[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 110-159]
A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY
(PART 1 OF 2)
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
JULY 15, 2008
[H.A.S.C. 110-168 part 2]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
44-340 WASHINGTON : 2009
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC
area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC
20402-0001
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey JEFF MILLER, Florida
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California PHIL GINGREY, Georgia
JIM COOPER, Tennessee K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky
JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania
John Kruse, Professional Staff Member
Thomas Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Roger Zakheim, Professional Staff Member
Sasha Rogers, Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
----------
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2008
Page
Hearing:
Tuesday, July 15, 2008, A New U.S. Grand Strategy (Part 1 of 2).. 1
Appendix:
Tuesday, July 15, 2008........................................... 43
----------
TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2008
A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY (PART 1 OF 2)
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking
Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.............. 3
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Chairman,
Committee on Armed Services.................................... 2
Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee...................... 1
WITNESSES
Bacevich, Dr. Andrew J., Professor of International Relations,
Boston University.............................................. 4
Dobbins, Ambassador James, Director, International Security and
Defense Policy Center, RAND Corporation........................ 6
Posen, Dr. Barry R., Director, Security Studies Program,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.......................... 10
Reiss, Dr. Mitchell B., Vice Provost for International Affairs,
William and Mary Marshall-Wythe School of Law.................. 13
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Akin, Hon. W. Todd........................................... 49
Bacevich, Dr. Andrew J....................................... 50
Dobbins, Ambassador James.................................... 58
Posen, Dr. Barry R........................................... 73
Reiss, Dr. Mitchell B........................................ 83
Snyder, Hon. Vic............................................. 47
Documents Submitted for the Record:
A Grand Strategy of Restraint submitted by Dr. Barry R. Posen 99
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.]
A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY (PART 1 OF 2)
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Tuesday, July 15, 2008.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m. in
room 2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Dr. Snyder. Good morning. Why don't we get started here
this morning? We have, I think, titled this hearing, instead of
hearings, A New U.S. Grand Strategy.
But the term ``grand strategy'' is one that I think several
of us on the committee are still trying to get our hands
around, and particularly, do we currently have one? Do we need
one? And if so, what should it be? And we appreciate the four
of you being here today and getting a start on this.
We began last July and then in January on six hearings on
Iraq in terms of what should our strategy and proposals--
alternatives be for Iraq. We have had a series of discussions
about interagency reform specifically focusing on the
provincial reconstruction team. But the whole concept of reform
and change and the new policies often comes back to, what is
the unifying theme? Should there be a unifying theme? And that
is what we hope you will help us with this morning.
Chairman Ike Skelton is here with us this morning, and he
is also in the process of elevating this discussion of what
should a national strategy look like. And, in fact, he is in
the process of giving some speeches about that. In fact, we are
going to have a full committee hearing, I believe in September,
with--we hope with some former high-ranking officials from both
Defense and State.
Henry Kissinger noted in an April opinion piece that the
global environment is going through an unprecedented
transformation in a discussion he called the three revolutions:
one, the transformation of the traditional state system of
Europe; number two, the radical Islamic challenge to historic
notions of sovereignty; and three, the drift of the center of
gravity of international affairs from the Atlantic, to the
Pacific and Indian Oceans. And, in fact, his discussion was
about the fact that perhaps our Presidential debate, as we head
into the fall, ought to be about those kinds of themes rather
than the things that have been talked about so far in the
national security area.
Before introducing our witnesses, I would like to recognize
Chairman Ike Skelton for any comments or an opening statement
he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the
Appendix on page 47.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI,
CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
First, let me compliment you, Dr. Snyder, on your interest
in calling this hearing. You and I have discussed on any number
of occasions the need for a strategy for the United States, and
I have had the opportunity over a period of years and more
recently months in talking with leading thinkers in this area.
And kind of like Mark Twain, the more you explain it to me, the
more I don't understand it because this is a very complex world
in which we live. And to try to glue together a strategy based
upon a solid policy, much less the tactics, both military and
diplomatic, that would fit under such a strategy is very, very
difficult.
During the Cold War, the Truman Administration glued
together what we know as the doctrine of containment, which
worked. When President Eisenhower was elected, he did not
automatically accept it. He had a series of three teams that
studied the issue of policy and strategy; and he ended up
deciding that what was in the Truman doctrine was the correct
one and swore that the containment theory did work, as we know,
culminating in 1989 when the Wall came down and all of the
Soviet Union changed in character.
To glue together such a strategy now is more difficult,
which we all know, because of the different challenges,
threats, interests that are throughout the world. It cannot be
centered on the Islamic radicals because that omits a great
part of the world.
So where do we go from here? That is where our witnesses
come in to give us their best thought. First, you have to have
a policy, you have to have a strategy in order to get there;
and then, of course, the diplomatic and, when necessary,
military techniques under it.
Dr. Snyder and Mr. Akin will have hearings here in the
subcommittee, which I compliment them on--Doctor, thank you for
your leadership in this role--and in September we hope to have
a major culminating hearing.
Whatever the strategy is and comes from the White House, it
is going to have to include Congress. It is going to have to
include the American people, so that there is a common
consensus as to where our Nation should go and what we want it
to be like in 10, 15, 25 years and henceforth. And without a
strategy, we are treading water or getting washed ashore
somewhere else.
So this may be the only place that this is being looked at
seriously, and our committee intends to involve you very
deeply.
So, again, thank you so much.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We will recognize Mr. Akin now before we introduce our
guests.
STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI,
RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Dr. Snyder. And I don't know which one
is Mr. Chairman. We have a couple chairmen in here. We have so
many chairmen, we don't know what to do with them.
This is a hearing that I have long been looking forward to.
Years ago, I was able to sneak through an engineering school
and get a degree in engineering. And it seemed to me that one
of the problems that we have is Americans who are really good
at solving problems, but we are not too good at defining what
the problem is. And that is why this hearing is exciting to me,
because it seems like we are getting to the basic assumptions
behind who we are as a Nation and who we are as a people, and
then having to project those in terms of our policy.
I hope that that is the way you are looking at things and
can give us some thoughts on that subject. It would, I think,
be interesting, too, if you built into your testimonies,
gentlemen--and thank you for coming and joining us today.
First of all, President Bush, it seems to me, has maybe
extended or applied the old Monroe Doctrine to a certain degree
in a preemptive sense against Islamoterrorism. You might
include that as part of whether or not you see that as part of
where we should be.
It is also clear that the President has made the war on
terrorism for the past 8 years his number one priority.
Certainly, if you talk to him, that is what he is thinking
about all the time. And then it also seems to me that almost
before you can come up with a grand strategy, it seems that you
almost have to agree to a vision of who we are as a people,
what America is.
I have always used largely the basis of what is written in
our Declaration of Independence as the basis, the idea that we
believe that there is a God--even if you disagree with what his
name is--and he gives basic rights to people: life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness. And governments are instituted among
men to protect those basic rights.
When we have gone to war, in the War of Independence, we
fought because we believed that sentence. And if you look at
most of the wars that we have fought, they have been fought
basically on that idea, that we think that there are
fundamental rights that all people should have, and some tyrant
was trying to take them away.
Is that still a basis for our Nation and for our grand
strategy or not? And does that fit in?
I think those are some interesting questions. I look
forward to the witnesses' testimony. I thank you, both Mr.
Chairmen, for a very interesting topic for a hearing.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Akin.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the
Appendix on page 49.]
Dr. Snyder. We are pleased to have with us today our panel
of experts: Dr. Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International
Relations and History at Boston University; his latest book is
The Long War and New History of U.S. National Security Policy
Since World War II;
Dr. and Ambassador James Dobbins, Director of the
International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND
National Security Research Division, who has served as a
diplomat in South America, Europe and Afghanistan;
Dr. Barry Posen, the Ford International Professor of
Political Science and Director of Security Studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; his recent article is
called The Case for Restraint; and
Dr. Mitchell Reiss, the Vice Provost for International
Affairs at the College of William and Mary and Professor at the
College's Marshall-Wythe School of Law, who previously directed
the policy planning staff at the Department of State.
Gentlemen, we are pleased you are here with us today. I
found your written statements to be very thought provoking, and
in fact, they will be made a part of this record.
I might also say, any written statement that Chairman
Skelton or Mr. Akin or other members of the committee wish to
be made part of the record will be done so, without objection.
We are going to have the five-minute clock go on here, so
when you see the red light go off, it means five minutes has
ended. Feel free to take longer if you need to. But I think we
have an energetic group of members that would like to ask some
questions, so we will put the light on there as your guideline.
We will begin with you, Dr. Bacevich, and just go right
down the line. Dr. Bacevich, you are recognized for as much
time as you need.
STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW J. BACEVICH, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Dr. Bacevich. Thank you for the opportunity to present my
views to this committee. I am very grateful for that chance.
In American practice, grand strategy almost invariably
implies conjuring up a response to emerging threats or
prospective challenges beyond our borders. The expectation is
that an effective grand strategy will provide a framework for
employing American power to shape that external environment.
These days, strategists expend considerable energy and
imagination devising concepts intended to enable the United
States to win the global war on terror, to transform the
greater Middle East or to manage the rise of China. These are
honorable, well-intentioned efforts and may, on occasion,
actually yield something useful. After all, as Chairman Skelton
noted, the grand strategy of containment devised at the end of
World War II did serve as an important touchstone for policies
that enabled the United States and its allies to prevail in the
Cold War.
Yet there is a second way to approach questions of grand
strategy. This alternative approach, which I will employ in my
very brief prepared remarks, is one that emphasizes internal
conditions as much as external threats.
Here is my bottom line: The strategic comparative that we
confront in our time demands, first of all, that we would put
our own house in order--fixing our problems to take precedence
over fixing the world's problems.
The past decade has seen a substantial erosion of U.S.
power and influence. This has occurred, in part, as a result of
ill-advised and recklessly implemented policy decisions, the
Iraq war not the least among them. Yet it has also occurred
because of our collective unwillingness to confront serious and
persistent domestic dysfunction. The chief expression of this
dysfunction takes the form of debt and dependency. In the not-
so-very-distant future, they may well pose as great a danger to
our well-being as violent Islamic radicalism or a China intent
on staking its claim to the status of great power.
To persist in neglecting these internal problems is, in
effect, to endorse and perpetuate the further decline of U.S.
power. Let me illustrate the point with two examples.
Example number one is energy. I hardly need remind members
of this committee of the relevant facts. Once the world's
number one producer of oil, the United States today possesses a
paltry four percent of known global oil reserves, while
Americans consume one out of every four barrels of worldwide
oil production. President Bush has bemoaned our addiction to
foreign oil. He is right to do so. The United States now
imports more than 60 percent of its daily petroleum fix, a
figure that will almost certainly continue to rise.
The cost of sustaining that addiction are also rising.
Since 9/11 the price of oil per barrel has quadrupled. The
Nation's annual oil bill now tops $700 billion, much of that
wealth helping to sustain corrupt and repressive regimes, some
of it subsequently diverted to support Islamic radicals who
plot against us.
Since the 1970's Americans have talked endlessly of the
need to address this problem. Talk has not produced effective
action. Instead, by tolerating this growing dependence on
foreign oil, we have allowed ourselves to be drawn ever more
deeply into the Persian Gulf, a tendency that culminated in the
ongoing Iraq war. That war, now in its sixth year, is costing
us an estimated $3 billion per week, a figure that is
effectively a surtax added to the oil bill. Surely this is a
matter that future historians will find baffling, how a great
power could recognize the danger posed by energy dependence and
then do so little to avert that danger.
Example number two of our domestic dysfunction is fiscal.
Again, you are familiar with the essential problem, namely, our
persistent refusal to live within our means. When President
Bush took office in 2001, the national debt stood at less than
$6 trillion. Since then it has increased by more than 50
percent to $9.5 trillion. When Ronald Reagan became President
back in 1981, total debt equaled 31 percent of GDP. Today, the
debt is closing in on 70 percent of GDP.
This is no longer money we owe ourselves. Increasingly, we
borrow from abroad, with 25 percent of total debt now in
foreign hands. Next to Japan, China has become our leading
creditor, a fact that ought to give strategists pause.
Given seemingly permanent trade imbalances, projected
increases in entitlement programs and the continuing cost of
fighting multiple open-ended wars, this borrowing will continue
and will do so at an accelerating and alarming rate. Our
insatiable penchant for consumption and our aversion to saving
only exacerbate the problem. Any serious attempt to chart a
grand strategy for the United States would need to address this
issue, which cannot be done without considerable sacrifice.
