying a lot of really smart things about what Russia’s doing in the Levant now. And so take a minute, if you would, and talk about what you think Putin’s trying to achieve there. And we’ve been talking about interests and all that, and what’s at stake for the United States and how you think we ought to be responding.

SEN. COTTON: My son has reached the age at which we play a game that’s commonly known as peek-a-boo. In my household, I call it surprise by Putin. (Laughter.) As a reminder, as a reminder that while it is cute when a five-month-old is repeatedly surprised by the same thing happening over and over again in close succession, it’s dangerous when a president is.

If you get back to first principles, it’s very clear what Vladimir Putin is doing. It’s the same thing he’s been doing for years. Russia’s an enemy. Vladimir Putin is a KGB spy. He views international politics in a zero-sum way. That’s it, simple.

He’s not in Syria because he wants to be a partner, because he wants to help defeat the Islamic State. He’s not in Syria to help advance the United States in any way. He is in Syria in part to undermine the United States.

The way I would look at his strategy I think is in three different lenses, near term, medium term, long term. In the near term, he clearly wants to prop up his ally, Bashar al Assad. He wants to preserve access to his only expeditionary base overseas in Syria. And, stepping into the medium term, if necessary to replace Bashar al-Assad, to whom I don’t think he’s personally committed. He wants to ensure that it’s going to be replaced by someone like Bashar al-Assad – someone who’s going to protect his interests.

Second, he wants to embarrass the United States. He wants to diminish American power and prestige in the region, which he’s regrettably doing. Third, he wants to build up Russian as a Middle Eastern power broker once again, which it hasn’t been for 45 years at a minimum since Sadat kicked him out of Egypt. But now, the most – probably the most bipartisan, least contentious, longest standing, most easily understood policy – Russia is not a power broker in the Middle East – is being undermined.

And then, in the very long term, the longest term, I think he views as a much lower risk way to divide Europe, to divide the EU and to divide NATO.

What he’s done in Ukraine, especially what he could do in the Baltics, in particular Estonia and Latvia, is very high risk because those countries are protected by the Article Five guarantees of NATO. Not saying he won’t do it, but it is a very high risk way to try to divide the EU and divide NATO.

But if Europe says they’re going to take all these refugees and they’re going to pay for them and Bashar al-Assad wants them out because they’re opposition, they’re opponents of the regime to begin with, well, who better to create a greater flow of refugees from Syria into Europe than the man who applied the Grozny rules in Chechnya in the last decade?

So he has a whole overlapping range of desires inside of Syria, none of which – none of which – advance U.S. interests.

MR. TALENT: Right. And people ought to focus on the fact he’s not particularly interested in oil prices remaining low either.

SEN. COTTON: Yeah.

MR. TALENT: And it’s central to the stability of his regime.

SEN. COTTON: And I would strongly disagree with the president’s characterization that’s going to find himself in a quagmire. It is possible, if he plays his hand poorly, but Vladimir Putin has a history, especially over the last seven years, of playing his weak hand very well in places like Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. He has a history of doing that.

And he make a relatively limited investment in air and naval power with some ground capabilities in the theater, but largely rely on pro-regime Syrians as well as Iran shock troops, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Hezbollah forces to be a ground force so he achieve those interests at a relatively low cost, even though they’re tremendously important to him.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. One of the reasons that the Soviets found themselves in a quagmire in Afghanistan was because the Reagan administration got busy and had an energetic policy to help create that quagmire.

Well, he and I could talk the rest of the hour, but we’re going to restrain ourselves and take questions. So if you have a question, please just signal to me, and we’ve got somebody who will run over with a microphone I think, don’t we. I will go right in the front here. Right here. OK, Rick. Thank you.

Q: Thank you, Senator. It’s David Folio (ph), Raytheon International, associate fellow at the GDW Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. A question about cyber.

I noticed the report addresses it in part on page 36. What are your latest thoughts, Senator, on how we can make our adversaries and other bad actors feel a real cost to undermining our national security, stealing our data, stealing our intellectual property and so on in the cyber domain?

SEN. COTTON: You know, I’ve used cyber as a defense matter, something like the early days of the Cold War when, you know, strategists were still thinking through the implications of nuclear weapons. And I think strategists are still thinking through the implications of cyber, both in offense and the defense.

