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Remarks by Secretary Carter at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ASH CARTER:  All righty.  Good morning, everybody.

AUDIENCE:  Good morning, sir.

STAFF:  Well, Secretary Carter, I want to give my thanks for you taking the time this morning to come to the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, and answer some hard questions from our officers here who've come to ask those.

I want to prime the pump with a couple questions that we've gotten in order to get -- get the ball going.  I know you want to immediately hear from them.

SEC. CARTER:  Yeah.  Can I just -- I just -- first of all, Admiral Howe, thanks very much.  Appreciate your leadership for this place, centrally important place to us.  And so I'm grateful to you and the dean and all the other leadership.

Continuing education, continuing self improvement is -- more and more a part of life in the United States and around the world in general.  So organizations are finding it necessary to help people stay up, keep up, stay competitive in the course of their career.

So what is done here is, to me, centrally important to my force of the future thinking which is trying to look generations down the line and making sure that we're state of the art in how we handle people as well as state of the art in terms of how we handle warcraft and technology and all the rest that goes into this.

This is a really important place for me and I'm grateful I have the opportunity to be here.  I just wanted to say that.

STAFF:  All right.  I appreciate that.

My first question has to do with national security strategy.  Here at the war college in our strategy and policy course, we -- our senior officers have been looking at long-term competition, and one of the examples we draw from is the British experience with overstretch or overreach in the late 19th and early 20th century.

So given our current budget constraints, aggression with Russia, continued conflict in the Middle East, our international terrorism threat, how can we afford -- what are the costs and the risks associated with continuing a balance or a pivot towards East Asia and the Pacific?

SEC. CARTER:  Well, the reality is we've got to do it all and your question is can we do it all.

But let me just remind you what all is, because yes, there's the long-term competitive situation -- that's the only word you can use for it -- with Russia and China, which is a position they have chosen, but one that we need to meet with steadiness and strength and deterrence.  And since they're at the higher end and have generally greater geographic reach than others, that is a stretch for our capabilities, but we're investing a lot in them.

And -- and the Asia Pacific, especially important because it's -- it's the single place in the world, single region in the world of most consequence simply by -- (inaudible) -- of the fact that it has half the population and half the global economy, so it's a big deal for the United States.

Then, you get to the -- what I call the hardy perennials, North Korea and Iran, and a little bit lower down the line, but still quite worrisome both behaviorally and in terms of capabilities that they're developing themselves or getting from somewhere else.

And then, you've got ISIL, which we're going to beat, but that takes a certain amount of resources to defeat them, and I'm certain we'll do that.  But there's a certain amount of preoccupation that goes with conducting that war and winning it.

So those are the five things that are currently on the plate, and then you always have to have at the back of your mind that our historical record is perfect in never having it right what's the next big thing, and so staying agile, flexible, wide area field-of-view, excellent keeping the edge, all of that is essential for what might come down the road.

So now, can we do it all?  Well, we can do it all.  Obviously, when talking about resources, you'd always like to have more resources.  My biggest concern is not with the right now, but in the years ahead.  I think we have the right mindset.  We have determination, we have public support. I was at ROTC at Yale, where, when I went to college, I'll tell you the climate was so different, not for me, but for most of the people I went to school, and ROTC wasn't welcome and it was a big deal.

So we have the support of our society, we have the fact that we're -- a lot of people around the world like to work with us.  They like you.  Many of them are here.  We like working with other people.  We're effective partners.  We treat people decently.  We represent things that other people want and they want to associated with, so we kind of have all the friends and the allies, and our enemies don't have any, our opponents don't have any; nobody likes them -- nobody wants to work with them.

So we've got a lot of strengths.  The biggest concern I have down the road is -- is at this particular moment, in terms of budget and resources is I hope that we're not going to see the collapse of the bipartisan budget agreement.

If we -- we've got to have some budget stability.  We can manage within -- OK, we understand we're not going to everything we want.  Nobody ever gets everything they want, but we need stability.  We need stability to plan; our industries need stability; our people need to know what their future is; our friends need to know that we're with them; our enemies need to know we're strong.

And so, that kind of stability -- and we had a two-year budget deal, which was done in the right way, which is Washington getting out of gridlock, coming together, both parties putting the whole smear on the table.  Not just discretionary spending, but revenues and entitlements.

