1 PENTAGON-2013/08/06 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION DISSECTING THE PENTAGON’S STRATEGIC CHOICES AND MANAGEMENT REVIEW Washington, D.C. Tuesday, August 6, 2013 PARTICIPANTS: Moderator: MARVIN KALB Nonresident Senior Fellow The Brookings Institution Panelists: MICHAEL O’HANLON Senior Fellow and Director or Research, Foreign Policy The Brookings Institution MACKENZIE EAGLEN Resident Fellow, Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies American Enterprise Institute * * * * * ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 2 PENTAGON-2013/08/06 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. KALB: Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, to another panel discussion here at the Brookings Institution. This one is called “Dissecting the Pentagon’s Strategic Choices and Management Review”. I’m Marvin Kalb, a Nonresident Senior Fellow here at Brookings and a senior advisor to the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which is located just next door. Way back in August 2011, believe it or not, that’s only two years ago, Congress passed and the President signed into law a legislative monstrosity called the Budget Control Act. It was a way of doing something when nothing seemed worse, at least at that time. A Joint Select Committee was set up to control the spiraling deficit, but Congress warned that if the committee failed to come up with a solution, sequestration would automatically follow, meaning massive cuts in both Defense and all other programs. Those cuts have now begun. The Pentagon was already prepared to cut $150 billion over the next ten years. However, sequestration would require $500 billion in cuts over the next ten years. Last week, Defense Secretary Hagel soberly warned that cuts of that magnitude would not only affect entitlements such as salaries, housing, education, and the like, they would also affect Defense readiness and capability. If the U.S., for some time now, had been ready if necessary to fight two wars at the same time, now with these cuts that would no longer seem to be possible, meaning America’s Defense strategy would have to be radically altered. So, what to do in a macro and micro sense? We’ve asked two highly respect defense and budgetary experts to explain reality and options to us. They are Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident fellow at the ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 3 PENTAGON-2013/08/06 American Enterprise Institute, and if I got this right, during the last presidential campaign, she helped Governor Romney, but the governor’s loss should in no way be ascribed to Mackenzie. Our other expert is Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow here at Brookings and though he has written many books, most recently author of “Healing the Wounded Giant”. Recently our panelists coauthored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal urging Congress to reverse sequestration or watch the nation’s military readiness go into a decline. Mackenzie, why don’t we start with you? And then we’ll go onto Mike and then I’ll ask you both a couple of questions, then we’ll go to the audience, and we’re going to finish at 11:30. So, Mackenzie, please. MS. EAGLEN: Good morning. Thank you so much for moderating. It’s a pleasure to be up here with you and, of course, my good friend, Michael, who not only did we recently author the op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about some of these issues, but we were also together with Secretary Hagel and his team last week at a briefing about these choices and this budget outlook and we’ll certainly talk, I’m sure, about some of what was discussed at that conversation. I think you’ve set the ground very well. It’s important to remember, sequester is not the starting point and so much in Washington feels like we’re always starting at square one, but sequestration is the fourth year of Defense budget cuts. This draw down has been well under way. We peaked our Defense spending in 2010 and there were a series of capability, capacity, and real budget cuts ever since, and so there’s been almost roughly $1 trillion taken out of current or planned or future DOD spending in the last four years before sequestration. That’s why this is tough. That’s why you hear the chiefs constantly ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 4 PENTAGON-2013/08/06 banging the drum, that’s why you hear the Secretary and the Deputy Secretaries talk endlessly about how damaging sequestration is. This is not the first dollar of Defense cuts, nor is it the first capability or capacity that’s being unwound as part of this process, and so a lot of the things that I think we’ll talk about this morning, unfortunately, are overdue. So many of the choices that the Pentagon has recently laid out, are things I think that should have been under consideration four years ago. It’s not to say that a lot of the Defense cuts that started under President Obama and then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates weren’t of value or utility in certain cases, this is not their first efficiency drill at DOD, and -- but there were a lot of things done rightly and wrongly as part of those previous years, but I’m not so sure the lessons learned have sunk in. And so what we have now is a Defense Department and a Congress -- a Washington, I guess you could say -- that continues to have to go back to the same pots of money and the same priorities for DOD every year as part of the Defense draw down because we’re doing it on an annual basis, we’re doing it piecemeal. It’s chipping away at the margins Defense cuts as opposed to big term, big picture strategic planning, thinking about this, if we really do have to live with this, how do we handle it for ten years and work backwards? Instead we see what we saw in 2013, which is half a year or so into the fiscal year we’re going to start to talk about serious change and serious planning, and I certainly don’t think that’s any yelp to the half trillion dollar tab that’s already on the table. MR. KALB: Mike, pick it up, please. MR. O’HANLON: Yeah, thanks, Marvin. And, by the way, I agree with you, Mackenzie can’t be blamed for Governor Romney’s loss, but she’s also been polite enough not to remind us all here in Washington that she’s from the great state of ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 5 PENTAGON-2013/08/06 Georgia, and with the Atlanta Braves somewhere like 100 games ahead of the Washington Nationals at the moment, I admire her discretion and appreciate it very much. What I would say is -- and, again, it’s been very well framed -- some of the additional budget cuts that are now being considered I think are okay, and Mackenzie and I don’t have the exact same view. I don’t want to suggest that everything I say that she would endorse necessarily. We do think that there is room for efficiencies, and some of them are probably, if you can actually accomplish them, if you can get the Congress to authorize them, if you can actually implement them the way people think you can probably, let’s say, reform information technology systems at a massive organization like the Department of Defense, they’re worth doing. At the briefing that we heard last week from Secretary Hagel and his team, which developed some of the ideas that were also expressed by Deputy Secretary Carter in his Congressional testimony that everybody can read on the web, we saw an estimate that perhaps $40 billion could be saved over ten years from new efficiencies, and that’s on top of the other efficiencies that were already identified as part of previous budget cutting reviews, like additional base closures, although it’s worth pointing out that Congress has not yet authorized many of those previous efficiencies, so if anything we’re even deeper in the hole than we thought because even to get to previous levels of plan cuts, we’re now going to have to either persuade Congress to change its mind and go ahead and authorize things like base closures, or find other ways to save comparable amounts of money. But let’s say that base closures, for example, are authorized. Some of these efficiencies could save somewhere around $40 billion over ten years. And every time you ask the Pentagon to try harder and go look deeper, they’re probably going to ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 6 PENTAGON-2013/08/06 find another $5 or 10 billion here or there and so I would say that, on balance, there’s never going to be the end of any and all possible cuts. So, $40 billion, let’s say we can do that. Then there’s another examination of possible savings, which Mackenzie and I wrote about in this Wall Street Journal op-ed ten days ago and they have to do with things like reductions in certain elements of military compensation, or at least reductions in the growth.