But one thing I would do is just recognize it as a traditional, inherent function of government. When mass gunmen walk into a bank and steal the money, we treat it as a crime that the FBI is supposed to investigate. When people flew planes into the World Trade Center, we treated it as an act of war, not an act of vandalism and expected the property owner to defend his property.

The same thing with cyber. Whenever, you know, foreign nations or their allied private actors are stealing data from private companies, it has being treated as a crime. Whenever they’re doing that to our government or other critical infrastructure, it needs to be treated as an act of aggression. And they have to know that they will pay a price for it – that we will single them out for it and that they will be punished.

Now, what that punishment might be is something that can be best left for, you know, a more classified setting than this. But they have to know, just like, say, China knows that we’ll honor our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, that aggression won’t go unpunished.

MR. TALENT: Next question. Yes, ma’am. This lady right there.

Q: Yeah. My name is Ni Yang (ph). I think you have pretty much – (inaudible) – to solve the world problem. I just wonder if you can say – (inaudible) – how to solve the social problem by which you convince all other countries to admire the United States rather than say – (inaudible) – and kill everybody and while we are hungry here domestically and with massive incarceration to reduce productivity. I think we are going the other way around.

SEN. COTTON: The question would go back to our conversation about soft power versus hard power. It is preferable to use tools in our national toolkit other than our military – to use diplomacy, to use finance, and trade and cultural influence to achieve our national interests. It’s also in the best interests of other states.

And, again, I’d go back to South Korea and their development since the Korean War. South Korea is now one of the most advanced capitalist democracies in the world. Their standard of living has gone from atrocious – one of the worst in the world in 1953, to one of the highest in the world in 2015.

They have done that not because of international aid. They have not done that because of international aid over the long term. They’ve not done it because of, you know, sending in, you know, technocrats telling them how to run their country. They have run it because they’ve embraced the values of individual rights and democracy and capitalism with the support of American security structures.

It’s those security structures that can be in place, that can help advance those principles of individual rights and democratic self-government and free market capitalism so people can achieve the same kind of thing that South Korea has achieved. They can achieve the same kind of thing that Singapore’s achieved.

They can look to the United States, in a country where, you know, working men and women lead a decent standard of life. They can own their own home. They can have a vehicle. They can send their kids to college and hope for a better life. For all of our problems, the world still can look to us, an example of what they can achieve if they follow the same path that we have followed.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. I don’t view the world as one that should naturally be full of enemies for the United States. I think most countries could be, if not allies, at least partners for discrete purposes. But to recruit them to those purposes, they have to believe in our commitment and in our leadership. And if they don’t, then you see what’s happening today, where they each have to go their own way to protect themselves.

SEN. COTTON: Well, I was in East Asia in early August. And I went to South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and I expect to be in Southeast Asia later this year. And I’ve consulted with foreign ministers passing through the U.S. or their ambassadors of basically every country from South Korea all the way around down to India.

And the one common theme you hear from virtually every country is they want more U.S. engagement and leadership. They don’t want to have to fight a hot war with China, but they don’t want China to be able to impose its will on them because of lack of military capability or lack of U.S. leadership.

One example of that leadership is the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, which was just consummated yesterday. So many of those countries, even if they’re not a member of the negotiations, like South Korea or Taiwan, are eager to see a good, healthy trading relationship with all of the countries in the region and the United States because they want to be part of a broad coalition that checks the rise of China before China gets the – before it gets the economic might and the military strength to compel those countries to do its will without fighting a war.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. And we talk about humanitarian issues and we talked before about interests in the Middle East. And that’s how you have to structure your foreign policy. But what’s happened in Syria is just – it’s just hideous and resulting from a vacuum of American leadership in the context of –

(Cross talk.)

SEN. COTTON: Yeah. I mean, David Petraeus testified in front of our Armed Services Committee a couple of weeks ago and referred to it as a geopolitical Chernobyl, which I think is an apt phrase.

MR. TALENT: OK. The gentleman right behind the lady who just asked a question.

Q: Yes. I’m Russell King, retired federal employee. Yes, Senator. Governor Christie has said much the same thing as you said about Putin’s intentions in the Middle East. But he also called specifically for removal of Russia from Syria and other places in the Middle East, which is much more of an approach that appeals to me as a Virginian who takes our state motto seriously.