Because remember, they're the lion's share.  You can't balance the budget on the backs of us.  It's just -- just the money is not there.

So -- it just doesn't work.  So, you've got to have everything.  And there was -- and it was supposed to be a two-year budget deal.  Now, six months into it, they're passing bills that call into question the -- whether that is going collapse or not.

That worries me a lot, because on the other side of that is $100 billion of sequester cuts.  That's what happens if the budget deal collapses and we go back to sequester.  So, that's my principle worry.

Strategically, we know what we're doing.  Obviously, we'd like to have more; we'd always like to have more.  But we can do what we need to do.

But I can't pretend that I know we've figured out how to do that with $100 billion less in the coming years.  That, I'm not -- kind of doubt is going to be possible.

Q:  OK, well, I'm going to follow up on one question, and then open it up to the floor.

Since you were talking about budget, over a week ago, you spoke at the Navy League Sea Air and Space Expo, and you pushed back a little bit on recommendations from the Senate Armed Services Committee in that National Defense Authorization Act, with reference to acquisition reform.

And given your long service and expertise in acquisition, wanted to give you an opportunity to amplify.

SEC. CARTER:  Yeah.

Q:  As well, as you talked a little bit -- if you give us some comments.  You talked about the balance with Congress in terms of providing oversight versus micro-management of the Defense Department.

SEC. CARTER:  Yeah, yeah.  Yeah.  Well, I mean, first of all, there are some good things in there, and there are many well-intentioned things in these bills.

To get to your second point, however, these bills are now 1,000 pages long.  They have hundreds of provisions.

In one year, the add boxes to our organization chart, and the next year, they take boxes away.  And I -- just on principle, I believe that that kind of micro-management is not helpful.

Lots of reports require that kind of thing.  And I think our leadership is the best source of good management ideas.  That's why we're here.  You don't like us, they can find another crowd of us.  But that's -- that -- the management of the place ought to manage the place, and not be micro-managed.

Now, that said, you know, we've got to work with our committees.  At the end of the day, they have the final say on our money and on the law.  And they're -- I appreciate the spirit behind much of what is going on.  I understand very well the frustration with acquisition, because I share it.

I understand the desire to keep pushing us to think about how we're organized and structured; that's fair enough, I'm OK with that.

But I have -- I do have problems with parts of it, and I hope we're able to work this out, but we'll see.

The one you specifically reference is a proposal that I -- is not quite clear to me, but has the effect, if I understand it right, of separating research and engineering from procurement, which is, you know, sort of like violating the third law of thermodynamics or something.

It -- you know, if -- if anything, we have a problem perennially of connecting the research and development enterprise to the production everlasting the world we need is bureaucratic.  To me, there is way too much of that.

So if there -- it was a proposal that was bringing them together further, I -- it would make more sense to me.  So I'm still trying to make sense of it.  We will talk to them, we'll try to get somewhere better in that regard.  But I could not support something that enforced that separation.  I just know better.

And -- and -- we -- our history, over time, and I have been doing this a long time, as -- as Admiral Howe referenced -- I got back to Harold Brown was my first boss, also a physicist, by the way.

But you know, in Harold's day -- and Harold had been director of research and engineering  and that meant the buying guy too.  I mean, it meant a -- it was AT&L.  It's just -- we renamed it over time.

So -- that one I really can't support and there are other ones that I can't support in there and I would, respectfully, appeal to the committees to stick to the big things and not have a lot of little, you know, move this around and move that around.

It is almost impossible to believe that from that remove they can have a better perspective on what we need to manage ourselves.  That's not that there is anything wrong with them and it's not that they do not understand many things, but we're right in the thick of it and I think that our senior leadership, our chiefs, our service chiefs, our service secretaries, myself ought to have the latitude to organize our environment and not have it organized for us.

STAFF:  OK, appreciate that.   We'll take questions.  Remember to use the mic when -- because this is being broadcast.  You have a question there in the middle.

Q:  (off-mic.)

SEC. CARTER:  I'm sorry, increasing -- I just missed the last part.  I think...

Q:  (off-mic.)

SEC. CARTER:  Well, first of all, DCMA is a great organization and a very essential one and I think the question, I don't know if everybody could -- could hear, was basically about, I'll put it in these terms, the balance between ceding to the contractor a lot of control over program execution, rather than keeping tight control and oversight on the government side.