Now, there are those who would contend that the Bush
Administration has already formulated a grand strategy. The
centerpiece of this strategy is the global war on terror. In
some corridors, it is referred to as ``the long war.''
In fact, the long war represents an impediment to sound
grand strategy. To persist in the long war will be to
exacerbate the existing trends toward ever greater debt and
dependency, and it will do so while placing at risk America's
overstretched armed forces. To imagine that a reliance on
military power can reverse these trends toward ever-increasing
debt and dependency would be the height of folly. This is the
central lesson that we should take away from the period since
9/11.
Shortly after 9/11, then-Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld framed the strategic problem facing the United States
this way: ``We have a choice,'' he said, ``either to change the
way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way they
live.'' And ``we,'' referring to the Bush Administration, chose
the latter.
What we have learned since then is that the United States
does not possess the capacity to change the way they live,
whether they are the people of the Middle East or indeed of the
entire Islamic world. To persist in seeing U.S. grand strategy
as a project aimed at changing the way they live would be to
court bankruptcy and exhaustion.
In fact, the choice facing the United States is this one:
We can ignore the imperative to change the way we live, in
which case we will drown in an ocean of red ink, or we can
choose to mend our ways, curbing our profligate inclinations,
regaining our freedom of action, and thereby preserving all
that we value most. In the end, how we manage or mismanage our
affairs here at home will prove to be far more decisive than
our efforts to manage events beyond our shores, whether in the
Persian Gulf or East Asia or elsewhere.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Bacevich.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Bacevich can be found in the
Appendix on page 50.]
Dr. Snyder. Ambassador Dobbins.
STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR JAMES DOBBINS, DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL
SECURITY AND DEFENSE POLICY CENTER, RAND CORPORATION
Ambassador Dobbins. Thank you.
Let me start by saying, I agree with Dr. Bacevich on his
main point, which is that the budget deficit currently
represents America's greatest vulnerability and correcting it
is our greatest national security challenge.
It is very flattering to be asked to comment on the
components of a new grand strategy. I have to say, as a long-
time practitioner of American diplomacy, I have some skepticism
about the utility of grand and somewhat, sometimes, grandiose
statements of American purpose in terms of an actual guides for
the conduct of policy.
My experience over the last 40 years impresses upon me the
enduring interests, friends, and values that the United States
has, and the importance of consistency in our behavior and
continuity in our policies. Rather than try to sketch out an
entirely new schemata, therefore, let me suggest how our
existing grand strategy might be amended in reaction to our
experiences of the last year.
I believe that the contemporary schools of foreign policy--
realism, Wilsonianism, neoconservative--provide pundits and
political scientists with useful instruments for analysis, but
afford poor guides to future conduct. Wise Presidents and
legislators will pick and choose among these alternative
efforts to describe and prescribe for a world that defies easy
categorization, worrying less about ideological coherence and
more about incremental progress toward long-term national goals
which do not and should not in the main change.
In terms of aspects of the current policy, which I think
need some amendment, although not complete reversal, I would
include the war on terror, preemption, democratization and
nation-building, all central elements of the current
Administration's approach, all of which have become, as a
result of the war in Iraq, somewhat more controversial.
On the first, the war on terror, the Bush Administration's
rhetoric since 9/11 has accentuated the martial character of
the terrorist threat and the warlike nature of the required
response. Treating terrorists as combatants and labeling their
activities as jihad or holy wars dignifies their endeavors,
bolsters their self-esteem, and enhances their standing
throughout the Muslim world.
Most of the tangible success in the war on terror comes as
a result of police intelligence and diplomatic activity.
Certainly efforts to counter violent extremism and protect the
American homeland must continue, but we need to find a
vocabulary that secures us broader international support, which
denigrates rather than dignifies the terrorists, and which
supports a greater allocation of our own resources to
diplomatic intelligence and law enforcement instruments.
Preemption is another aspect of the current doctrine which
I believe needs to be modified. After all, over more than two
centuries the United States has conducted dozens of military
campaigns, only two of which were in response to attacks on our
homeland. This record should leave no one in doubt that the
United States will employ military force when necessary to
protect itself and its friends and its interests without
necessarily waiting to be struck first. But trying to
incorporate this in a declarative doctrine simply makes our
military actions more controversial when they take place and
diminishes the degree of international support that we are able
to get for them.
Democratization is another aspect of the current
Administration's approach which I don't think should be
jettisoned, but I do think needs to be somewhat modified. Like
preemption, democracy promotion has been a component of our
foreign policy almost since the country's birth. In the 18th
century, all of Latin America adopted the American model,
however imperfectly, and in the recent decades all of Latin
America, much of East Asia, some of Africa, and all of Eastern
and Central Europe have become functioning democracies with
American help. It was, as Condoleezza Rice has indicated,
probably a mistake to have not applied these kinds of policies
in the Middle East over the last 60 years; but it is also
unrealistic to expect this deficiency to be remediated over a
period of a few years.
Democracy is no panacea for terrorism and no shortcut to a
more pro-U.S. or, for that matter, pro-Israeli Middle East.
Established democracies may not wage war on one another, but
studies have shown that democratizing nations are highly prone
to internal and external conflicts.
Furthermore, elections are polarizing events and we have
seen the effect of elections in highly divided countries over
the last few years. So I do believe that we should continue to
pursue democratization, but we should expect this to be a long-
term rather than a short-term program; and I think we do need
to focus less on dramatic electoral breakthroughs and more on
U.S. efforts to advance democracy by building on its
foundations, including the rule of law, civil society, larger
middle classes, and more effective, less corrupt governments.
Nation building is another aspect of current policy that
has also become controversial. And while the Administration has
made some commendable efforts to improve its performance after
the initial setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq, and while it has
clearly determined to do better next time, many Americans may
be more inclined not to do this kind of thing next time.
In fact, both conclusions are valid. The United States
should certainly avoid invading any further large hostile
countries on the basis of faulty intelligence with the support
of narrow, unrepresentative coalitions. But not all conflicts
are avoidable. Iraq may have been a war of choice and the
choice may have been a poor one, but Afghanistan was neither,
and both interventions left the United States with a heavy
burden for nation building.
Nation building is tough, slow work. Yet, contrary to
popular impression, successes do outnumber failures. Tens of
millions of people are living today at peace in places like El
Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia, Cambodia, Albania, Bosnia,
Kosovo, Macedonia, East Timor, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Liberia
because either American or European or NATO or U.N. troops came
in, separated the combatants, disarmed the contending factions,
helped rebuild the economy, organized elections, and stayed
around long enough to make sure that those governments could
take effect.
It is the Middle East where our national security strategy
has undergone the greatest innovation since 9/11, where it has
encountered the least success, and where, consequently, the
need for renovation is the greatest. Today, we have some
200,000 troops in the region and yet our influence has never
been more absent. At present, the European Union is leading
negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program. Turkey is
brokering peace talks between Israel and Syria. Qatar has just
mediated an end to the political crisis in Lebanon. Egypt has
brokered a cease-fire accord between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
This Administration initially resisted all of these
efforts. American leadership is currently manifested only in
what appears to be a dead-end negotiation between the Israelis
and the Palestinians, a process that, at best, is going to
produce a statement of principles before the end of the current
Administration.
There is no controversy about what our country's objectives
in this region are. We all want a secure Israel at peace with
its neighbors, a denuclearized Iran, a unified and democratic
Iraq, and the modernization and democratization of all the
societies in the region. What is under debate is not our ends,
but how we prioritize them and the best means of approaching
them.
The threat from al Qaeda is centered primarily in South and
Central Asia, and secondarily, in disaffected Muslim
populations in Western societies, not in the Middle East. The
attacks of 9/11, therefore, do not justify or require an
enduring American presence in the Gulf region. The overall
American goal in this region should be to promote the emergence
of an equilibrium among local powers that does not require most
of our available ground forces to sustain.
This is not an impossible goal. Such a balance existed from
when Great Britain left the Persian Gulf in the early 1950's
until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990's. During
this 40-year period, American interests were preserved with
little more than occasional naval visits. A return to this
condition may take a while, but it will be worth enunciating
this as a national goal.
On the other hand, a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq could
easily move us further from that objective. We owe it to the
Iraqis, we owe it to the region, and we owe it to ourselves to
leave behind a unified country capable of contributing to
regional stability. This will not happen overnight nor even, in
all likelihood, within the next year or two, although some
significant troop draw-downs over this period may well prove
feasible if the security situation there holds.
I have not addressed many other areas of our national
security strategy on which I think there is a broad consensus
and on which I have no great differences with the
Administration.
The Bush Administration has moved away from its unilateral
approach in its early years and has sought to force better
relations with Europe, Russia, China and India, the world's
other major power centers; and I would anticipate that the next
Administration is likely--whoever is elected--to embrace these
policies and continue those approaches.
Having served under eight Presidents through seven changes
of Administration, I have come to view these transitions as
periods of considerable danger, as new and generally less-
experienced people assume positions of power with mandates for
change and a predisposition to denigrate the experience and
ignore the advice of their predecessors.
America needs a grand strategy that helps it bridge these
troubled waters, one that enjoys bipartisan support and is
likely to endure. One key criteria for judging any newly
announced grand strategy, therefore, is whether it is likely to
be embraced by successor Administrations. In this respect,
Napoleon's advice with respect to constitutions may prove apt:
that they be short and vague.
Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Ambassador.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Dobbins can be found
in the Appendix on page 58.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Posen. And, Dr. Posen, I note you have the
greatest challenge of condensing your thoughts to 5 minutes
because you gave us a very comprehensive written statement,
which I appreciate.
STATEMENT OF DR. BARRY R. POSEN, DIRECTOR, SECURITY STUDIES
PROGRAM, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Dr. Posen. I am an academic scrivener and you have my
scrivenings, so I will not read them.
I want to thank you for inviting me. The last time I was
before the House Armed Services Committee was in the 1990's.
Congressman Dellums was Chair. The subject of the hearing was
U.S. grand strategy. At that time I argued that there were
roughly four grand strategies competing in the American
intellectual discourse, and I believe we are down to two.
I am going to say what the two are. One is, I think,
basically the consensus, which I think to some extent
Ambassador Dobbins just represented; and the other is a
critique that has been around since the 1990's that several of
us are making. You have heard a little from my colleague, Andy
Bacevich, and that is a grand strategy that many are starting
to call restraint and renewal. And I will talk in a second
about restraint and renewal.
Before I do, I want to not lay out what I think the grand
strategy is, but I do think grand strategies offer a lot of
benefits. And I feel like Ambassador Dobbins was critical of
that, and I just want to remind people that there are reasons
why you want grand strategies to do the things that they do.
One, we live in a world of scarcity. Choices need to be
made. We need some sort of metric by which we are going to make
those choices.
Second, the U.S. Government is a vast enterprise. We need
some general concepts, general theory, to coordinate the
activities of that enterprise.
Third, this is a great, big, and rambunctious political
system. We need a way to ensure government accountability. The
population of this country, its elites, need a way to judge new
enterprises when they are offered. Are they consistent with the
grand strategy that we understand to be our grand strategy? And
why are they consistent?
And finally a grand strategy is needed to communicate
America's interests abroad. Much of what we do in the world is
either about coercion or deterrence. You can only practice
coercion and deterrence if people know what you are up to and
why you are up to it. Stated grand strategies help you do that.
The current grand strategy consensus in the United States
is centered around the United States being essentially the
preeminent power in the world, an extremely active power, a
very heavily armed power, a power that is concerned about
threats of all kinds--threats to safety, sovereignty, national
security, power position. It is concerned about the internal
workings of other countries and the power that other countries
can mobilize. It is concerned about terror. It is concerned
about great powers. It is concerned about energy.
It is a long, long list which almost defies prioritization;
and it leads the United States to an extremely activist policy
that I think has not served us well in recent years, for some
of the reasons that Andy Bacevich talked about.
Now, people who are interested in this grand strategy, I
think, are motivated by five big facts that they see as being
extremely important in international politics today. One is the
fact that the U.S. has great power. The United States is still
the preeminent economic power in the world, and it is certainly
the preeminent military power in the world.
This is an enormous source of American security, but it is
also an enormous source of temptation. Americans always believe
they have the capability to do the things that they can
imagine. That is extremely tempting.
Second, much of the world we used to talk about, the great
regions of the eastern and western ends of Eurasia where the
middle and great powers are, these parts of the world are as
stable as they have ever been. There are balances of power,
regional balances of power, in these parts of the world. And
the United States has to do much less to accomplish its basic
interests in the world than it once did.