And Donald Trump has a different approach in negotiating with Putin. And, of course, if Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton were president, they would take an accommodation approach, just like Obama.

But what combination of approaches would you take with Russia? Do you favor Governor Christi’s approach or Trump’s or –

SEN. COTTON: Well, not having heard all of them, I don’t want to adjudicate between all the presidential candidates. They can do that themselves and we wouldn’t finish until 8:00 p.m. tonight.

But I would say that we have to stand up to Russia’s influence in Syria, just like we should have been standing up to it in the Ukraine. And I view those two are connected because Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in the two places are connected as well. He’s trying to reassert Russia as a global superpower. He wants to retain control of its Near Abroad; in Syria’s example, reinsert himself back in the Middle East for the first time in 45 years, and, therefore, we have to take specific and concrete steps to adopt new policies that stop that.

In Syria, we long ago should have imposed a no-fly zone. I was calling for it in my earliest days as a congressman. I was one of the few Republicans who supported air strikes against Syria when they used chemical weapons against their own people.

David Petraeus, in that very same testimony just a couple of weeks ago said we should still be establishing safe havens, a least in south Syria, maybe in north Syria as well, along the lines of what we did for the Kurds in Northern Iraq after the Gulf War. That would allow them both the humanitarian relief they need, but also it would allow those fighting forces to regroup. And that would be patrolled by a U.S. led coalition.

And that means, just like the air space over Turkey means, that if a Russian fighter approaches it, they have to deterred. And it’s important to note that Russian fighters are now going into the air space of a NATO ally to whom we are treaty bound to commit. Vladimir Putin apparently doesn’t take that treaty commitment very seriously. It is time that he started taking it seriously.

Then, if you look to the Ukraine and to our NATO allies in the Baltics, there are other things we can do. We can start providing the weapons to the Ukrainian government they have been so desperately seeking for a year now. We can provide greater intelligence so they know what Russians and Russian-supported rebels are doing not only across the line of contact, but across the border.

In the Ukraine, we can start with at least temporary rotational deployments of our troops that are in central and Western Europe under the front lines, Poland if not Estonia and Latvia so Vladimir Putin knows that there’s going to be an American presence and that we’re going to draw the line and that he is going to back down.

I would point out that I think about three weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, Benjamin Netanyahu went to Moscow. That is a very bad thing that the prime minister of Israel now has to worry about the presence of Russian troops on the battlefield because that’s what Syria is for him. Israel hasn’t been as strongly committed to Assad’s removal over the last four and a half years, but they have been unequivocally committed to interdicting any shipment of missiles into Lebanon and Hezbollah that’s transiting across Syria.

What do you think Benjamin Netanyahu told Vladimir Putin when he went to Moscow? Do you think he said, we need to interdict these missiles, I hope you don’t object? Can we reach some kind of agreement? Or did he say, we are going to interdict missiles. There better not be any Russians around them if you care about the lives of those Russians.

MR. TALENT: He’s now facing a peer military competitor in the region which they haven’t had for some time.

SEN. COTTON: But I would submit to you that Prime Minister Netanyahu told Vladimir Putin exactly what they were going to do –

MR. TALENT: Right.

SEN. COTTON: And Vladimir Putin is going to respect Israel’s national security interests in that region.

MR. TALENT: I think the – I’m not going to speak for you on this, Senator, but there’s a certain level where defense policy is foreign policy. I think the single most comprehensively effective thing that we could do would be to begin decisively rebuilding America’s military. The message that that would send not just to the aggressors, to whom the initiative is passed around the world, but also to prospective allies and partners – I think you’d see a huge sigh of relief if we can that accomplished. It’s the first thing Reagan did before all the other things.

SEN. COTTON: You know, in the U.S., because our military is small relative to our population and so many of our threats and our engagements are so far away, oftentimes we don’t appreciate that those kinds of seemingly remote signals are very critical around the world.

The gap of a carrier in the Western Pacific or in the Persian Gulf may not make much news here in the United States, but it is intensely noticed in the region; or the fact that we withdrew missile defense interceptor systems from the Czech Republic and Poland, on the day – on the very day that Russia invaded Poland, without even giving the Polish and the Czech governments a heads up. Again, it doesn’t necessarily register much here, but it sends a terrible signal to not only those two countries but our allies all around the world.