That is a difficult balance.  You're right.  Future combat systems was an example where we outsourced the systems engineering, configuration control, everything -- and that was the rage at the time.  You know, let industry do it.  They will have the expertise to -- well that didn't work.  Almost all the time it failed.

And -- so -- you're right.  The pendulum needs to come -- come back. Now, not all the way back because I do want there to be shared responsibility and shared expertise in industry and also I need to be careful about what we can take on because -- to be blunt about it, our acquisition system is uneven.  Some parts of it are up to that job and other parts, we need to work on and get up to that job.  DCMA is an inestimable help in all this, I should say -- say that.

So it's -- it's -- it's something that I think where the pendulum has swung back in the direction of more government, direct government involvement, but there's a consequence to that, which is we've got to get better at it on the government side.  That's -- the civilian side and the uniform side, and that's -- that's related to something else that comes up in the Goldwater-Nichols discussion of acquisition, which is the role of the services and the service chiefs in acquisition.

And I think that's very important.  That's an area also where the pendulum swung too far and the -- the -- the service chiefs basically didn't have anything to do with acquisition for 15, 20 years or so, or not nearly enough, and -- and I think that was the pendulum going too far.  I'd like to see it get back the other way.

But I've told the chiefs in order to do that, you have to educate yourselves because most of you and most of the senior leadership by now in all the services have gotten there not because of their expertise in acquisition.  That was the way it was when I started out in the Cold War, because remember, that was the time we never actually did anything; we just got ready to do things.  And so...

(Laughter.)

Well, and so over the decades, getting -- being good at getting ready to do things was what made you proficient in your service, and so acquisition executives who rose to the top, that -- that -- and there's nothing wrong with this, but we've had a more operational set of decades, and so we have tend to have more operators at the top and so these guys need to get in the game.

But I tell them, you need to be humble about what you really understand.  We need your understanding of what the requirements are.  We need your management and leadership acumen, but you're also going to have to understand, you know, how to manage big programs, how to deal with technology and so forth.  And that's not something that -- that is in your background.

STAFF:  Next question?  There in the back.  Yes.

Q:  Good morning, Ashton -- (inaudible).

(Laughter.)

(inaudible) -- out to -- (inaudible) -- on the perhaps the next phase of our careers at various senior levels.  Some of my compatriots about (inaudible) to promoted to admiral (inaudible), but you talk about half the population and half the trade in Asia, West Pacific.  We're seeing -- (inaudible) -- rules-based order, particularly by Russia -- (inaudible) -- South China Sea and further out into the -- (inaudible).

What's the tipping point that forces the international community to say, "Hey, that's enough," without proxying -- (inaudible)?  (inaudible) -- very complex and volatile environment, -- (inaudible) -- these threats that are becoming more and more -- (inaudible).  What's your advice -- (inaudible) -- your allies on where that needs to go, where that tipping point sits, when saying enough is enough -- (inaudible)?

SEC. CARTER:  Good -- good -- good question.

First of all, let me just salute our Aussie friends everywhere around the world, including at this very moment in the places you know about and a number of places we can't talk about here, but you probably individually know about, we're like this with the Australians in so many ways.

And I -- and it's a country that like the United States, to its great credit is -- regards itself as having a responsibility for the global order.  And then that gets to your question.  Then there are some who evidently don't, either want to challenge that or have an intensely self-absorbed view of how to conduct themselves internationally.

And in their very different ways, Russia and China fit that general description.

My view is that this -- that just looking at the leadership of those two countries and their current inclination, this isn't going to change soon.  And now it's having the effect of isolating them, because everybody -- talking Europe, it's the NATO side, and in the Asia-Pacific, almost all countries are reaching out.

And look at Vietnam and the United States just in the last few days with the president.  You know, why is that?  It's because they know that -- that stability and security is what has created the Asian miracle, and that it can be threatened by kind of instability, and they want to be on the side of keeping a system that has the trade values and the human values that have made that part of the world work.

So, I think you've got to look at this as a long -- I don't see there being a -- barring something -- sort of some instability in those two countries, which I also don't see happening.  Given the current leadership, I think this is going to be the trend for quite a while, and we need to be in it for the long-term.

