Commission on the National Defense Strategy Report Readout

Courtney Kube:

Thank you so much, Niamh. Thank you to our wonderful panel here today. So the FY 2022 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision that called for a commission to examine the 2022 National Defense Strategy. Armed Services Committee selects the members, they selected eight people. It was bipartisan, so four on each side. And we are very fortunate today to have four of those members here today. Now the report’s just about done, not quite done, but we’re going to get a rare sneak peek at it, including some of the recommendations they have for updating the National Defense Strategy, which we heard a lot about frankly at this event just last summer. So I want to start because we haven’t seen the report, we’re going to start by each of the members giving a quick sort of two minute review, and I’m going to give you a little bit more about their bios while we do that.

So we’ll start with Jane Harmon, as we heard from Neve, she’s the chair of the commission. She’s served nine terms in Congress as representative from California and was the ranking member on the intelligence committee for four years after nine 11. She’s also on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. And I just want to say, just given the current climate here, she doesn’t know I’m going to say this, but when she was on the Intelligence Committee, when she was one of the leaders, I was a young cub producer at Meet the Press, and I can remember her coming in with her colleagues in the intelligence committee, the leaders on the committee, both sides, Republicans and Democrats. And I still to this day, I was always really struck by how they disagreed on policy, but they all got along. In fact, they were funny together. They almost seemed like they were friends and just given the climate here. Were you friends? Yeah. Oh, okay. Well you heard it here first, but given today’s climate, it is just something I want to point out that she was a part of that work. So Jane, if you could just start us off with a little bit of an intro into the Commission’s work and I guess the status of where you are.

Jane Harman:

Well, thank you Courtney. Not only were we friends back in the day, but the Intel committees, both sides are probably the only truly bipartisan committees in the Congress. It’s a good start, but it’s not enough. And on our commission, we’re all buddies. I mean, some of us went to Ukraine together on a bipartisan basis and we have little funny jokes about being in that train car from Poland where there’s bunk beds. So our shorthand is we all slept together. Anyway, that was naughty, wasn’t it? So a little bit more background on this, we’re not the first commission that Congress has set up. There were prior commissions. Eric Edelman, whom you’ll hear from, was a co-chair of one of those. He’s the vice chair of this one. Jack was on the last one back in the day it was called the Quadrennial Review, but the goal of it is for Congress to appoint people to take a clear-eyed view of how good these ndss are.

And the one in 2022 was the most recent one. Some of you in this audience wrote Congratulations. You know who you are. However, just to point out, it was before Russia invaded Ukraine. It was before Israel Gaza. It was before what happened last weekend and a lot of other things Jack will describe. So we took our own view of this. We traveled around the globe. We went to VPA in Germany where there is this amazing strategic center. We went to Honolulu to see Indo Paycom. We went to a variety of other places and we had 92 interviews, only 92 with some of you and many others who are extremely knowledgeable. The four of us are going to be introduced by Courtney, but there are four others who are not here. Tom Mankin, Mariah six, killer Alyssa Starak, who is in the audience someplace. Alyssa, where are you?

Yeah, she better be there. That’s right. And Rogers heim our report, this is a key takeaway, is unanimous. Think about that. We’re extremely proud of that and we share the belief that we face threats greater than any time since World War II and more complex than the Cold War. Unlike previous reports, we believe there needs to be fundamental change. We’ll describe this in the way the Pentagon and government agencies do business plus a robust incorporation of technology and the tech sector and full embrace of the capabilities of our partners and allies. We decry. This is Jane in particular, the broken budgeting process in Congress and the broken Congress and stress, the need for leaders to explain to the public this has not happened, how dire the situation is, and to fully resource how to pay for the fixes. So that’s my intro.

Courtney Kube:

Great retired General Keen Jack Keen served as national security and foreign policy expert to presidents, members of congress, cabinet officials, CEOs, just about everyone, probably some of you here in this room. He chairs the Institute for the Study of Wars. We heard from Neve. He served on prior NDS commissions and before all that he somehow managed to serve 37 years on active duty, reaching the rank of four Star General and serving as chief of staff of the Army,

Vice chief of staff, vice chief of staff in there. Oh, I elevated. You see, that’s what you get to do in retirement and frankly, he has so many awards and assignments that if I were to read them all here, it would take up the rest of the panel. So I’ll just say he’s got a lot of them and he served in a lot of places. So General Kean, if you could take on the threat piece of this commission, what are the major threats facing the US right now and how prepared do you see the US for tackling them?