MR. TALENT: On the anniversary of the day they did. And after the last drawdown in Europe, when we pulled out the last heavy brigades, we didn’t have a working tank in Europe. And if you don’t think Putin knew that, I think you’re wrong.

Yes, sir. And then we’ll – I don’t see anybody over here, so I’m not neglecting anybody to my left here.

Q: Thank you. Senator, the Chinese military budget has been on the increase for many years now. It’s really alarming to me. What do they want? Do they just want hegemony in the region or are they willing to bump heads with us? Can you comment on that?

SEN. COTTON: So, most immediately, as you say, they want regional hegemony in the East and the South China Sea, and increasingly in the Indian Ocean, all of which are critical commercial corridors for them to secure the access to raw materials that their economy needs. So, at a minimum, they’re trying to establish regional hegemony.

Much like the United States, I think they would prefer not to have to use that military, but they would prefer their economic might and their military buildup to allow them to compel countries on their border to accept their will.

But I do think they have, you know, broader aspirations. You know, they are building the so-called string of pearls or they’re also building the so-called Silk Road. They are trying to establish themselves in the long term as a global superpower that can rival if not knock off the United States.

And this – you know, they have a very long tradition of seeing themselves as a great power and they view – you know, so kind of a middle kingdom viewpoint. And, in the last couple of hundred years, they view that as an aberration. And I think the Chinese leadership recognizes – you know, believes that they are on the cusp of restoring that kind of global prestige and power, even if in the near term their aspirations are primarily focused in the region.

Again, that’s why U.S. leadership is so important. Countries as diverse as South Korea and Japan and the Philippines and Malaysia and Vietnam, even countries like Burma increasingly are seeking more U.S. security and economic cooperation and assistance because they know if the U.S. is not engaged, China, because of its massive size and because of its geographic centrality and its military buildup will likely be able to pick them off one by one – not necessarily in a hot war, but just by compelling those countries to yield to China’s demands.

MR. TALENT: And the tactic, which is pretty effective tactic, is to unilaterally assert sovereignty, take actions consistent with a sovereign, and then put their neighbors in a position where they either have to accept that de jure or de facto or start a shooting war with China.

So they put the burden of escalation on the country which is the object of what they’re doing, and so far it’s been effective. I mean, again, the countries around the world noted that China was able to get control of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, which is a treaty ally of the United States. And so these little things that seem small to us –

SEN. COTTON: Very small. And I would – you know, when I was in South Korea, I viewed a lot of the new military construction. We’re going to move essentially all of our forces away from Seoul and back. There’s a strong force protection element to it because it’s going to be largely out of range of the long range artillery that North Korea has.

But also sends a very powerful signal to the government and the people of South Korea that we wouldn’t be investing, you know, billions of dollars in new barracks and new training facilities and new chow halls and new gyms if we weren’t there and committed in the long term, just like building a new embassy somewhere shows that are invested in that country, even if it’s mainly about getting greater standoff from car bombs or other kind of terrorist threats.

Those are things that we may not appreciate because we are the global superpower, but when you’re a small country and you’re next to a big rival like China or Russia, they very much take notice of it.

MR. TALENT: Let’s talk about China for just a minute. I want to get your reaction to something that concerns me a lot. I’ve actually been fairly complimentary towards the Obama administration’s rebalance policy as a policy. Now, I didn’t like the fact that –

SEN. COTTON: This is where we’ll disagree.

MR. TALENT: Well, I didn’t like the fact that they suggested we could stop paying attention to other places, but as a policy, the steps that they took, you know, announcing that we wanted no unilateral resolution of disputes, the outreaches to allies in the region, which I think has been pretty good.

But what I’ve said is just a shell of a policy because the power isn’t there to back it up. And the concern I have is that what we’re doing and – I’ll get your reaction on this. What we’re doing is presenting ourselves to the Chinese as the obstacle to their ambitions. I mean, declaring that they can’t do this, they can’t do this, they can’t do that but without enough power and purpose to actually deter them, OK? So it’s like we’re earning their contempt at the same time as we’re presenting ourselves as an obstacle, you know, again, to their ambitions.