So, this is going to be a long campaign of firmness, and gentle but strong pushback for probably quite a number of years in both places.

Now, I also believe that the internal logic, as was true with the Soviet Union over those many decades, and again, a different situation.  They're only similar in this respect -- the internal logic, which suggests -- which suggests that this isn't really what's in the interest of the Chinese or the Russian people in the long run, but that will prevail at some point.

But that's almost academic at this point, because they're way -- their leadership is way on the other side of that equation right now.

So, I think we have to, you know, brace in for the long run.  That's certainly our approach.  Our rebalance isn't a couple year thing, or do this for a little while and try it out kind of thing.  This is a long-term commitment -- after, we've been at it for 70 years.

And we'll stay at it, because we have been the pivotal military power in the region, and the linchpin of security and stability in that part of the world.

And we're going to keep it that way.  That's what the rebalance is about, for a long time.

Q:  OK.  Last question.  Over there in the back.

Q:  Yes -- (inaudible).  A couple of years ago, your predecessor, former Secretary –Hagel was here -- (inaudible).

And he is honest regarding the proliferation of advanced weapons into the adversaries -- (inaudible).  When you look at some of those weapons, a lot of it is, you know, unmanned systems, stuff in the cyber domain.  And the nature of development in that area seems to be a lot past of -- (inaudible) -- years.

SEC. CARTER:  Yeah.

Q:  As opposed to building battleships, which take years -- (inaudible).  (inaudible) -- unmanned systems from China (inaudible).  So when we look at the ability -- (inaudible) -- very fast.  How is our process -- (inaudible) -- process for our defense foreign military sales -- (inaudible), recognizing that's probably a -- (inaudible) -- answer that -- (inaudible).

(Laughter.)

SEC. CARTER:  It's actually both of our questions.

Q:  How are we aligning -- (inaudible) -- tools -- (inaudible)?

SEC. CARTER:  Good question.  Two things.  First of all, we're too slow.  And that's a problem.  And if you really want to go after acquisition, you don't take up research and engineering and separate it from acquisition.  That was my point earlier.  They've got to come together faster because the -- the future is going to go to those who are agile, creative, up to date, competitive.

And yeah, there are some things like capital ships that naturally go on longer time scales, but unfortunately a lot of the reflex of our acquisition system is to operate on that kind of time scale, which as you point out is completely inappropriate when it comes to things like drones; when it comes to things like cyber.

And so that's a very big preoccupation of mine and it's -- it's the central reason why you see me pushing so hard to connect us with the tech community and rebuild those bridges that were so strong when I started out in this business, between the technical community in the country at large, and the defense world.

That was a union bred in this country in World War II.  It lasted for a few generations thereafter, including mine.  And now it's -- it's just not a natural thing.  People -- they don't know us and our problems.  They don't know how to work with us as easily.  We have -- but -- but it's also no longer true as it was when I started out that all technology -- most technology of consequence originated in the United States and originated in the defense or government environment.  That's just not true anymore.

So we have to have a different model where we're connected.  That's why you see my out in Silicon Valley, up in Boston, out in Austin.  And so we're trying to get the most vibrant parts of our tremendously innovative country harnessed to the United States.

Now, these guys want to do it.  You talk to them, they -- they're patriotic.  They care about -- (inaudible).  They care about the country and the world.  They know they can't -- that everything they do has no meaning if there's no security.  They -- they -- they're people who like to make a difference.  They like to do things that matter.  They like to do things that are consequential.  And they know that what we do is consequential.

So I find the uptake is really great.  But I've got to work real hard on that.  And I urge all of you to do the same.  We just can't sit back and expect that it's all going to come to us anymore.  That's -- that's long in the past.  And we can't expect that we can do things on 10- and 15-year time scales.

The export control system, I don't even want to get started on.  I -- there are so many -- oh, what's a nice word? -- archaic aspects of that system it makes your head hurt.  And so you're right.  So we're frequently behind.  And it would be better, given that country X is going to have a certain system, but it would be better if they got it from us because at least we'd be in there and it would be part of our partnership and so forth.

But to stand back and say, "Well, we don't want to do that, so we're going to let somebody else sell the identical item into that country," that doesn't make any sense to me.  That's cutting off our nose to spite our face.  And yet, we do that again and again and again.