John “Jack” Keane:

Yeah, well, I want to deal with threats and some others will pick up with preparedness, but look, several of us were on the 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission and be quite frank about it. We got into it. We were alarmed by what we were facing in terms of our threats and just how seriously United States military had lost its decisive edge, and here we are five years later, the threats are more serious, they’re more dangerous, and we have absolutely failed to keep up with it. That’s kind of where we are. I agree totally that the global security challenges that the United States are facing today, serious and dangerous. As I mentioned, and I agree with what Jane just said, we haven’t seen anything quite like this since World War ii and it includes the potential for near term war. The partnership of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is a major strategic threat that we have yet to account for. It makes each of those countries more effective and stronger militarily, economically and diplomatically, and it weakens our own tools to deal with.

The 22 NDS identifies China as a pacing challenge based on the strength of its military and obviously its economy with its intent to dominate regionally and globally. But the commission finds China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated United States military advantage in the Western Pacific. After two decades of China’s very focused investment, United States military folks remains the world’s global military power. It’s able to project military power to any place in the world in a way that no other country has ever achieved it. However, when we get within a thousand miles or so of the Chinese mainland, the advantage moves decisively to China. We would be challenged to win a war there, and indeed we could lose one. That’s the reality of what we’re we’re facing. The other thing, excuse me, microphone’s a little away from me. China, as you know, I mean their cyber capabilities, their space assets, their long range fires, their conventional air and maritime capability and their growing strategic nuclear forces, they’re put together first and foremost to deter the United States from ever engaging and obviously if necessary to defeat us. Russia is a chronic threat committed to absorbing Ukraine and expanding further into Eastern Europe. The China Russia partnership, the so-called No Limits partnership has deepened and we’ve all seen it, the reality of it, and it’s expanded to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea. This newer alignment really does increase the risk and makes it more likely that any future conflict can expand across theaters and we could find ourselves involved in a global war.

And lastly, we are already involved in two wars and we’re struggling right now to keep up providing munition and equipment to our allies. If we got involved in a global war, we would be significantly challenged to deal with our adversaries and the capabilities that they have and our exercises that we played have revealed all of that. If we truly want to deter aggression, and I submit we do and we talk a lot about deterrence, we need to realize how serious and how dangerous the challenge is that we’re facing. We’ve got to move with a sense of urgency and determination now to confront these threats that we’re facing. Thank you.

Courtney Kube:

Thank you. General Mara Rudman, as we heard, is a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia Miller Center. She directs the Ripples of Hope project that identifies approaches to help democratic leaders resolve key challenges. She also serves on the Board of Visitors at Howard University College of Arts and Sciences, and she served in multiple senior national security roles at the White House under Presidents Obama and President Clinton and positions at the State Department focusing on the Middle East. Maura, we just heard about these threats, which seem to be numerous that the US is facing right now in the world. Frankly, the commission is expected to recommend employing elements of national power, all elements of national power to address the threats that we just heard about. Can you walk us through some of those recommendations?

Mara Rudman:

Sure, sure. Happy to do that. Obviously, as General Keen has laid out, we are facing an extremely challenging situation. And while our mandate is clearly looking at reviewing, making recommendations for the National Defense Strategy, what’s very clear is to meet these challenges. The Defense Department, the Pentagon, our military cannot do it alone. And in fact, the National Defense Strategy calls for integrated deterrence, as does the National Security Strategy, which describes that in some detail. The challenge has been in what that means and how it’s understood across government, across society, as well as within the Pentagon and at the White House. And so that’s why we talk about all elements of national power to start to find the solution sets to meet these challenges. We need everyone involved and that means that for all of government, it is yes, our diplomats, but not them alone less.