Third, globalization is a powerful force. The people who
study it have disagreements about how the force works. The one
thing I think we can say it does: It disrupts the lives of
hundreds of millions of people in the world. It brings the
power of modern capitalism to the developing world. It shakes
up societies. It draws people into cities. It interacts with
the population explosion in this part of the world, with
urbanization in this part of the world; and it makes large
numbers of people extremely insecure and ripe for mobilization
for all kinds of political action--most of it, we hope, good;
but some of it, we have seen, bad.
Another aspect of globalization is the diffusion of power
in the world, right? And though the United States is certainly
a clear number one, a lot of capability is now out there in the
hands of countries that we have formerly thought of as weak.
And this capability makes itself felt particularly when the
United States military goes ashore.
There are millions and millions of young men of military
age in the developing world. There are millions and millions of
infantry weapons left over from the Warsaw Pact that have made
their way into the developing world. When an American soldier
goes to the developing world, he meets many, many adversaries.
And this is going to drive up the cost of American intervention
to rebuild societies, to wage counter insurgencies. The costs
are high and they are going to get higher.
Finally, nuclear proliferation is a sad fact of modern
international life. We look at the new proliferators, the
countries that are managing to get nuclear weapons. These are
not modern, highly capable industrial powers--or they are
modern, highly capable industrial powers, but they are small
ones. Cracking the nuclear code is just not that difficult
anymore. And if the United States has the idea that we can
basically control entirely the diffusion of nuclear weapons
technology to the rest of the world, then we are in for a very,
very large and very, very demanding project, all right.
Now, in light of these facts, what does restraint recommend
as a U.S. grand strategy? Basically, the United States has to
focus first on preserving its own power, which is the ultimate
source of American security. And right now, as Andy Bacevich
suggested, the sources of that power, the sinews of American
power, are in danger.
Second, we have to maintain the capability when we wish,
when we need to, to tip the balance of power on the Eurasian
landmass. As I said earlier, the Eurasian landmass is quite
stable right now, so America does not have to do much. But it
does have to maintain the capability to do it if it has to.
We have a problem with terrorism. We should focus on the
key source, which is this organization, al Qaeda. And we should
deal with terrorism in a way that doesn't create more support
for terrorists, which means the United States has to be
extremely judicial in the offensive use of military force and
depend much more on intelligence and police cooperation to deal
with this problem.
Finally, we have to avoid the following four perils of our
current grand strategy:
One is overstretch, the tendency of American activism to
take us into costly and open-ended engagements.
Second, making the United States a magnet for balancing and
targeting, right? Being too imminent in the lives of others
cause them to blame us for the problems that they face.
Third, we have a problem with our allies. Our policies
encourage free riding and reckless driving. The Europeans spend
a very small share of GDP on defense compared to the United
States, less than two percent typically. The Japanese spend
less than one percent. These are rich allies, with strong
currencies these days, all right? They have good industrial
bases. They produce good weapons. They have decent and, in many
cases, quite good military commanders. They could do more, they
should do more; they don't have to do more because the
Americans are carrying the load.
The flip side is, we have allies who trust us too much and
who drive recklessly. Right now the Iraqi Government continues
to drive recklessly, secure in the notion that the Americans
will catch them if they fall. For years, the Taiwanese
Government drove recklessly. Sometimes the Israeli Government
drives recklessly. And the United States needs to do something
to discourage this reckless driving.
And, finally, we face a problem of blow-back. Our grand
strategy affects American politics at home. When we go to
explain a policy to the American people, it seems like we
invariably tell them that whatever new initiative, whether it
is going to be Bosnia or Iraq or Afghanistan, it is ultimately
going to be inexpensive.
It is time we started leveling with the American people
about these things. The deployment of military power to rebuild
nation-states, to fight counterinsurgencies, to occupy other
countries, these are very expensive and long-term projects. And
the American people need to be told so that they can
participate in this debate in a way that allows them to have
some say over whether or not they want to pursue this strategy.
With that, I will stop. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Posen.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Posen can be found in the
Appendix on page 73.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Reiss.
STATEMENT OF DR. MITCHELL B. REISS, VICE PROVOST FOR
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, WILLIAM AND MARY MARSHALL-WYTHE SCHOOL
OF LAW
Dr. Reiss. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you and the
whole committee for inviting me to testify today.
It seems that we have been searching for a new Mr. X or Ms.
X, for a decade now, since our ultimate triumph in the Cold
War. A number of foreign policy experts have tried to answer
the call to become the next Mr. X, yet none has won the Mr. X
sweepstakes. Public and elite opinion have not yet coalesced
around any of these grand strategic attempts. So it is
interesting to ask ourselves why is this so.
There are three possible reasons. The first is that there
is no single unifying threat that galvanizes the attention of
the United States, our allies and friends and the world. There
is currently no ``glue'' to bind countries together like the
glue the Soviet Union provided during the Cold War. The global
war on terror, which some would maintain is the unifying force
around which a grand strategy can be constructed, simply
doesn't provide the same amount of glue.
A second possible reason is that the world today is too
complex. In place of a single overarching threat, there are
today a wide variety of lesser threats that impact different
countries differently, thereby discouraging collective action.
These threats fall into two general categories, country-
specific threats, like Iran and North Korea, and transnational
threats, such as climate change, WMD proliferation, mass
migration, terrorism, and infectious diseases.
It is humbling to think that today George Kennan would not
only need to have a deep understanding of Russian politics,
history, and culture, but would also need a deep understanding
of China's military modernization, global economic flows,
demographic trends, environmental degradation, WMD
proliferation, and the sources of Islamic extremism, to name
but a few topics. That is a pretty high bar for anyone to
surmount.
The third possible reason has less to do with the supply
side than with the demand side. Our political system today is
too divided to accept a grand strategy. And it is not just
divisions between the Republicans and the Democrats; it is also
divisions within the different wings of each party. There is
simply not a lot of receptivity to grand, unifying ideas. In
particular, there is no consensus over five key concepts, what
we might term the building blocks of any new grand strategy.
The first key concept is American primacy. As you recall,
the Bush Administration's 2002 national security strategy was a
rousing call for extended American primacy. For some, this
language was viewed as aspirational, a distant goal on a
faraway shore, and certainly unobjectionable. After all, why
wouldn't we want the United States to remain the dominant power
for as long as possible?
Others saw this goal as a realistic and achievable
objective, assuming we kept our economy strong, made the
necessary military hardware and personnel investments, and
employed our strength widely. And still others viewed it as
arrogant and objectionable, perhaps even horrifying.
Significant differences exist around a second key concept:
the use of American military force. Few people disagree that
the United States should defend its vital interests. But this
begs the larger question of how these vital interests should be
defined, a task made more complex by the increasing
interconnectedness of the world in which we live.
A further complication is that some would maintain that the
prevention of humanitarian disasters, such as genocide, is a
vital interest of the United States, consistent with our
national character and under an increasingly developing
responsibility to protect.
A third key concept where there isn't consensus is in our
attitude toward international institutions. The classic reasons
for establishing international institutions are well known,
they reduce transaction costs, they provide a forum for
regularized contact and information exchange, and they
institutionalize a cadre of professional expertise. However,
critics argue that these institutions often take a lowest
common denominator approach and are unable to respond
effectively to fast-moving crises.
They point to the inability of the International Atomic
Energy Association (IAEA) to thwart the nuclear ambitions of
North Korea and Iran, the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food scandal, and the
gross misbehavior of some of its African peacekeepers. We have
just seen in the past few days the inability of the U.N.
Security Council to effectively sanction Zimbabwe.
These critics prefer, instead, coalitions of the willing,
ad hoc groups of like-minded states that form and reform
depending on the contingency.
A fourth key concept where there isn't agreement: democracy
promotion. On few Bush Administration policies has there been
less agreement over how best to proceed. Is democracy promotion
about holding elections, building civic institutions,
alleviating poverty, reforming education, promoting women's
rights, transparency in the rule of law; or all of the above?
Do we promote democracy differently depending on the country or
region? Is democracy promotion the same for China, the Congo,
Saudi Arabia, and Belarus?
And even assuming we can find the right tools, how do we
measure success? What metrics are the most relevant? And how
urgently do we push democracy? What time frame do we use?
Needless to say, answers to each of these questions range
all over the political spectrum.
The fifth key concept is globalization. The debate over
globalization in the United States has largely been reduced to
strongly held views on trade. The wide gap between the ``free
trade'' Republicans and the ``fair trade'' Democrats has been
on public display during this Presidential campaign season.
Now, these are serious divisions, and it is unclear whether
they will be bridged or reconciled anytime soon. But more
importantly, they mask an even greater shortcoming that
threatens America's security.
As in George Kennan's time, America's diplomatic standing,
military power, and financial influence are a product of our
economic strength. Without a strong economy, our ability to
promote our values and defend our interests, to support
properly our men and women in uniform, to help our friends and
allies overseas, and to safeguard our country will be gravely
weakened. Without a strong economy, all talk about a grand
strategy is illusory.
As a first step, I strong strongly urge the committee to
focus its first hearings on developing a strategy for
sustaining and enhancing America's economic power. Such a
strategy would include the following issues: reducing the
national debt, which now stands at record levels and has placed
great stress on the middle and working classes; tackling the
coming crisis in entitlement payments, especially health care,
U.S. citizens 65 and over will increase by a projected 147
percent between now and 2050; reforming immigration laws to
ensure that highly skilled and motivated people can continue to
come to the United States to work, create jobs, and receive an
education; revitalizing our industrial infrastructure and
developing a new national energy strategy to reduce our
dependence on foreign oil, including greater investment in
alternative energy sources.
These are just a few of the hurdles that we will have to
surmount in the coming years if we wish to keep America strong.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Reiss can be found in the
Appendix on page 83.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you all for your thoughtful, both written
and oral, statements.
Mr. Skelton has asked if he could defer to the end of the
subcommittee members, and we will do that. We will go ahead and
put on the clock. We will put ourselves on the five-minute
clock and go around, and we will probably have time for a
second round.
I appreciate you all's comments today. And I also
appreciate--I think there is unanimous agreement on--I think
every one of you talked about the economy and that here we are
a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, and yet
you see the economy as being perhaps our number one priority
that we ought to look at as a nation. And I certainly can't
disagree with that.
The two questions I want to ask I am going to combine into
one and let you respond to it. One is, given what you all have
presented here today, do you see--would you describe what we
are in? The situation right now is--are we in a situation of
drifting?
Dr. Reiss, you talked about how there is not really an
agreement in--either politically or in the country for a grand
strategy. Would you describe this as a period of, we are
drifting? Would we describe it as a period in which we have
sufficient strategy? Would you describe it as a situation in
which we just need to recognize we do need to have a complex--a
statement, but it will be a complex statement of where to go in
terms of strategy?
And the second question I want to ask, what role for
Congress do you see in these discussions that we have asked you
to respond to today?
Dr. Bacevich, we will start with you.
Dr. Bacevich. I think that the Bush Administration seized
upon 9/11 as an opportunity to revolutionize U.S. grand
strategy. And when we look at a very important--I personally
think wrong-headed, but very important document like the
National Security Strategy of 2002, we see an authoritative
statement of what that new grand strategy was to be.
Fast forward to 2008, and it seems to me that events have
shown that that grand strategy, post-9/11 grand strategy, was
fundamentally defective and, indeed recently, increasingly we
see the Bush Administration implicitly backing away from it
toward a more realistic and, I think, more restrained approach
to things.
So I think the answer to the question is, we still have a
grand strategy on the books, as it were, and it has been
discredited. And yet there has been insufficient recognition of
the extent to which it has failed and, therefore, insufficient
public dialogue about the need to replace it.
I mean, this hearing, in a sense, may be part of an effort
to promote that kind of a dialogue. But we don't so much have
drift as we have a statement of policy that has failed and has
yet to be replaced.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Dobbins.
Ambassador Dobbins. I agree with that. Looking back
throughout the Cold War for 40 years, we essentially had a
bipartisan approach to national security policy. There were
hawks and doves, but they were in both parties. There were
doves in both parties; there were hawks in both parties. There
were people for arms control; there were people against arms
control. There were people for detente; there were people
against detente. But it was Nixon and Kissinger who led the
detente move.
So you had a national argument about these things, but it
wasn't conducted on clearly partisan lines. And I think that
helped very much to keep the dialogue constructive and to keep
the country on course.