And the last time – now, I’m not saying that the two situations are parallel but the last time we did that was in the late 1930s, and we saw how that worked out. So do you have any – I mean –

SEN. COTTON: When I said we disagree about the pivot to Asia is the point you’re making, is that it’s mostly talk, not backed up by a lot of concrete action. I also just disagree in concept with the notion of a pivot. We are a global superpower. We don’t pivot. We have priorities. And we have priorities that are present around the world. And East Asia has been a high priority of ours going back many, many decades, just as the Middle East has been, just as Europe has been.

But it also raises expectations and hurts feelings in other places. If you’re not in Asia, people ask where you’re going. And, if you’re in Asia, people ask, where have you been? And then they look and say, well, you haven’t actually done much. You know, there’s not much to back up this so-called pivot to Asia. In fact, we’re beginning to think that it’s really nothing more than rhetorical cover for a disinvestment in the Middle East and in Europe.

MR. TALENT: Right. Right.

SEN. COTTON: All the rhetoric of the pivot to Asia, from the president down to, you know, deputy assistant secretary of the state could all have been overtaken and influenced by the simple act of putting two carriers in the Western Pacific on a constant presence.

MR. TALENT: If we had them.

SEN. COTTON: Well, that’s a different story.

MR. TALENT: And this again goes back to you have to have it to be – you can’t shift forces here that we don’t have.

Yes, in the back there, that gentleman.

Q: Hi. Pat Span (ph), retired U.S. government. I’m wondering if you could articulate – looking down the road now that supposedly the Western Hemisphere is becoming self-sufficient in oil and energy, what do you see as the long-term U.S. interest in the Middle East?

SEN. COTTON: It’s going to remain what it’s been for the last 100 years. It’s driven in part by oil, for sure. I as much as anyone would like to see the United States in particular, North America in general, you know, be able to produce as much oil as we consume. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we will produce it here given the differences in the natures of oil and the refining capabilities. But I think it’s a good thing that we produce more oil and gas in the new world.

But we still are not going to be able to produce enough to supply the entire world. And in an increasingly interdependent global economy, the health of our economy depends on the health of our East Asian allies or our European allies or emerging markets like South Africa or Brazil or India and so forth. And they will continue to depend on Middle Eastern oil.

So even if we continue in the energy – what we’ve seen in North America, our interests in ensuring the free flow of oil resources down to the Middle East is going to remain a present in our national security posture for decades to come.

Secondarily, it is the crossroads of civilization. It always has been and it always will be. What happens in a place like Syria is always going to have spillover effects in Europe and, therefore, in the United States as well.

Third, it remains a breeding ground for the gravest kind of transnational threat we face which is Islamic terror, both in its Sunni, al Qaeda, ISIS brotherhood variant, and its Shiite variant of Hezbollah and other Iranian activities.

So the Middle East, no matter the amount of oil and gas we produce in North America and the New World entirely, is still going to remain a vital theater for the United States.

MR. TALENT: I would add as a fourth the viability of the non-proliferation regime is at stake. And, you know, when you game theory out, if we get a nuclear cascade – and we’re well on our way to it – if you game out game theory a multilateral nuclear confrontation between states that don’t have secure launch protocols, and in some cases aren’t even talking to each other, the chance of a launch goes up enormously. So there are real solid interests. But it’s a good – I’m sorry, Senator. Please.

SEN. COTTON: I was going to say they don’t have a second strike capability, putting a much higher value on a first preemptive strike. And they are not, you know, thousands of miles away, but in some cases dozens of miles away.

MR. TALENT: Right. But it’s good – the question’s a good one. These are questions we should be asking, what do we have at stake and what are we trying to achieve? Whenever somebody asks me about Syria or Iraq, I try with the press to go that first, say, what is it – we’ve got to define what we’re trying to achieve first.

SEN. COTTON: Yeah. Because it’s always – the military – I mean, more broadly, our security services – the military, the intelligence community, agencies like the Border Patrol and so forth have to – their budgets have to be based on strategy and strategy has to be based on threats. Unfortunately, for the last six years, our strategy has been based on our budget, and it’s part of the reason we find ourselves in the condition we are today.