Yes, those who work on our economic issues and our investment issues and also those who work on critical infrastructure and supply chains. Critical minerals are absolutely essential at everything that we’re talking about as well as those who are working. And one of the earlier panels talked about workforce challenges. Everyone here is confronting that who work on labor and workforce and education. So I’ve pretty much mentioned pretty much every agency across our government and we need to have a different way of thinking about these things. In addition to that, we need to look across our civil society, and I want to underscore there, we need a civil society as well as the private sector to be involved, to be committed to understand what we’re facing in terms of these national security threats that we all share this national security mission. It’s we need it in terms of technological innovation, we need it in manufacturing, we need it in workforce, we need it in public service and in increasing our recruitment ability and our retention ability across our military and really across all of public service.

And so we need all elements of national power and that’s what we mean by it. We also need to be working, including within how we view all elements of national power, is working with allies and partners. And this administration has made some real gains in terms of strengthening nato in terms of the office agreement, in terms of a lot that we’ve done in Asia, it is not enough. We need to do more. We need the United States, all elements of the United States, all elements of government and our society. We need to be better partners and that involves being smarter on how we work on export issues, on technology issues, on information exchange. It also means being able to be relied upon as a stable partner, being seen as reliable throughout the world, regardless of who’s in charge of our government and our country. So we have a lot of work to do to get there.

Courtney Kube:

Thanks. Ambassador. Eric Edelman served in a number of positions at the Pentagon and the State Department. He was the ambassador to Finland in Turkey under Secretary of Defense for policy at the Pentagon, senior advisor to the vice President and on and on. He also co-chaired the National Defense Strategy Commission in 2017 and 18, and now he’s the vice chair of the current commission. Mr. Ambassador, you know bureaucracy at the Pentagon very well at this point you’re very familiar with, sadly, yes, you’re very familiar with the fact that it’s the world’s largest bureaucracy. What are some of the changes that need to be made? And then also to Mar’s point about are there changes that need to be made in the defense industrial base, in the civilian sector as well?

Eric Edelman:

So thank you Courtney. It’s great to be with you again. And I’d like to start by actually saluting the leadership of Jane Harmon as our commission chair. She made it sound very easy. We got a unanimous bipartisan report out. I’m here to tell you, it was actually not that easy if you don’t think, we didn’t have a lot of very vigorous disagreements among ourselves. We did, but the important point was that we had eight patriotic Americans who were willing to negotiate out their differences and come to a unanimous report. And a lot of that is credit to Jane. As Jane mentioned, I’m a recidivist. I’ve served on the four previous congressionally mandated reports, and in 2010, our report said that, and General Keen was a member of that group. We said that the accumulating strategic challenges the United States faced and inattention to resources for defense were leading to a potential train wreck in 2014.

We said that we were accumulating strategic risk and that the Budget Control Act was a giant strategic misstep that had undercut the nation’s defenses. And in 2018, we said that while the 2018 National Defense Strategy pointed us in the right direction, it lacked a lot of specificity and in particular lacked operational concepts that would suggest how we could deter and defeat our various adversaries. Mara has enjoined me repeatedly that just yelling this stuff louder doesn’t get you anywhere. But if you listen to General Keen, I think you get the sense of urgency that I think animates all eight of us on this commission. And we met with the entire DOD leadership. We met with all the combatant commanders, the service secretary, service chiefs, the chairman, the vice, lots of other senior leaders, and we found all of them committed, working very hard to deal with these very complex challenges.

But what we also is that there’s a very large Pentagon bureaucracy that lacks that sense of urgency. General Keen mentioned that the report, the commission report, but also the strategy identifies China as the pacing strategic challenge. I commend to people a very good ran paper by Michael Azar that points out that we’ve understood that this was a challenge for almost 10 years now. Late Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter started talking about great power competition in his last two years in office. We’ve identified many of the challenges that general outline that we face vis-a-vis China. And yet here we are with very little progress to show, and part of the answer is the old POGO story. We’ve met the enemy and it is us. We have a very large bureaucracy that’s optimized for research and development and procurement of exquisite expensive irreplaceable platforms in an era where the conflicts that are underway that General Keen mentioned are showing us that the future is autonomy, ai, robotics and large numbers of a treatable, easily replaceable and hopefully cheaper systems that we have to be able to deploy.