That began to break down with the end of the Cold War. In
the 1990's, the Clinton foreign policy was attacked by the
opposition. And that is certainly one of the functions of the
opposition, to oppose; so within reason, that is fine. But
that, of course, continued with the Bush foreign policy. And I
think as long as national security policy is, you know,
regarded as a partisan issue--I am tougher than you are, I am
more capable of leading the country than you are; and this
transcends not just the personalities of Presidential
candidates, but the parties--I think you are going to have a
virtually impossible time devising a grand strategy that will
transcend Administrations.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Posen.
Dr. Posen. I will not surprise you that I have a different
view. We may be drifting, but the feeling of drift, I think,
has more to do with where we are in the political cycle.
A colleague of mine did a little drill. She went through
all of the national security policy statements of the principal
candidates that appeared in the Journal of Foreign Affairs. I
sat down last night and looked again at Senator Obama and
Senator Clinton and Senator McCain. The amount of consensus is
really quite surprising.
And I think it would also be surprising if those documents
were actually written by those people. They probably had staffs
of foreign policy experts who helped them write those things.
So I think there is quite a lot of consensus. I don't really
think it is drift.
Where I see the drift is an inability to bring together a
sense of the real scarcity that the United States is going to
begin to see in terms of resources because of the fiscal
condition of the country and because of the expenses that are
coming, the real difficulty of bringing that sense of scarcity
together with our national security policy and trying to look
at these things against each other.
We have a tendency in this country to basically assume that
if we identify something as a national security problem, we are
going to find the money. But we have gotten into this habit of
identifying many, many things as a national security problem,
and this has produced a very, very big bill. And we have to do
major rethink to try and figure out what our actual national
security priorities are.
And if there is one--if you are asking for a role for
Congress, and I am no expert on how the Congress works--but I
do think we have a problem in bringing together the disparate
corners of our revenue raising and our spending in this country
right now. We need a way to look at these very big numbers
which you can find in any of the Congressional Budget Office
documents about the future--these very big numbers about rising
health care, about taxes that are insufficient to cover our
spending, and about the magnitude of the defense budget today
and the apparent preference for both of the current
Presidential candidates to keep that defense budget high and
maintain a high level of energy.
So something has to give here. My own guess is that
everybody is going to have to contribute to paying the bill.
The defense budget and defense efforts are going to have to
come down. Medical care is going to need to be controlled. And
taxes are going to need to go up. And we need to have a
discussion in this country about the realities of those trade-
offs rather than sort of continue to talk about these things in
isolation and end our conversations with a kind of an airy
collection of hopes and dreams about how we are going to slice
away at these problems at the margins.
These are percents of GDP, which is a lot of resources in
this country. So that is the thing I think we need to find a
way to focus on it. And if this body and this House can kind a
way to focus on it, I think it would be a great contribution.
Dr. Snyder. My time is up; we will go to Mr. Akin. But, Dr.
Reiss, when we come around again, I will call on you first.
I think we are going to have this problem all day, just
because of the nature of the topic. I think we will try to
follow the 5-minute rule as closely as we can even if it means
witnesses don't all get a round.
Mr. Akin for five minutes.
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I appreciated your perspectives. It is refreshing to
hear. You know, in certain ways you are agreeing and yet the
focus and your emphasis is a little bit different and all.
I guess some of the discredited and failed language that I
heard in terms of what has gone on, it seems to me to be a
little blind to what has happened in the last year in Iraq. I
would be a little surprised if the people in Iraq really feel
that in five years from now that they are in the same place
they were back when--before we attacked Iraq.
I think there has been progress. Whether the cost was
reasonable in terms of return is a very different question. But
it seemed to me that the President made a statement that was
really a broad vision for what he wanted to do in foreign
policy, and that was, he wanted to export freedom.
I guess I would be interested--first of all, I don't know
that he knew how to define that. But I am not sure that that
wasn't a pretty grand vision for what we should be doing. I am
not sure that--his approach to doing that was maybe more
muscular than it needed to be and had less sales and more
coercion in it. But yet that was still a pretty big idea.
Would you want to respond to the concept of exporting
freedom?
Dr. Bacevich. I will take a stab.
I think you ought to know what it is you are trying to
export before you do try to export it. I agree with you that
apart from some sort of grandiose language, they really had
very little understanding of what the export of freedom in
particular to the greater Middle East entailed. And we are
oblivious to the possibility that people who lived in that
region of the world might define ``free'' differently than we
do.
So, to my mind, it was a fool's errand that we never should
have undertaken; that is to say, that the export of freedom to
the greater Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11 was a
completely wrong-headed objective and has taken us down the
path.
Now you alluded to the fact, and it is a fact, that over
the past year or so technical conditions on the ground in Iraq
have improved, at least in terms of the level of security. But
it seems to me, to be fair to the Administration, the
Administration didn't invade Iraq simply because of Iraq, but
as you suggest, with this expectation that the invasion of Iraq
was going to produce all kinds of positive second- and third-
order consequences.
From my perspective, that hasn't happened.
Dr. Bacevich. My perspective is that hasn't happened and
that freedom has not been brought to the region. To the extent
that democracy has taken hold, it has done things like brought
Hamas to power in Gaza; it has enhanced the power of Hezbollah
in Lebanon.
So there is something fundamentally flawed with seeing the
promotion of freedom as somehow the cornerstone or the
fundamental source, the place to begin thinking about the
U.S.----
Mr. Akin. Does anybody else want to agree with that, or do
you all disagree with the idea that exporting freedom is a
reasonable starting point?
Ambassador Dobbins. I think it is an important component of
American foreign policy and has been for a long time, and I
think it is an element of continuity in our approach.
I do think that the emphasis given to this in the
Administration's policies from 2003 to 2005, say, was excessive
and ultimately counterproductive. I mean, we needed the
cooperation of all of Iraq's neighbors if we were going to
stabilize it. And none of them were going to cooperate in a
project that was designed to undermine their legitimacy and
ultimately overthrow their systems.
So to the extent we saw Iraq as a model for the region and
as a precursor for democratization of the region as a whole, we
simply built up resistance to our overwhelming objective, which
was to stabilize the country behind a freely elected
government, which we could have done with a lot lower rhetoric.
So I think the goal should continue to be an important
element of our policy, but not always the dominant element and
not always the element that we lead with rhetorically.
Dr. Posen. I just think we have to be aware of what other
definitions are. For many, many people, peoples, around the
world, ``freedom'' means freedom from outside intrusion into
their affairs. It is not their model of our government that is
defined as freedom. It is the ability of their people to
determine their own governments and their own ways.
So the very idea of exporting freedom, the greatest power
in the history of the world, sort of, bringing freedom to you,
immediately involves all kinds of dilemmas and runs the risk of
causing all kinds of trouble.
I, sort of, look at the problem differently. I don't think
freedom is very easy to export. I think others could import it,
but I am not sure that we can export it.
Mr. Akin. Go ahead, Dr. Reiss, or we may never get to you.
Dr. Reiss. Thanks very much.
I think President Bush's second inaugural address will go
down as perhaps his greatest public speech. And, as Jim said,
the promotion of democracy and human rights overseas is a
longstanding element of American foreign policy.
But, as the other panelists have also said, we can't
reinvent these other countries in our own image. It is not
going to be Jeffersonian democracy throughout the rest of the
world. And, in fact, we have to pick and choose the means we
use, the places we use. What we try to do in Saudi Arabia is
not going to be the same as in Iraq or Belarus or China or
other places.
But what I would like us to try to adopt is to have a
little bit more patience and a lot more confidence that this is
a universal value, it is not an American value, that most
people want to have dignity in their lives, whether it is
expressed as liberty or freedom or democracy or what have you.
They want to be able to live safely, with accountable
government, with decent schooling and education and health care
for themselves and their family. That is something that is, I
think, a universal aspiration. And when we try to use a cookie-
cutter approach and impose it on other people, I think we run
huge risks.
Dr. Snyder. Ms. Sanchez for five minutes.
Ms. Sanchez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being before us today.
I completely agree with you that our number-one national
security issue is this whole fiscal responsibility or lack of
responsibility in Washington, D.C. And I, as a former
investment banker, have been very worried about this issue. I
remember in 2000 when we started with President Bush, and the
people will remember, I think it was in the February-March-
April time frame, we were having discussions in the front page
of the Wall Street Journal about what would the Government
really look like without Government debt, without T-bills and
T-bonds, and was that really something that we wanted to do.
And now we find ourselves in completely the opposite direction.
And the war is, of course, just a very, very small piece of
that, although it is a bleeding that continues to go on.
So I guess my question to you is, what would be the format
or the forum in which we could begin to really address this
broader issue with the American people? Because they, I
believe, aside from now suffering individually from lack of
savings or costs going up with respect to fuel and other
issues, I don't really think that they understand just how bad
this fiscal foundation is of our United States.
So I guess, as a lot of you are academics, what would you
suggest as a forum, or how do we begin--and it is a lot of
political risk. I mean, every individual Congressperson goes
back to their district and says, ``Things are going to get
better. Don't worry.'' But the reality is that they are so
broad, the entitlement issue is so broad, the energy
independence issue is so long-term, could be, although I
believe Californians are much further ahead in solving that
issue for us.
But what would you say would be the forum for that?
And then the second question would be, how can we on the
defense committee, I mean, what is it that you think we should
be doing in the area that we control, i.e., our military and
how we use it, to begin to address this larger issue that I
believe--I don't know whose testimony I have in front of me,
where you talk about the five or six different things that we
need to do. And I think the theme is throughout all of your
written testimonies.
So the first question, what kind of forum do we use to
really talk to the American people about the hole that we are
in? And, second, what can we do as members of the military
committee? And it is up for grabs to anybody.
Dr. Reiss. I think you have a wonderful platform and a
wonderful megaphone, and you can hold hearings.
And I spent a long time negotiating with both North Korea
and with the political parties in Northern Ireland, and I
always saw my first job was to educate and explain, not to
negotiate. And I think that you need to educate and you need to
explain to the American people exactly what the balance sheet
looks like right now.
You know, if this was a business and you were coming in,
you would do an audit. You would do a strategic audit of the
whole business and find out where is the money coming in, where
is it going out, where can you plug holes, where can you get
more revenue? Doing a strategic audit for the U.S. Government,
for the new Administration coming in, may be one way to do it.
But you need to explain what the balance sheet looks like
to the American people, whether it is in the military budget or
whether it is in the other accounts. And I think that there has
been no coordination in advance among any of us, that I am
aware of, and yet I am pretty impressed that there is a large
degree of overlap in terms of how we are analyzing the
challenge.
And it faces all of us, but you are the public
representatives, and it is your responsibility not just to
respond to the American people but to lead us. And so I think
that there is some political risk involved, but that is why you
get paid the big bucks.
Ms. Sanchez. Don't worry. I voted against a lot of things,
like giving you $600 rebate checks when there is no money in
the coffers. So I don't worry about it.
Dr. Bacevich.
Dr. Bacevich. Well, I don't fully understand the way the
Congress works, but, I mean, it seems to me that one of the
things you can do is try to break down those compartments. I
mean, again, I don't know if this is feasible, but to insist
that just because you are on a committee that is concerned with
the Armed Forces that these other matters, like debt and
dependency, somehow need to belong, to be owned by somebody
else, because in terms of the long-term interests of the
Nation, they do all come together to shape the problem.
Now, specifically with regard to the matters under this
committee's purview, it seems to me that one of the big
questions that I don't think has been fully engaged with has to
do with the fundamental purpose of the United States military
as we try to reshape it and configure it.
To oversimplify, if we look at the pre-9/11 era, the first
nine months of the Bush Administration and of Mr. Rumsfeld's
tenure, the bumper sticker to describe how we were going to
reshape U.S. forces was transformation. It implied a particular
emphasis on technology, on long-range strike, probably a bias
in favor of air and naval as opposed to ground troops.
Since the invasion of Iraq, since the rise of General
Petraeus and the rediscovery of counterinsurgency operations
or, as I think they are now called, stability operations, we
are, sort of, drifting toward a model of U.S. forces that now
places greater emphasis on boots on the ground, on long-term,
protracted presence and engagement, on nation-building, not
simply warfighting.
I think a fundamental question as we look to--we must look
to--the post-Iraq era is, which of those two models really is
going to help us think about the future of U.S. forces? Or is
there a third model? And we can't do both. Because to do both I
think is utterly unaffordable. So what is the shape and purpose
of the United States military as we look out 10 years or 20
years?
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes.
Mr. Bartlett. Thank you very much.