So, it's a serious problem and I -- I did, when I was AT&L, a number of things to speed us up.  We're still too slow, but we're a lot faster now.  We have -- we have basically fast tracks for stuff.  But then we do wait for the diplomatic approval, and I respect my diplomatic colleagues and their views and so forth.  But the results here don't add up, they don't make sense.  It's not a sensible system.

But I think that is, in all fairness, secondary to our need to pull our own socks up and get faster and more agile, otherwise we are going to be left behind.  We can be generations behind, just -- believe me, there are areas right now what we're way behind.  We're trying to catch up, but we're two or three generations behind and, you know, the enemy -- let's take ISIL, for example.

ISIL's quite agile on the net.  They're barbarians, but they're good with the internet.  Now, we're trying to eliminate that capability from them; that's what I've got CYBERCOM doing, which would be our first real cyber campaign in Iraq and Syria, and take that freebie, that command and control freebie away from them and make that part of crushing them in Iraq and Syria.  But you know, 10 years even, certainly 20 years ago, that wouldn't have been an aspect of the conflict.  It's got to be an aspect of the conflict now and we've got to get in the game and be -- be good at it.

STAFF:  All right.  Well, thanks for taking time today.  Do you have any final comments before...

SEC. CARTER:  Well, I -- just to say how much I appreciate that the -- I don't know what it feels like to you all to be here in terms of your overall careers, but I'm going to tell you how it looks to me, and this is to my international friends as well.

The international people here, thank you for being with us.  We don't take it for granted.  I think, you know, at our best, working together, we represent the civilized -- no other way to say it -- world protecting itself, protecting its people, letting them do what they deserve to do, which is live their lives and dream their dreams and have peace, and that is a wonder thing.  So thank you, for those who are not American here, for being with us.

And for the folks from the American military and our civilian counterparts as well, all our DOD family, your being here represents your awareness that in today's world, we're never out of school, we're never out of school.  This idea that you graduate from school and your 16-years-old or 20-years-old and that's it and you live out the rest of your life.  That's -- that's -- that's gone now.

Everybody needs to be constantly learning, constantly changing because we all individually need to be competitive, as well as collectively be competitive.  So I need people and I need to get the -- that have that edge, because I need the best because in the end of the day, our military is the best in the world because our people are so good.  And I can't count on people like you generation after generation after generation.

I've got to work hard, just like I have to work hard at connection the technology base.  I have to work hard at connecting to the population and getting them to join us, getting once they've joined us, to stick with us.  And when they've decided to stick with us, continuing to give them opportunities to grow and change, assume more responsibility by having more capability.  That's what this place represents.  So it's an extremely important institution to me.  It's a highly successful one.

And, you know, I look forward a little bit later, I want to try to learn from you, what your scholars and what your thinking can provide me in the way of advice, but its principal purpose is to educate people that were already highly successful, and give them that sort of extra jetpack to go further.

And I -- it's extremely valuable.  It's an incredible part of improving the readiness and our prowess of our force.  So, congratulations on being here.

Q:  Well, thank you very much for that.

(APPLAUSE)

STAFF:  Sir, thank you.  So, you closed with the importance of education.  And you were, I think a key component of our education with the engagement that you had with us today.

Thanks for that, thanks for advancing our mission, and thanks for your service to the nation.  A small token of appreciation.

SEC. CARTER:  Thank you.  Appreciate it.  Appreciate everybody.  Very nice.

We don't get to have coins that are shaped like bottle-openers.  You're getting all these coins now.  Everybody is getting more inventive with this coins -- you know, I just have a little humble, old round secretary of defense coin.

If I ever showed up with a bottle-opener coin, I'd be up in front of the -- our committees in a heartbeat.

(Laughter.)

But these guys have it.  I had a guy pull out -- I was on a helicopter, a V-22, a few weeks ago.  A crew member pulls out -- they've got a coin that is a bird of some sort, some predator bird, with these sharp wings -- the coin is like this big, and these sharp wings.  Completely impractical.

(Laughter.)

You have a round coin you can put in your pocket.

STAFF:  This throws -- this turns into a throwing star if you ever (inaudible).

(Laughter.)

Walk out this way.

SEC. CARTER:  OK.  Bye, everybody.