We’ve got some serious efforts that are underway like replicator, like DIU, but what’s troubling about all that is that all of these efforts are essentially efforts to work around the system as it exists. We had the same thing with the European Deterrence Initiative and the Pacific Security Initiative. We have to work around our own processes and programming and budgetary bureaucracies in order to try and get results. And I’ll close with just one final thought, which is that we identified five or six years ago in the 2018 report, the lack of operational concepts that would allow us to use our technological advantage vis-a-vis China, some of which was discussed yesterday in a way that will be accessible to the war fighter and allow us to deter, hopefully conflict but defeat aggression if we have to. And we discovered in our examination that the 2018 and 2022 strategies, which both say, well, we really have to concentrate on winning one fight and then deterring everybody else with nuclear weapons is probably insufficient to the challenge that General Keen described where we’ve got Russian aggression financed by the PRC providing precision machining to get Russia’s defense industry on a 24 7 3 shifts a day basis, producing Iranian drones with a factory built by Iranian Russia with munitions supplied by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

We have to be present in three major theaters. We have to be able to deter aggression in three major theaters. We will have to perhaps defeat out adversaries. It won’t look the same in every theater, but you can’t do it with an army that’s going down with an air force. That’s the smallest it’s been in very long time. And same with the Navy. We talked about operational concepts in the Cold War, the late Harold Brown and the then director of research and engineering, bill Perry committed the United States to the development of stealth technology and precision guided munitions and some very farsighted military strategists came up with the airland battle salt breaker and NATO’s follow on forces attack that allowed us to take those technological advantages and turn them into a powerful deterrent that ultimately ended up contributing to the end of the Cold War. We have not yet done that in the Department of Defense today. And that’s, I think on the agenda for the future.

Courtney Kube:

So I think the big question that we have to ask is with this, who’s going to pay for all this? You’ve just laid out this idea of a bureaucratic Pentagon that doesn’t want to shift. We have Congress that we know doesn’t want to agree on the time of day. Where will you get the resources for this, Jane?

Jane Harman:

So very briefly, let me clarify something I didn’t say, which is we are formed by Congress, funded by Congress, but independent of Congress. And some of the things we’re saying up here have not been said by Congress, and they have certainly not been said by the Pentagon in any public way. I also want to recognize the enormous valor of David Grannis who’s sitting in the front row if you think it took a lot of work to become unanimous. He was the guy who had to draft all this and change it every hour. But we did it. And on July 30th, we will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about our final version of the report. And you’ve been very good, Courtney in not outing us because it’s not. It ain’t over until it’s over. Just a few things on who’s going to pay for this.

We are not in favor of printing money unanimously not in favor of printing money. The US defense budget is already 850 billion China’s budget. Russia’s budgets are going up. So what are we suggesting here? We are suggesting spending more and you’ll see the recommendations in the report, but we are also suggesting spending smarter. There are lots of ways to save money in the Pentagon where the tooth to tail ratio is tooth, meaning war fighting 30 to 70. That doesn’t sound very efficient to me. There’s also Congress which has not passed a defense budget on time since 2011. That’s the year I left Congress. So you all understand it was working perfectly until I left. We are also in favor of spending differently. You’ve heard some of this. We have a much broader lens on what it will take to project national power. It is not just Pentagon centric.

And I would add as one who was an offender back in the day representing an aerospace district in Los Angeles, that Congress is addicted to legacy systems and actually so is the Pentagon. I think Jack would agree. And what we need to do is change that whole mindset, change the business model to one that’s much more resembling of the tech sector and risk taking. This will take a lot of work. Doug Beck is speaking later and he’ll tell us all about it. He’s one of the refreshing newbies at the Pentagon. I said we had to spend more, but one of the things we have to understand is that the public is pretty clueless about how serious these threats are. And you heard Jack, they are very serious. And our political leaders need to educate the public about what the risks are. And oh, by the way, I’m going to say this, it was unanimous. We are recommending that we may have to raise revenues, that would be taxes to pay for some of the new spending and get this listen up reform entitlement spending.

Courtney Kube:

General

Jane Harman:

Keen, general keen.

Courtney Kube:

Did you want to clap? You can clap. Come on. This friendly environment. Go ahead and clap away. General, I do want to just ask one thing that you said in your opening remarks, which was that the US is already involved in two wars and struggling to keep up. So I just wonder, does the commission believe that the US is capable right now of fighting, whether it’s a multi-front war on multiple theaters or fighting multiple wars at a time right now?