David Walker has resigned as the Comptroller General. He is
now the CEO of the Peter Peterson Foundation. Peterson has
committed $1 billion of his personal fortune to educate the
American people about the imminent financial crisis that we
face in our country.
This is a huge challenge, and it may, in fact, be
insurmountable if we don't have a proper policy relative to
another crisis we face, and that is the energy crisis. The two
of you mentioned energy specifically, and the third of you
mentioned scarcities in our country, and energy is one of those
scarcities.
There is a new mantra now: Drill now, drill more, pay less,
to hell with our kids and our grandkids.
Oil is not an infinite resource; it is finite. It will run
down, and it will run out. We reached our maximum capability to
produce oil in our country in 1970. No matter what we have done
since then, we have produced less oil every year, year after
year. We have drilled more wells than all the rest of the world
put together, and we now produce half the oil than we did in
1970.
The same man that correctly predicted that 14 years before
it happened predicted the world would be reaching its maximum
production of oil now. The International Energy Agency (IEA)
and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) have oil
production in the world flat for the last 36 months, while oil
has risen from $52 a barrel to $146 a barrel.
We have no national energy policy. What is going to have to
happen before the American people and our leaders recognize
that it is a huge, huge challenge? You are not going to drill
your way out of this. You are not going to solve it with
immediately turning to alternatives. What is going to have to
happen before we recognize the magnitude of this challenge?
Dr. Posen. I have a little pet peeve here about oil, and I
don't know that it would help much, but it might help a little
bit.
I think, without quite thinking it through, a big part of
America's energy security, and particularly oil security,
policy is nested in the Department of Defense in the fact of
the enormous American military commitment to the Persian Gulf,
which, from my point of view, has no other rationale other than
oil.
The magnitude of this commitment is not well-understood,
and I think it is actually quite hard. I have tried to find
decent academic articles that will tell you what exactly it is
we are spending in the Persian Gulf.
DOD spends a lot of money every year, and my own guess is
that a big, big chunk of it is going in this direction. And we
should be asking ourselves, do we want a big chunk of America's
energy security policy to be nested in the Pentagon?
And to even begin to offer a rational answer to that
question, we need to have a relatively defensible estimate for
exactly what we are spending each year. I am not just counting
the Iraq war. I am talking about what we have been spending
every year, certainly since Saddam Hussein's first defeat at
our hands, what we have been spending every year to make
ourselves ready for war in the Gulf.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it maybe we should. But it
would be useful to know what those figures are, because maybe
some of that money could be better spent going to some other
energy sources and some other way of providing energy security
that might have a longer-term payoff.
Ambassador Dobbins. Well, $4-a-gallon oil or gas has
already had a quite beneficial effect on conservation, carbon
emissions. And one probably impolitic approach is to determine
that we should not want the price of gas to go down. That, as
the external price goes down, taxes should rise to keep the
price at the pump where it is now, which is still lower than
most other countries.
And most other countries have had this approach for a long
time--that is, very high taxes, which encourage conservation,
smaller cars, more efficient cars, et cetera, more efficient
homes. And there is no hope for America unless we are prepared
to adopt that philosophy.
Dr. Reiss. If I can just add quickly to that. To answer
your question, I wonder sometimes whether we can mobilize
ourselves politically in the absence of a crisis. And there is
a joke in this town that the Government only knows two speeds,
complacency and panic. And unless there is another opportunity,
short of a crisis, that is hard for me to imagine, it is hard
to see how we are going to mobilize the political will, given
all the vested interests in things the way they currently are.
And I agree with what Jim was saying. You want to make sure
that the revenues from gasoline stay in the United States and
don't go to a lot of our adversaries around the world, where
they are currently going. But that is not sufficient. You then
need a government policy that is going to recycle those dollars
into science and technology and research and development with
new alternative energy sources.
And I am not the first one to say that we should be aiming
to be the world's leader in energy technologies for the 21st
century. We have the ability in our universities, in our best
companies. We have the brain power. We just don't have the
political willpower right now.
But I think that is clearly the way to go. And that is what
is going to sustain America's strength, I think, long term.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis for five minutes.
Mrs. Davis of California. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I
certainly appreciate this hearing. There aren't too many
opportunities, as you well know, for us to have these kinds of
discussions, and it is a good one to have.
One of the things that we have done on the committee is
talk a lot about interagency coordination. And I wonder if you
could perhaps put that in some of the context in which you are
speaking.
We know that the tools of government were not used in Iraq
or Afghanistan the way they could have been. We came pretty
late to the table with that. A little more of that is happening
today.
I think that you have certainly touched, Ambassador
Dobbins, on the idea that people are probably going to be
pretty tired of nation-building. They want, as Tom Friedman has
said, they want nation-building, but they want it here at home.
And how can we better talk about the need to use all of
these tools better in a way that might, in fact, engage the
American public?
Ambassador Dobbins. I think that the current
Administration's performance has significantly improved in this
respect. I think you see good civil-military relations and a
substantial civilian role in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I think
the White House is functioning quite successfully as an
integrator of policy. And I think you see the effects of this
improvement in the turnaround that we have seen in Iraq.
We have recently completed a study looking at how
Presidential leadership and interagency structures and
decision-making processes affect outcomes in America's national
security efforts abroad. And the conclusion is that some
Administrations are better than others, but all of them get
better over time. And then that improvement doesn't transfer to
their successors, that there are abrupt discontinuities, in
terms of expertise and competence, when Administrations change,
particularly when they are accompanied by changes in party.
And, therefore, if you are looking at a place to fix the
system, fixing it at the transition point is the point at which
you are likely to have maximum effect, because they all do get
better. And I would suggest that there are several ways of
doing that.
First, it would help to have legislation that set out
clearer guidelines on what State, AID, Defense and others are
supposed to be doing. The Administrations need some
flexibility, but completely reinventing the interagency
division of labor every 4 or 8 years is very disruptive,
because no department is going to invest in the long-term
personnel and other capacities that are needed to perform
functions that may be taken away from them and given to some
other agency. And we have seen repeated shifts between State
and Defense, really, since 1989, as to who does what when they
are jointly engaged in some constituency.
Second, I think that just as our military are told that if
you want to reach general rank, you have to have served in
another armed service other than the one you are in, or in a
joint position, telling members of the Foreign Service and the
Civil Service that they are not going to get to the Senior
Foreign Service or the Senior Civil Service unless they have
served in another national security agency or in a White House
or joint position would be an appropriate way of improving
jointness at the interagency level.
And, finally, I think that the number of political
appointees that are now transitioned every 4 or 8 years as a
new Administration takes office--we are now up to 6,000 or so
people change when a new Administration takes office--this is
very disruptive. It demoralizes the career service. It creates
an ideological layer between the professionals at the bottom
and the policymakers who are appropriately political at the
top.
And I think setting some limits on that and perhaps
establishing that a certain proportion of sub-Cabinet positions
and White House staff positions, including particularly
national security positions, National Security Council staff
positions, should be career would be another way of bridging
these abrupt discontinuities that occur at transitions.
Mrs. Davis of California. How important is all that to this
grand strategy?
And I think my follow-up question was going to be really on
the international level, as well, in terms of trying to have a
counterpart to that.
Ambassador Dobbins. I think most people would agree that
the major failures of the current Administration were the
failures of competence in the early years. You can argue
whether it was a good idea or not to have invaded Iraq. But
whether or not it was a good idea, there were many multiple
failures, which the Army has recently documented and any number
of academics have documented, which are purely questions of
competence and expertise.
Mrs. Davis of California. Is there any disagreement with
that issue, in terms of interagency, on the panel?
Dr. Posen. Well, just to, at least a footnote. It matters
more to Ambassador Dobbins's grand strategy than it does to
mine, the interagency process get itself sorted.
You know, as everyone, including me, agrees, these state-
building or nation-building or peace enforcement or
counterinsurgency projects are immensely complex military,
political, economic activities, and all kinds of expertise is
required.
And I am guessing that one of the reasons it looks better
at the end is because of actual craft knowledge that is gained
on the ground. I am actually very dubious that this can somehow
be structured in before you can get into one of these projects.
My own guess is that most of these projects are going to go
badly for several years, no matter what, no matter what you do.
Now, I subscribe to a grand strategy that wants to do a
less of this. Because I want to do a lot less of it, then I
need lots less of it. And if you have doubts about our ability
to become real experts at this fine orchestration of multiple
talents, then it should make you question the viability of the
entire grand strategy that, sort of, drags you into these
projects.
Dr. Reiss. Just to address very quickly on this point. One
thing that would be very useful for whatever grand strategy is
adopted would be to revise legislation to allow statutorily the
Secretary of the Treasury to become a member of the National
Security Council.
Right now, the Secretary of the Treasury is invited to
these meetings according to the discretion of the President.
But statutorily, I would argue, especially with today's world,
the importance of globalization, trade, commerce and finance
and that interconnectedness with all these other issues, the
Treasury Secretary needs a seat at that table in order to
empower him or her going forward and to make sure that Treasury
has an input into these deliberations.
Dr. Snyder. We are now going to the members in the order in
which they arrived after the gavel. It will be Mr. Sestak,
followed by Mr. Jones, then Mr. Conaway.
Mr. Sestak for five minutes.
Mr. Sestak. All right. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
I heard a couple things today. One was that national
security begins at home; we need to address the fiscal issues.
The other one I heard is that there is a destructive phenomenon
going around globalization; it is somewhat disturbing out
there.
And I also heard that we need to reach out every so often,
to Dr. Posen's points and others, that we have to do something
every so often when people are driving a car the wrong way. In
fact, Mr. Ambassador pointed out, however, recently we have let
Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, someone else, the European Union handle
affairs in the Middle East, they are deciding where the car is
to go.
My question is, or I guess my assessment has been, up to
now, and I would like a comment, is that I have seen a need for
some template, grand strategy, call it what you might, that
appears to be less in this grand strategy world now than ever
before, particularly as we have walked away, for good or bad,
from past templates--the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty,
CBC protocol, Kyoto treaty, International Court of Justice.
So that U.S. leadership has been absent, not just in these
individual cases you point out, Mr. Ambassador, but it has been
absent from--what we did after World War II is constructed
consciously 63 defense agreements around the world--the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (U.N.).
My question is not what should that be. I don't think
anybody here knows exactly. But in a world that is increasingly
destructive, in terms of blurring the lines between what used
to be foreign policy and domestic policy, because we can't fix
our fiscal house without dealing with globalization, this
construction needed, in my opinion, of the right types of
international entities, which U.S. should influence for its
self-interest.
What has been, in your viewpoint, the impact of not having
that upon here in the decision-making? I am not interested in
what the construct is; but I am interested, if you Congress
should hold up some national mirror to the Nation and say, here
is what is attendant to what we need, I think they would be
more interested in knowing what happens here at home in
decision-making if you don't have it?
One might argue that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn't have
a template in this new genre of how to argue for the right or
wrong of Iraq. Some might argue that when the Pentagon sends
over here something called a conventional Trident missile to be
stuck on a nuclear submarine with 23 other similar-looking
missiles that are all nuclear-armed, that there is no arms
control template to argue that. We vote for it, but we don't
have this deep, thorough discussion that, obviously, Congress
probably hasn't had in 10 years until this has come up.
I am interested, if you could quickly, what is the impact
if we don't have it upon decision-making policy and decision-
makers that don't have such a template to think about this
national security strategy that no longer really has borders
between us and overseas?
If you could, just each.
Dr. Bacevich. I am not sure I can answer your question in a
satisfactory way. However, it does seem to me that, even if
there is no construct, there at least ought to be the
opportunity now to try to divine in a nonpartisan way what are
the lessons of the Iraq war or the lessons of the global war on
terror. And if we can identify those lessons, those lessons at
least provide the basis for some kind of a construct. Let me
illustrate what I mean with a specific example.
I think in the decade after the end of the Cold War there
was a bipartisan--and I mean Republican and Democratic,
civilian, military--intoxication with what seemed to be the
limitless capacity of American power and especially American
military power.
I think the greatest expression of that was this conception
conceived in the Pentagon in the 1990's called ``full-spectrum
dominance,'' in which the Pentagon claimed that by tapping both
the great expertise of U.S. forces and the potential of
information technology, the United States was going to be able
to be dominant in all forms of warfare, and that this kind of
an idea had a certain amount of purchase among national
security experts. It was false, it was silly, it was stupid,
and it has been demolished by the events on the ground in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
So what we ought to do, it seems to me, at this juncture,
even if we can't agree on the label that will describe our
grand strategy going forward, we at least ought to confront the
actual lessons and the limitations of our capacity--and, again,
I would emphasize, especially our military capacity. And at
least the recognition of those lessons would provide some basis
for going forward and trying to think about what the construct
ought to be.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Conaway for five minutes.