MR. TALENT: We’ve been critical of the Obama administration here. I’ve also said very often though that had the Bush administration made clear, whether you agreed or disagreed with the Iraqi mission, it wasn’t just about removing Saddam Hussein. It was about working with the Iraqi people to create a working – another working partner or ally in the Middle East, which would have been hugely significant. And had that been established as an object of the war, I think the momentum of that might have influenced the Obama administration to maintain a base there.

We have time for one or two more – yes, this young lady here.

Q: Hi. My name is Mallory Sholwall (ph). I’m a reporter at IG Review. Thank you for being here, Senator. You mentioned the refugee crisis. And given everything that’s been talked about, especially among the candidates running for president, some have called – referred to a potential security threat. What would you think would be a comprehensive policy to addressing that while weighing what some say is a security threat?

SEN. COTTON: Well, it is a security threat. It’s a humanitarian disaster as well. By some estimates, almost half of the Syrian population has now been displaced either internally or externally. You know, Ann and I were at the Zaatari refugee camp just a few kilometers off of the Syrian-Jordanian border last month. And they’ve got 80,000 people there and they have a little baby born every two to three hours.

You know, we saw a little baby that was using a medicine bottle with a couple of pills or maybe a couple of rocks in it as both a rattle and a teething toy. That’s the kind of conditions in which they’re living, and that’s in a refugee camp that’s not under constant bombardment, as some of the displaced persons face inside of Syria.

But, in the end, the refugees inside Syria, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Lebanon and now flowing the Europe are just a symptom. The underlying cause is the global Chernobyl that is the war in Syria. And without addressing that war in Syria, there’s not going to be any way to solve the refugee crisis.

I mean, what Europe needs to do, in my opinion, is to defend its borders, to make it clear that refugees not only from Syria, but really from throughout the world, to include a lot of mere economic migrants are not going to be invited into Europe. They’re not going to be given jobs; they’re not going to be given welfare benefits. That doesn’t benefit Europe and it doesn’t benefit them in the long run in part because of the treacherous journey they have to make.

So while we want to give as much humanitarian assistance as we can to those refugees around Syria, I would say that we need to establish some safe zones inside of Syria. In the end, we have to address the underlying cause. And the underlying cause is what David Petraeus called the global Chernobyl of the Syrian war.

MR. TALENT: Yeah. And going forward, and that’s – I’m going to cut it off here because I know you have a hard stop – going forward, it would be nice if we anticipated, if we tried to stop these conflicts in their early stages, because the truth of the matter is you just don’t know – nobody predicted this refugee crisis. You don’t know what’s going to happen if you let them continue. They escalate. They spin out of control. And also –

SEN. COTTON: I would say now that – I mean, it appears that Europe is willing to pay for it and it’s going to divide Europe politically. I mean, it’s – you’ve got an even greater incentive. So not only do you have a greater pull incentive from Europe in terms of their economic prosperity and their welfare benefits, but you’re also going to have even more push from Bashar al-Assad and from Vladimir Putin.

MR. TALENT: In my work – I’ve done some work on behalf of presidential candidates, as you know, over the last few cycles. And we get these questions a lot. You know, what would you do now? And they’re fair questions. They’re important questions. They really are. But what I always want to say is, OK, when you’re at the end of a string of bad decisions, bad decisions narrow your options over time. So you have less practical options.

SEN. COTTON: Yeah. I mean, what we see in the world right now is, I would argue, not primarily the result of bad decisions of the Obama administration since January 2013, although there have been plenty of those. These are the chickens coming home to roost of the bad decisions he made in his first term. Now, the chickens that are being sent out right now will come home to roost in the coming years, unfortunately.

MR. TALENT: We thank you again, Senator, for all your work. You’ve done a tremendous job in your first session. And, you know, we’re hopeful that we can deal with some of those chickens with stronger, more robust tools of power, which is what “To Rebuild America’s Military” is all about. And we have copies I believe outside. So you’re all welcome at the reception to pick up a copy.

I’m tremendously impressed and gratified that you seem to have actually read it, so that’s – thank you. I mean, this is a man who actually reads the things that he’s working on. Thank you again, Senator Cotton.

SEN. COTTON: Thank you, Jim. (Applause.)

(END)