John “Jack” Keane:

Well, we’d fight those wars, but we’d be struggled to win those wars. That’s the reality of what we’re facing. We’re resourced to fight one war and then deter all others. But we’re already gone past that reality. Let’s see. You see it out there yourselves. So that’s the issue. We would really struggle. We would struggle against China fighting one more and certainly would’ve major problems. And that’s why our adversaries would take advantage of the situation. If Russia expands into Eastern Europe, does that incentivize China to move and take action in the Pacific region? Does it incentivize Iran to expand and operationalize their proxies once again and even a more serious way to finally take Israel down? Our judgment is yes, it likely does. And that’s why the threat of multiple theater and global war is real now, and the administration and the subsequent administration has got to deal with the reality of that and a plan to deal with multiple wars or global war itself despite the fact that we have limited resources to cope

Eric Edelman:

With all of

John “Jack” Keane:

That.

Courtney Kube:

Do you want to add something?

Eric Edelman:

Yeah, Courtney, if I might just add to what General Ke just said. So in our 2018 report, we actually drew attention to the fact that our magazine of munitions was actually very shallow and that in the 2015 Counter Isel campaign, the Air Force almost ran out of precision munitions. And we drew attention to that, said that Congress should pay attention to this and look at this problem. You can see how effective our report was because no one paid any attention in the least. But President Putin has done us a service. I think because the war in Ukraine and the struggles we’ve had to support Ukraine, and then subsequently after October 7th, Israel have shown a degree to which our own defense industrial base, and this gets back to an earlier question you raised, has deteriorated because of the shrinkage of the post cold War of the industrial base, and it’s going to take some very significant investment, but even with a lot of investment, and even if we can get not just the primes, I mean I don’t want my comments about big exquisite systems to say we don’t need any of those.

We do, but we need a lot of the other stuff as well. And we have to find the right balance, as Jane was saying, in spending in smarter newer ways. But even with the best effort we can make to crank up our own defense industrial base, we’re going to have to rely on allies, which is why the NATO summit recognized that by committing itself to a pretty significant enlargement of the European defense industrial base, we’ll see whether European politics allows for that. But we’re in this together, as Maura was saying, with allies, we’re going to have to rely on them as well.

Mara Rudman:

Just one quick add-on, and my colleagues are used to hearing me say this, it’s not only the defense industrial base, it is the industrial base that’s part of all elements of national power and getting this done. There’s so much overlap with the commercial side and the defense side and things like there’s no better illustration of that than something like critical minerals and supply chains for it.

Courtney Kube:

One thing I was really struck by is that we’re talking about two years ago, the National Defense Strategy two years ago, and look at how much has changed in the world since then. And it made me wonder, and I throw this to any of you, is the strategic environment, is the environment just changing so fast at this point that the strategies can’t keep up?

John “Jack” Keane:

I think one thing I think is happening is our adversaries, when they look at us and see all the challenges that we have, I think they see opportunity based on our vulnerabilities. And if you look at just the last two to three years, our adversaries have become more aggressive. That’s the reality of what we’re facing. And that’s indisputable. So yes, we think the strategy has not kept up with that reality that we’re dealing with. And that’s part and parcel of the essence of what we’re saying in our report.

Jane Harman:

I’d just also add that we are very good at fighting the last war, and a lot of what the Pentagon is doing is burnishing how to fight the last war. What we need to think about is cyber AI and the amazing change in social media and how people are motivated to act. And just again, think about last weekend and the threats around us and now this report of the Iranians possibly targeting former President Trump, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. I mean, it’s a massive change and if we don’t think differently, we will never get on top of the threats. And as Jack said, first of all, we won’t deter them, but then we won’t win the wars we have to fight.

Courtney Kube:

I also, the other thing I’ve been very struck by is we have heard for years that China is the pacing challenge. Some people even called it the pacing threat, although that was frowned upon in the Pentagon in 2022. But now you’re saying that China is outpacing the US at this point. How and why, and I guess if it’s been something that’s been on the radar for all these years, how do you address it now?