Mr. Conaway. Well, thank you, gentlemen, for coming today.
Obviously very bright, articulate folks.
My one contribution would be that we need a better name.
``Grand strategy'' has a pluralistic, kind of, overarching,
kind of, ugly phrase, to me, personally, that, Mr. Chairman,
maybe we can figure out something else to call whatever it is
we are talking about. Because I am put off, right off the bat,
just by the phrase.
Dr. Snyder. We could have met in a solarium, but that
wouldn't have worked out so well.
Mr. Conaway. You know, hindsight is wonderful, and I guess
you guys get paid for looking backwards. And we are trying to
look forward with this, whatever we call this piece.
I was particularly impressed that it is dominated by the
fact that our internal threats probably--not probably--do
outweigh any external threats to this country. If some nation-
state would threaten us, I suspect we would galvanize
immediately. World opinion or U.S. opinion, following 9/11,
although it was a relatively huge attack, but on the grand
scale of the world wars it was a pretty small pop, but, you
know, this country rallied quickly. We don't see that same kind
of spirit rallying behind cuts in Federal Government spending,
raising taxes, whatever your solution. And those of us on our
side of the aisle think this Federal Government spends too much
money.
I would be interested in where you would cut spending. Dr.
Reiss, you might want to start this, because your five points
circulated around national debt and government reform and a
couple other things. Where would you whack a significant chunk
off Federal spending?
Dr. Reiss. Well, we are quickly----
Mr. Conaway. It is easy to talk about reform----
Dr. Reiss. We are quickly going to exceed my competence on
the domestic side of the ledger.
I think what I would want to do would be, first of all, to
not identify any single thing. I think probably there are going
to need to be hits taken across the board.
But rather than be arbitrary, I think that there needs to
be a process so that everybody can see transparently what the
balance account looks like, and then you are going to have to
have a national conversation. And it is going to be messy, and
it is going to take a while, but I don't see any alternative,
unless we have another crisis again, in which case anything is
possible. I don't think any of us want to wait for that to
happen. We hope that that never happens.
So I am afraid I can't give you very many specifics. I am
kind of like a general practitioner here, rather than--I think
you need a specialist to try and examine this patient.
Ambassador Dobbins. Well, I think the defense budget is the
largest component of discretionary spending by far, if I
understand correctly. And, therefore, to the degree that this
committee were to agree with the proposition which all of us
here in one form or another have stated, which is that
balancing the budget and getting our domestic fiscal house in
order is the most important national security challenge we face
today, and were to offer to the other committees of Congress
who are responsible for other forms of discretionary spending a
willingness to join in a broader effort to reduce those
deficits, I think that would be a significant contribution.
Dr. Bacevich. I mean, it seems to me that, again, it
depends on your assumptions or your expectations. To go back to
the earlier comment about do we need Donald Rumsfeld's high-
tech, transformed military, or do we need a military that is
configured to do stability operations, how you answer that
question suggests where you make the cuts.
If, indeed, the future of the U.S. military is to be more
and more stability operations, then the current expansion of
the Army and the Marine Corps, which I think is supposed to be
92,000 over 5 years, is inadequate, if we are going to have
more Iraqs and Afghanistans in our future. And if that is going
to be the case, then we cut the F-22 and we get rid of a couple
of carrier battle groups from the Navy, and that is where the
budget cuts come from.
If your military is the transformed, high-tech military, it
is not going to be, in particular, focused on stability
operations, then the expanded expansion of 92,000 more ground
troops is probably unnecessary, and we can make cuts there.
Dr. Posen. I will share the humility expressed by my
colleagues. But I think that we are talking about big numbers
here, so it is easy to pick on one particular problem in DOD
that one or the other of us doesn't like. I think we have to,
sort of, begin to confront the fact that defense spending as a
share of GDP in this country has to go back under three
percent. It is hovering around four now. This is a big and
wrenching change for DOD and requires lots of cuts across the
board.
Mr. Conaway. Mr. Chairman, I suggest that the panel
adequately expressed what we face every day, that nobody wants
to be the first guy to raise their hand to take those cuts in
spending.
So thank you, panelists.
Dr. Snyder. In Arkansas, we look at cutting a lot of
projects in Texas. But that doesn't seem to work out so well
with the Texas delegation.
Mr. Conaway. Big target.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Skelton.
The Chairman. First, let me thank you for your excellent
testimony today. We are very appreciative.
It seems that in recent years we have had two international
traumas to our country. One, of course, is 9/11, the other one
is Iraq, both in the Middle East. They seem to have dominated
international thoughts on where we are as a country. And we
seem to be measuring ourselves in relation to the Middle East,
when, in truth and fact, there is a lot of world we have not
adequately addressed.
What, of course, we all want is a return to our country
being not only respected but admired. And as a result of
particularly the actions in Iraq, we have lost some friends and
standing with long-time allies.
But I have two questions, in listening to your testimony.
Is it even possible to derive a singular American strategy
for the days ahead?
And the second question is this. Fast-forward to January
the 20th. The phone rings, it is the President of the United
States. And he says, ``You are the expert. I would like for you
to write a two-page paper for me and have it to me in 7 days,
because I want to make a speech on national strategy on the 8th
day. Would you please get that paper to me?'' And being the
President of the United States, you would say, ``I would be
glad to.'' And then you start struggling with that two-page
paper.
Just assume that telephone call has come in to you. Would
you outline for us what you would put down on your two-page
paper devising a strategy for the United States as will be
enunciated in 8 days by the President of the United States?
Dr. Bacevich.
Dr. Bacevich. I think that my two-page memo would begin by
saying that the global war on terror as a construct to frame
our post-9/11 policies is deeply flawed, and that this new
Administration intends to reject it. That the terror threat,
the threat of violent Islamic radicalism is real, it will be
persistent, but we have misconstrued it, and we have overstated
it. That, in many respects, the catastrophe of 9/11 happened
not because the adversary was cunning and strong, but because
we had let our guard down; and that we will never do that
again.
And, therefore, when it comes to terror, I would subscribe
strongly to some of the remarks of my colleagues, that rather
than thinking in terms of war, rather than thinking that
invading and occupying countries somehow is going to provide an
antidote to terror, that we need to revive, revitalize,
strengthen the so-called law enforcement approach.
Having said that, it seems to me that, going forward, the
essence of our grand strategy will be focused on reconstituting
and husbanding American power, primarily economic power but
also American military power. And it will be done with a
general sense that the nexus of international politics in the
21st century, which in the 20th century tended to be in Europe,
is now decisively shifting toward Asia. And that our efforts,
in terms of trying to shape the world beyond our borders, will
focus primarily not on the greater Middle East, but will focus
primarily on East Asia, where stability and openness are
absolutely essential to the wellbeing of the United States over
the next several decades.
That would be what I would say.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ambassador Dobbins. I am not sure that we are going to be
able to replicate what we had during the Cold War, which was a
national strategy that fit conveniently on a bumper sticker. We
had ``containment and deterrence.'' And then, for the last 20
years of the Cold War, we had ``containment, deterrence and
detente.'' And that pretty much summed up a bipartisan approach
to our main national security challenge, which was the Soviet
Union.
It is a more complex world today. If you had to put it on a
bumper sticker, I would say ``inclusion.'' Our main objective
ought to be to gradually include the emerging powers--or re-
emerging in the case of Russia--China, India, and of course the
European Union in the international system, which we have done
so much to build, in a system based on the rule of law and on
institutional arrangements that channel competition among
nations in constructive fashions.
And to do that, we need to explain to the American people
that we need to play by those rules ourselves, we need to
belong to those institutions, we need to shape those
institutions in order to bring these emerging powers into this.
Now, if I was looking for a way of explaining this, I would
definitely, as I think all of the panelists and many of the
committee members have indicated, stress that national security
begins at home.
And I would go back and look at some of the rhetoric from
President Eisenhower's Administration. You know, it was
Eisenhower who ended the Korean War, imposed drastic reductions
in the defense budget, talked about the dangers of the military
industrial complex, and conducted what historians now regard as
one of the most successful American presidencies in history. So
I think going back and looking at how Eisenhower handled some
of these tradeoffs between strength at home and strength abroad
is worth doing.
Dr. Posen. I am a great admirer of Eisenhower's defense
strategy, as well.
I would make only a few points to the President, bearing in
mind that my two pages is not the political speech.
One, the facts of the case: The U.S. is already enormously
secure. We have spent the last 15 years trying to tell
Americans that they are not, but we are. We have a quarter of
gross world product. Our nearest competitor has less than half.
We spend half of what the entire world spends on defense, and
our military is really unchallengeable in normal, conventional,
or nuclear war. We have a huge nuclear deterrent. We have big
oceans to the east and west and weak, compliant neighbors to
the north and south.
So the first thing we have to do is do no harm. Our
principle risk today are errors of commission, not errors of
omission.
Now, what do matter? What are the obvious threats? One, we
have to keep an wary eye on the balance of power in the
Eurasian land mass. That is why the United States waged the
Cold War. That is why we waged World War II. That is why we
waged World War I. The main reason why America goes abroad for
big wars or big peacetime military operations is because of the
possibility of a great military empire rising in Eurasia. That
possibility isn't very great right now, but we always have to
maintain the capability to thwart it.
We have two other problems in the world today, new
problems, threats to safety: They arise from terror, and they
arise from nuclear proliferation, and some people fear the
nexus of the two.
We have to figure out a way to work those problems. But one
of the things I think we have learned from the last few years
is working those problems in a way that is designed to try and
achieve 100 percent solutions ends up being extremely costly
and probably undoable. This is an uncomfortable fact for
Americans.
So we have to do what we can to restrain the proliferation
of nuclear weapons, but we have to maintain a strong nuclear
deterrence so those that get them know that trying to threaten
the United States is the most dangerous and crazy thing they
can ever do.
We have to do what we can to suppress terror, but
suppression, not 100 percent victory, has to be the model. And
we have to fight that battle in the back alleys and back
streets of the world with the assistance of other intelligence
agencies, other police forces of other countries who have at
least as big an interest in stopping al Qaeda as we do.
Dr. Reiss. I think the new American President next January
is going to want to start redressing America's image in the
world, which we all know is not what we would like it to be.
And I think that there are five things that he would need to
say, not really a grand strategy, perhaps more a combination of
a strategy and shorter-term policy, but nonetheless would send
a very positive signal to the world, would be that: The United
States is going to take the lead now on climate change. We are
not going to be in denial. We are not going to refuse to do
this. We are actually going to be the world's leader in
acknowledging this problem.
Second, we are going to close Guantanamo and abide by the
rule of law.
Third, we are going to elevate the importance of the Middle
East peace process, not episodically but on a consistent level,
appointing a special envoy who will report directly to the
President of the United States.
Fourth, we will aggressively promote free trade agreements,
trying to revive the Doha round, and try to pass through
Congress the three Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that are
currently before it.
And, fifth and finally, that there will be a much greater
effort on national investment in research and technology for
new energy technologies to make us, not energy-independent,
because we are never going to be energy-independent, but rather
what I would call energy-secure.
And I think that alone would do wonders for reviving
America's image throughout the world.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Gentlemen, we are going to go around again, if
you have the stamina here. And we will use the 5-minute clock.
I appreciate you all's comments today and thoughts. I don't
want you all to have to dwell on this any more than my wife and
I do, but we currently have a two-year-old and she is pregnant
with triplets. So our thinking about the future has passed the,
``Oh, my God, I will never retire,'' to actually thinking about
the future as all of us with children and grandchildren, and
care about what America does.
But it seems like what you all have talked about today in
terms of, as you look ahead, to what you see as security
threats is really a grand opportunity. I mean, the priorities
that you are putting on your list, energy, security--and I
prefer that term, too. We are always going to be a trading
nation, and we shouldn't shy away from being a trading nation.
We want security of price and security of supply, and make sure
that it is a reasonable percentage of family income that every
American pays for whatever kind of energy choices they make.
But when we look at things to do in energy, things that are
in conservation, in investments in new technologies, the
economy, things that we can do in terms of dealing with our
national debt, our long-term challenges of boomers that you all
talked about, what you talked about, either Ambassador Dobbins
or Dr. Posen, about the competency of government, the
transition to new Administrations, dealing with all these kinds
of things, in terms of focusing on diplomacy, making sure it is
the quality that we want it to be.
All of those things are under our control. These are all
things that are under our control. It is a tremendous
opportunity for us if we all buy into that these are the
priorities that this Nation needs to undertake.
A dramatic contrast with where we were during these periods
after the Solarium Project and the strategies were developed
where there were things that we could certainly do, and did, in
terms of alliances and building up our forces and the
tremendous investment in our military. But the reality is, a
lot of what the future of the world had to hold was out of our
control. And we saw that in Vietnam, and we saw that in North
Korea, in the Korean Peninsula.
So it seems to me that there is some tremendous
opportunities here as you all describe what you see as the
security challenges for this country.
I wanted to talk about one specific issue, if I might, and
it is a detail. Let's see, who mentioned it? One of you talked
about the absence--oh, I know, it was Dr. Posen. He talked
about language. I think it is on page 93.
Yeah, page 93, Dr. Posen, I am quoting from you now, you
say, ``Despite the great power of the United States, its
national security establishment is particularly ill-suited to a
strategy that focuses so heavily on intervention in the
internal political affairs of others. The U.S. national
security establishment, including intelligence agencies and the
State Department, remain short on individuals who understand
other countries and their cultures and speak their languages.''
Now, I think from your perspective you would say what you
said to Mrs. Davis: If you have a policy of restraint, perhaps
you don't need as many people. I would also argue, though,
along with what you all have said about developing the American
economy, if we want to compete in this world, our kids and our
adults today had better be prepared to understand cultures and
understand languages, or otherwise we don't compete.
Would you all respond to the specific niche question of
what I see, what a lot of people see, as the lack of foreign
language expertise and its accompanying lack of cultural
sensitivity?
Dr. Reiss.
Dr. Reiss. I am very excited about this question, because I
have given it a lot of thought----
Dr. Snyder. Well, I was excited to ask it, Dr. Reiss. Carry
on.
Dr. Reiss [continuing]. When I was in the Government and
now in academia.
You use as a reference point the launch of Sputnik and how
the United States responded after that shock to our American
political system, and you look at the legislation that Congress
passed. Not just a bump-up in the military budget, but also a
National Education Act that put in the hands of American
students grants for them to study the Russian language, Russian
history, Russian politics, aspects of Russian society that paid
dividends throughout the rest of the Cold War.
You then contrast that with what happened after 9/11. And
there were some attempts by the House to try and pass some
modest language programs. There was some, again, a modest bump-
up in the Boren program. But, again, given the need for us to
understand this strategic part of the world, the greater Middle
East, the different languages involved, the need for
universities to be able to get qualified teachers to teach our
students, the response has been wholly inadequate.
And it is not just in the State Department and the
military; I think it is throughout our entire society. So that
we are not doing a very good job in terms of responding to, I
think, a heartfelt strategic need right now.
And even if you don't think that military intervention is
going to be the right way to go in these situations, and I
think many of us would agree with that, if we are going to win
hearts and minds, we have to be able to have conversations with
these people. If we don't speak the language, we literally have
nothing to say to them.
And we just can't expect people to speak English; and if
they don't speak English, they must not have anything
worthwhile to say to us. We have to be able to understand not
just Arabic but all the different dialects and languages in
this part of the world, because we are going to be there for a
very long time.
Ambassador Dobbins. I agree in general, but let me be a
little contrarian. I think that the problem, particularly in
the early years of this decade, was less a problem of supply
than demand. That is to say, the Defense Department, the
military, the Administration simply weren't interested in
tapping the sources of expertise that was available.
This has changed dramatically. You know, today we are
deploying anthropologists with every brigade we send to
Afghanistan and Iraq to advise the commander on the human
terrain in which he is operating. This is a big change, and it
is just one example of the ways that the State Department, the
Defense Department and the White House are beginning to look to
external sources of expertise and tap them. But back in 2001,
2002, 2003, the Defense Department wasn't even interested in
asking the State Department for advice, let alone academics
from outside the Government.
So it won't do us any good to up our language training if
we don't have the demand side. If you don't have enough foreign
service officer positions funded that require language as a
prerequisite, It doesn't make any difference matter how many
graduates you have. The fact is that, with our immigrant
population, we have an advantage over most countries of having
native speakers of almost any language in the world in large
numbers, including Arabic.
So, you know, I think that we need to fix the demand side
as well as the supply side.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Akin, for five minutes.
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate a lot of the different points you are making.
And it seems to me that a good foreign policy--in the political
world, we go back and tell our constituents, ``I am fighting
for you in Washington, D.C.'' We don't do any fighting down
here. The things that we accomplish are all based on persuasion
and salesmanship. Even if you look at the bills that we pass,
there is very little that we accomplish that has not had to
have been really agreed to by both political parties. Any time,
in the political world, one party tries to shove something down
everybody's throat, it usually doesn't get through the system.
So my sense is that the way that we approach a lot of these
things is pretty much more--I like the idea of exporting
freedom, but I agree with you, you can't really export it; all
you can do is encourage people. And it seems to me that the
emphasis should be on understanding their cultures and saying,
``Boy, we have a lot of problems in our own country too, but
here are some things that worked for us when we ran into some
similar problems,'' and that sort of a friendship kind of
reaching out a hand and working with foreign cultures,
understanding them.
This committee has done a great deal of work, a lot of
hearings, years' worth of hearings, on basically projecting the
Goldwater-Nichols jointness concept to a much broader kind of
context. I think one thing that was very exciting to us on this
committee was we have some real left-wingers and right-wingers
and conservatives and liberals and Republicans and Democrats,
and we all had a good sense that this was a project we all saw
the need for. There was a good sense of cooperation that this
is a direction that we should be going. Interesting that DOD
was saying, ``We think the State Department budget should be
bigger.'' Kind of interesting.
My question to you is--and maybe you would reject it, that
we can't really know this for sure. But, as we took a look
after September 11th at threats, what we realized was the most
dangerous thing to us is a nation-state that has the funding
mechanism of a nation-state that concentrates in developing
weapons of mass destruction and is determined that they are
going to use them if they can get a hold of them.
Now, you might argue that we don't have such a nation-state
in existence. But what we found was it is very hard to develop
nuclear weapons if you are just a bunch of terrorists running
around from camp to camp. You need to have a source of oil or
something to pay for the amount of research and technology that
goes into making a significant threat, particularly asymmetric
kinds of threats.
But let's say that you are the President and you are stuck
with a situation where you believe there is some country that
truly is run by nutcases and that they have enough money to
develop nuclear weapons and that they are very close to having
them and that they will use them. If you will grant those
assumptions. Now we are confronted with a pretty sticky wicket.
How do you proceed under those conditions?
Because those of us that voted here, the U.S. Congress, as
you know, voted almost unanimously to go into Iraq, because we
thought that those conditions were in existence in Iraq when we
made that decision. Let's say that we had been right. What do
you do?
Ambassador Dobbins. Well, one of the questions you have to
ask yourself is whether the regime that you are concerned about
is more irrational than Joe Stalin or Mao Zedong. Where are
they on that scale? After all, Mao sent a million troops to
confront us in Korea and put his own people through hell with
the cultural revolution, and Stalin conducted genocide on a far
wider scale than even Adolph Hitler. And yet, we found them
sufficiently rational actors. So a combination of containment,
deterrence and detente was our response. So you have to go
pretty high beyond that threshold before those aren't the right
answers.
And if you are beyond that threshold, then coercive
diplomacy and declaring preemptive doctrine probably isn't very
useful, because if the person is so irrational, those probably
aren't going to sufficiently correct his behavior. And so, you
know, maybe invasion is the right answer, but that doesn't mean
having a doctrine of preemption is a good way of dealing with
the generic problem of nuclear proliferation.
Mr. Akin. Anybody else? Or take the other one, China
invades Taiwan. What are you going to do?
Dr. Posen. On your nuclear question, I couldn't add a
single thing to what Ambassador Dobbins said. I mean, I think
agree with him, sort of, 110 percent. I mean, one can always
define a problem in such a way that the answer is, sort of,
inevitable. But we should set a fairly high bar to convince
ourselves that we are dealing with undeterrable countries.
Now, we can always imagine a set of facts that will make
almost any of us deviate from our standard policy line. So I
think buried in your question is some deeper question about how
we do these assessments, what would convince us that the
particular actor is undeterrable.
Mr. Akin. I was asking the question, recognizing you are
swallowing a very big premise. And that is one of those things.
But somewhere along the line, when you are a CEO--and we have
to make those decisions when a vote comes on the floor. But I
think most of us are pretty sensitive to that. You don't jump
into it quickly.
Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Gingrey for five minutes.
Dr. Gingrey. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I am sorry that I had to leave to go to another committee
hearing. And this is, I think, extremely informative. And I
commend Chairman Snyder, Ranking Member Akin and Chairman
Skelton for being with us here earlier. It is a very important
discussion.
Dr. Gingrey [continuing]. I guess the one question I would
like to ask--and hopefully it has not already been addressed--
we talk about the development of our grand strategy, and we
have talked about a number of things. Before I left, I heard a
number of you comment on internal strategy and the importance
of getting our own house in order before we could really have
any grand strategy that was applicable to the nations of the
world.
I want to know if you can describe for us the grand
strategies of some of these other nations, such as China,
India, Russia, Britain, Japan and, indeed, Iran. Are their
grand strategies explicitly declared? Or do we understand them
implicitly as a result of their actions and what principally
influences their strategies?
Maybe you can also touch on how much information we really
should be sharing with the general public. I think maybe a
grand strategy from the 30,000-foot level, an overarching
explanation, but certainly I would be concerned about sharing
too much detail on how our grand strategy meshes or, indeed,
conflicts with the grand strategy of these other countries,
just a few of whom I mentioned by name.
So any one of the four of you who wants to take that on, go
ahead.
Dr. Posen. Well, it is not always true. And in fact it is
mostly untrue that states develop clear and coherent grand
strategies and state them publicly. Many of us are sort of
axiomatical about the grand strategy of the Eisenhower
Administration, and a good bit of it could have been divined
from public statements. But the guts of it remained in a
national security document; I think it was NCS 162, and I
believe that document remained classified until many years
thereafter.
It was quite common during the Cold War to keep much of it
secret, and I think a lot of that secrecy had to do with the
competition inherent in international politics. The trade-off
between the values and the gains of having a clearly stated
grand strategy in public and the possible risks of telling
adversaries too much always has to be treated. You have to be
self-conscious about that.
Second, sometimes countries have grand strategies, but you
know, they are not written down in one place. And you are
looking for kind of a main line of advance, you know, a set of
basic principles. And I think that would be true right now of
most of the countries you are talking about; I am not sure you
can find a single written document for one of those countries
in public.
You do find them from time to time. Just as an example,
when I first started in this business, I tried to figure out
what Israeli grand strategy was, and it wasn't written down
anywhere. So I collaborated with a fellow one summer at the
RAND Corporation, and we managed to assemble what we thought
was basic outlines of their grand strategy. The document was
very popular in Israel because they had nothing to talk about,
so they essentially used ours.
I think you are on to something here. But it is a good idea
to start out with the premise there is one and see somehow if
you can fill in the blanks. My own view is that most countries'
grand strategies, first and foremost, arise from their
international situation. And by their international situation,
we are talking about, what is their power position relative to
others? What big interests, conflicts do they have with others?
What is the geography around their country? And in many
countries, something that we know less about is the ethnography
in their own country because many countries have different
ethnic groups living in different parts of their countries, and
they have to worry about them together.
So China today, we think of China being a strong and
growing country that is interested, in some sense, in
challenging American dominance in that part of the world, in
the first instance, trying to develop some regional military
capability, maybe some regional denial capabilities.
But we also should understand that China has its own
concerns. You know, out at the other end of China, there are
many disparate ethnic groups. Keeping those ethnic groups under
some kind of control is a big problem for them; and it seems to
be a source of conservatism in their grand strategy because
when they get too adventurous, they have problems.
But that is just a kind of example of how it works.
Dr. Gingrey. Dr. Posen, I am about to run out of time and
maybe one of the others would like to comment.
Dr. Bacevich. I would want to emphasize, I think it is
absolutely imperative for this strategy, whatever it is, to be
explained to the American people, because if they haven't
bought into it, it is not going to happen.
We have talked about the strategy of containment. Kennan's
foreign affairs article, President Truman's speech where he
enunciated the Truman Doctrine, Secretary Marshall's speech
where he enunciated the Marshall Plan. These speeches were
really the effort to explain, to--and if you want to put it
crudely--sell the American people on the idea of containment.