John “Jack” Keane:

Well, dealing with the threat, it’s obvious, it’s indisputable in terms of outpacing us in terms of they have more long range missiles, more defensive missiles in the region. They have more air power in the region, they have considerably more maritime power, and it goes on and on. You name the platform except for submarines, and they’re outpacing us. They’re also outpacing us in terms of space and space technology and how they’re going to use that in a conflict situation. We know full well that if we have conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific region, the homeland is going to be involved rather significant. They’re going to come for us with cyber espionage, attacking our oil and distribution systems, our financial systems, is there other critical infrastructure that we have? And it’s also likely that they would attack us kinetically on the West coast. These are the realities that we’re facing.

All that said, we don’t have to go platform to platform with these guys during World War ii. I mean, excuse me, during the Cold War, Russia outmanned us, outgunned us dramatically. And as Eric mentioned, we haven’t had these brilliant generals coming out of the Vietnam War who realized the growing threat with the Soviet Union led by Russia. And we had to deal with it. They designed the doctrine around it. They practiced it right in front of the Soviet Union Warsaw Pact, and they demonstrated what deterrence really is all about. One is your capability to impose cost on an adversary, and they got that message. And the second piece in deterrence is you’re willing to use it. And we demonstrated our willingness to use that. We can do this. And one of the things that we feel very strongly about is communicating. And our leader here, Jane, speaks eloquently about it, is informing the American people. Listen, we get the American people involved in a seriousness and a threat. I mean, the first thing we say to them is how bad it is. They say, what the hell are you going to do about it? And we got to have a plan and tell ’em what to do about it

Courtney Kube:

And

John “Jack” Keane:

How it involves them.

Courtney Kube:

But when you say, well, we’re going to raise your taxes to deal with it. I mean, how do you get the American people on board with this?

Jane Harman:

We’ve done that in the past. Our taxes were much higher during the Cold War and certainly during World War ii. I mean, it’s not fun to raise taxes, but it’s not fun to lose a major war with China either. I think that would get people’s attention. And I just wanted to stress one other thing to add to what Jack said, and Mara mentioned this, all elements of national power means far more than any platform or any software the Pentagon could design. It means the Pentagon lashed up to the State Department, lashed up to a ID lashed up to other agencies that have a role in this lashed up to the tech sector, not as an add-on, but our whole business model needs to move away from building hardware to building software, which the tech sector is enormously skilled at doing lashed up to partners and allies. Some of them can not only build, but can repair things in theater. Think Japan, that would make it so much easier to deter China from attacking Taiwan.

Mara Rudman:

Thanks. So obviously raising taxes for many people As a third rail, we went back to look very specifically, I’m not going to mention the numbers here, but it is striking what the regular tax base was when we were in the Cold War period as well as World War ii. But we need to have people understand, we need to have people understand that we are all in this together. And in fact, there has never been a time, I think, for this country where the term united we stand, divided we fall, resonates as deeply as it is does now. And that’s part of why it’s such a frightening time for us in this country as well as in the world, because we have extraordinary ability when we are united. We have unmatched ability in the, and we’ve proven it time and time again. And so we need to figure out every possible way. And it takes all of us, everyone in this room, everyone in your community, everyone across the country to work together to make this happen.

Courtney Kube:

As we heard on the space panel this morning. I mean, one way is just to bring it home to the people by, Hey, your ATMs and your gasoline pumps aren’t going to work anymore if they take out the satellites. Simple things like that. Any last words, Mr. Investor?

Eric Edelman:

No, I don’t think I could improve on what

John “Jack” Keane:

Mar just

Eric Edelman:

Said.

Courtney Kube:

Well, thank you

John “Jack” Keane:

All very. I just like to add one thing. Half the capital in the world is resident in the United States. This is where people still put their money. Why? They have confidence in us. They have confidence in our capitalistic democracy and our ability to innovate. We can outthink these guys and out innovate these guys. We just got to turn all of that on. You saw what we did during World War ii dealing with a threat that it was much larger than anything we could ever imagine, and they had far superior military on a battlefield than we had. And look what we did. It was quite remarkable. Using the power of the American people, the power of our innovation, the power of our capitalistic democracy to overcome that, we can get there.

Courtney Kube:

Well, this is a rare treat to really have four of you up here giving us a preview of the commission’s work that’s not out publicly yet. So we all look forward to reading it in just a couple of weeks and seeing you on the hill. Thank you all very much.