If they hadn't have bought it, it wouldn't have worked.
In particular, I would say today, if there is going to be a
new grand strategy, it is going to have to be explained and
sold, because any new grand strategy that focuses on getting
our house in order--talk about energy security and the like--is
going to require near-term sacrifice by us; and that is going
to have to be explained in great detail in order to make it
palatable.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Jones for five minutes.
Mr. Jones. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. And, again, I
want to compliment you for this hearing. I have been looking
forward to something like this for a long time.
I sit here in great amazement. Are we at a point in the
history of this country that we don't need to have a grand
strategy for the world? Is what we need a grand strategy to
rebuild America? I think it is amazing.
I regret that I voted to give the President the authority
to go into Iraq. It was a failed policy to begin with. I bought
what I was sold, I will leave it at that.
What I see happening is that in this country, today, we
cannot be seen as a superpower. We are borrowing money from the
Chinese to pay our bills; we are borrowing money from Japan.
You have all acknowledged this. I am not telling you anything
you haven't said. The trade deficit with China is $252 billion.
And yet we in Congress are trying to deal with some very
difficult issues that there are no easy answers to. And I hope
the next President, whoever that is, Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain,
will concentrate on America and only do the things that have to
be done militarily when we are attacked, or if it is in the
national security interests of this country.
But for this country to continue to believe--I will tell
you the truth. I don't know how we, our military people, sit
down with the Chinese. I ask this question in Armed Services,
and I will close and I will get your responses to some of my
rambling.
We had Assistant Secretary for Pacific Affairs, we had a
four-star Air Force general, very fine gentleman. They are
telling us about a sit-down with the Chinese and talk about, we
need to do this, we need to do that. I said to them, how in the
world can the Chinese look across the table at you with the
same respect that they might have if you didn't owe them money?
So are we at a point that--I am not talking about being an
isolationist. I am not talking about being a protectionist. But
if we don't get this country back on its economic feet--we lost
3.5 million manufacturing jobs in 7 years. I don't know how we
can see ourselves as being a world leader when we can't pay our
bills.
I conclude my rambling. I think I have put maybe not
anything of any depth out for you to respond to. But I wish you
would respond back because this frustration I feel--I have felt
it for the last six, seven years--is great. And my concern is
that I am sitting here and watching not Rome burn, but America
crumble.
Ambassador Dobbins. I think most of us would agree that the
international situation has seldom been more benign. We have no
peer competitor; we have nobody who could even become a peer
competitor within the next two or three decades.
Now, part of the reason the world is on balance, rather
more benign than it has been for most of the last 200 years, is
because of American leadership and American engagement and
building up an international system. And it is frayed around
the edges as the result of some of the decisions we made over
the last few years. But it has by no means deteriorated.
So I think we do have the luxury of turning back and
worrying about our own problems somewhat more--without becoming
isolationists, without withdrawing from the system, and without
ceasing to strengthen the system when we can, but recognizing
that it is in pretty good shape.
Mr. Jones. Would anyone else like to comment?
Dr. Bacevich. Well, I think you have introduced this term
``isolationism'' into our discussion, and it is very important
to do that because, in essence, that becomes the club that some
will employ in order to beat into submission anybody who
counsels a strategy of restraint or who advocates spending more
time correcting our internal problems. And it is very important
to recognize the history of discourse about U.S. foreign policy
and the role that this bugaboo of isolationism has played.
The truth is, we have never been an isolationist country.
And I would simply want to emphasize that as a strategy of
restraint focused on internal rebuilding is articulated, it
needs to be articulated in the sense that we are rebuilding
ourselves in order to facilitate engagement, in order to make
it--make us better able to engage the world in ways that are,
first of all, in our interests, but may also actually
contribute to building a peaceful and prosperous international
order.
Dr. Snyder. I want to give--about winding down here,
gentlemen. Mrs. Davis, did you want a second round?
Mrs. Davis of California. Just briefly, Mr. Chairman. I am
sure you are familiar with Henry Kissinger's article of April
7, 2008, the three revolutions and how--is that familiar to
anybody? And he talks about--well, the world order and what is
occurring.
I am wondering, and it is partly with regard to some of the
other questions, where does our discussion of a grand
strategy--and that may be not be the best way to define it at
this time--fit in with our allies and our ability to include
others in that discussion? Are we doing that?
I guess--what advice would you give to the next President
if in the next, you know, first month or three months or so of
the Presidency, where would you go first? Where should that be
placed initially?
Dr. Reiss. Let me try and address that a couple of ways.
First of all, the centerpiece of our strength and the
centerpiece of any grand strategy has to be our allies, so the
first place you want to go is to Europe to visit our allies in
Asia, Japan, South Korea, Australia and others. They are very
desirous of American leadership right now. I have been to both
Europe and Asia recently; they are waiting for the next
Administration. It is not so much that they expect some of the
policies to change, although some people do; but I think that
they would welcome a change in tone in terms of the face that
we show the world.
And it shouldn't be an angry face where everything is
reduced to a war on terror, but rather something positive and
affirmative which the United States has traditionally stood
for. Economic development, human dignity, human rights, these
are the values I think resonate globally and that epitomize the
best of our country.
But when we are talking about a policy of strategic
restraint, if I can just sort of transition to one of the
earlier questions, we have to recognize the rest of the world
isn't going to take a global time-out while we get our house in
order. Things are going to be taking place, many things, around
the world that we are not going to be very happy with.
And I think for Congress, especially over the next few
years, the two biggest issues you are going to have to grapple
with in addition to--well, the three biggest things then--is
going to be what is the next phase of our history with Iraq? In
particular, what type of American diplomatic and military
presence do we want to have in the Persian Gulf 5 to 10 years
out? Because that is really what the debate is all about right
now.
We are going to be coming home, whether quickly or slowly.
But the issue is, what residual force presence do we have? And
what residual diplomatic influence do we have in the region in
response to a secondary threat, which is a rising Iran, in
particular, an Iran with unfettered nuclear ambitions.
And then the third big issue to really focus on--which,
again, is not going to await our getting our house in order--is
going to be Pakistan. This is ground central for al Qaeda,
according to the intelligence estimates. And Pakistan is beset
by all sorts of internal difficulties. There are structural
problems that have long afflicted that country, and it is not
going to await our ability, our timing to engage it. It is
going to be demanding the attention of the Congress and the
next Administration well before then.
Mrs. Davis of California. Does anybody else want to
comment, in a minute or two, just in terms of those issues that
you put front and center, the extent to engage our allies in
that? Because I think part of our question is--this goes to
Afghanistan as well--this threat is not perceived in the same
way that we perceive it necessarily. So where does that fit
into that?
Dr. Posen. Well, the only thing I would suggest is that it
is very interesting the way Dr. Reiss started talking about the
traditional allies. When we start talking about problems, the
problems were all concentrated in this one little cauldron.
And, of course, we have problems with our allies in that
cauldron.
I think we need to have a serious engagement with our
allies about risks and costs and interests in this part of the
world. It is about time we found out what kind of allies we
actually have. I don't think what we have discovered is
particularly good.
The British and the Australians and the Canadians can't
carry all the weight for America's alliances. There are other
rich countries out there who put many, many caveats in their
participation. And we have to press harder. If we can't get
their help for some of the things we are inclined to do, I
think we have to think a lot harder about whether we can do
them.
The $64 question on Iran is: Are we going to have a war
with them? What is everyone else going to say about that war if
we decide to have it? These issues have to be thought through
very seriously, because if there is one straw left out there
that could break the camel's back as far as an American act of
commission, it is a prevented war with Iran.
Mrs. Davis of California. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. We will close with Mr. Bartlett for any
questions he wants to finish up.
Mr. Bartlett. Thank you very much. And thank you, Mr.
Chairman, for holding this very important hearing.
I think it is very clear that we cannot have a defensible
grand strategy unless it addresses the energy challenge that
the world faces, particularly facing us because we, having only
about 2 percent of the world's oil, use 25 percent of the
world's oil.
I think, Dr. Reiss, it was you who mentioned in your
testimony, we were sent to negotiate. The first thing you did
was to educate and explain so that you would then have a basis
for negotiation.
Who is responsible for educating relative to energy? There
is so much misinformation out there. People come to me talking
about schemes for getting energy out of water. Water is the ash
you get when you burn hydrogen. Do you think there is energy in
water?
You probably think there is energy in the ash in your
furnace. I had a Member the other day, with a straight face,
tell me that we had 2,500 years of coal, so we didn't need to
worry. I hear people saying that by 2050 we will be using twice
as much energy as we are using now, and most of it is going to
come from fossil fuels, from oil.
Then there are those who worship the market: The market
will fix this problem; it fixes other problems. But resources
are finite. You will not like the way the market fixes this
problem if you wait for the market to fix the problem.
Then there are others that tell me, don't worry at all
about the future because we have 1.6 trillion barrels of oil in
the oil shales of the West. Two bubbles have already broken and
one will shortly break. The first bubble that broke was the
hydrogen bubble. People finally figured out it is not an energy
source, I think; it is simply an energy carrier.
The core ethanol bubble broke with disastrous consequences,
like world hunger and food shortages around the world. And now
the next bubble that is going to break--and remember, you heard
it here--it is the cellulosic ethanol bubble. I can't imagine
that we are going to get a great deal more energy from our
wastelands, not good for growing any crop, that we could get
from all of our corn and all of our soybeans.
And the National Academy of Sciences--this isn't Roscoe
Bartlett; this is National Academy of Sciences. If we used all
of our corn for ethanol and discounted it for fossil fuel
input, it would displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. They
noted you would save as much if you tuned up your car and put
air in the tires. And if we use all of our soybeans for soy
diesel, we would 2.9 percent of our diesel.
There is just a gross amount of misinformation out there.
Who has the responsibility to educate? Because until people are
educated, we cannot possibly have a rational discussion of
energy. Who has that responsibility?
Dr. Reiss. Congressman, we all do, as educators, as
representatives. But the prime responsibility is the President
of the United States; he has the biggest megaphone and the
biggest pulpit. That is really what is going to be required,
and it is going to take more than one speech. It is going to
take a long-term, persistent effort; and there is going to be
an awful lot of push-back from vested interests.
And, again, this is why I keep on saying, there has to be
an awful lot of education that takes place here because it is
going to be a struggle. You are going to be promising people
future benefits, but they are going to be taking short-term
pain; and that is always a very difficult political bargain to
sell.
But I think what you have heard today from all of us, if I
can be presumptuous for a minute, is that I think we all see
that this is absolutely essential if we are going to keep our
country strong for the future.
Dr. Posen. It is easy for people in the education business
to tell others that they should educate, but--I agree.
But people need more authoritative sources of facts. One of
the problems with--one of the beauties, really, of the
Information Age economy is that there is too much information,
and much of it is not vetted, we need more sources of
information that are authoritative. People that, you know, we
can sort of have a little--you know, give a little credibility
to some of the sources.
For years and years and years, you know, I have been
indebted to you folks, because in my business, we love the
stuff that we get from Government Accountability Office (GAO),
we love the stuff we get from Congressional Budget Office
(CBO), we love the stuff that we get from Congressional
Research Service (CRS). And you guys have a terrific capability
to create facts that have a little bit of credibility behind
them, rather than factoids or candidate facts or baloney.
And so we welcome your assistance.
Mr. Bartlett. It is not that the information is not out
there. Our government has paid for four studies, all of them
saying the same thing: The peaking of oil is either present or
imminent with potentially devastating consequences. The Hirsch
report, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
report, was the first one; Corps of Engineers, the second one
in 2005. Last year there were two reports; the second one was
the National Petroleum Council, the first was the Government
Accountability Office. And our government has chosen to ignore
all of those.
The Hirsch report says the world has never faced a problem
like this, that the mitigation consequences will be
unprecedented. And still, it is business as usual. I am just--
you know, I am flabbergasted, Mr. Chairman, how we can do that
with all of the evidence out there.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett, for your questions and
for your very eloquent way of expressing what clearly is a
national and world challenge.
Gentlemen, I appreciate your being with us today. Let me
say that if, either in your minds now or in the near future,
you come up with something you wanted to add, feel free to
submit that as an answer--as a question for the record, and it
will be distributed to the Members and the staff and included
as part of the record of this hearing.
[The information referred to was not available at the time
of printing.]
Dr. Snyder. We are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:24 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
=======================================================================
A P P E N D I X
July 15, 2008
=======================================================================
PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
July 15, 2008
=======================================================================
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
=======================================================================
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
July 15, 2008
=======================================================================
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]