Hi everyone, it's been going well today. It's pretty cool to be speaking at UCI. This is my alma mater. I once was a student and now I'm a teacher here. I'm not going to back it. So today we will be talking about Death of the Media Query. From the title, I'm promising you much more than I can deliver. But we'll learn a bit about FlexBlocks and CSS Grid. And I've also, Bayden, switched you with Calc. It's in there. The slides are in there. But I think I'm going to skip the fair chunk of it. But I have been told the last presentation had frogs and I have cats. So come on. This is me. I already got introduction. Company, company. Cool. Slides are online. I had to do it at my name. So it's like harder to spell for you. But they're there. They're also referenced at the end if that is going to be for you. OK. So what is a media query? A media query is this thing that allows us, in design, to be able to create different styles at different break points in a device. So we see here a desktop version. And then eventually it will snap into whether it's a tablet version or mobile or whatever else. The designs all change. And in order to achieve this, you're writing separate styles for each version of the website, which can be tedious to update. And historically, we would do this with various measurements, like maybe percentages or these types of things, which can be a bit of a headache because 10% of spacing might create on a desktop. But when you get down to a mobile device to have 10% spacing on either side of your elements, can be really clunky or it's just an odd way to distribute space. Traditionally, or I think it might be a very early time in thinking about media queries, we think about it as desktop tablet mobile device. But as we all know, this isn't really relevant anymore because a mobile device can be quite small to a little bit bigger if you flip it into the landscape. You're doing it like 600 pixels, which is just like on middle ground where you're not at a tablet yet and get to a tablet in between a tablet and a desktop, yada, yada, yada. There's no real proper break point anymore. It's just this should look nice no matter where I'm moving my browser. So there will be no death of the media query today, fortunately. But the concept here is that we're going to look at how to use Flexbox and how to use CSS Grid. And the slides are there for Calc tucked away if you want to look at it. In an effort to create flexible design that will not require us to think so hard about our break points because the way space is being distributed or the way that we handle layout is much more elegant without us needing to be surgical and go in and think about each break point per device. So I used to do a lot of primer of this talk on like, it's so hard to learn new styling, which like, fair enough it is. And if you're comfortable with Flexbox, you can get a ton done with it if you are really curious about CSS Grid and both these things are kind of foreign to you. You can go down either route and you'll be able to achieve quite a bit. And then this image always reminds me of like, maybe you're getting like, if you're working on a project and it's something you've heritage and there's 2,000 lines of styling already existing on it and you're doing like $100 like look patch on it, not the time to go in and like rethink the framework and drop in Flexbox. And in my mind, these are like your clients calling you like Friday evening about to go to dinner and like, we got this great idea. So it's all like, in pacing and thinking about how to learn bits of it incorporated into your work, it does save a tremendous amount of time if you are templating, if you are very comfortable with these things, Flexbox and CSS Grid. OK, compatibility, this field is like much rougher like each day that goes by. If you go to caniuse.com, if you're not familiar with that, you can put in a CSS property and see how compatible it is with browsers and browser versions. CSS Grid and Flexbox are green across the board with modern browsers with like a greenish tint in the Internet Explorer realm. Morton Hendrickson, who's a big name in WordPress and also very smart and awesome. He has put forth this concept in one of the talks about no longer thinking about responsive design in terms of devices, but thinking along the lines of by browser, which I thought was like a really nice way to put Internet Explorer in the corner. Maybe it's like an ugly spin on what he was trying to say. But essentially, if the mobile version of the site is all that works on a particular browser, then maybe that's what it gets. Take it for you, well, all this stuff is very compatible at this point. And then the last bit of primer, if you're completely unfamiliar with CSS and you want to follow along conceptually, CSS happens to be syntactically a very easy language and consistent language to follow. So here is a simple CSS rule. You pick something that you want to change the style of, in this case, an age 100. You say what you want to do with it, in this case, a color, and then you give it a value, red, and you change it. Cool. OK. Tree of Serenity, your brain is clear. I'm going to show you some code. It's not so bad at all, but there is code. And hopefully it's legible. Oh, we get a key before we go there. So we're going to hop into FlexBlocks. And when we're thinking about FlexBlocks, we're thinking about spacing. And conceptualize this in your head as historically, we've done this with percentages and thinking about spacing like padding inside of an element or margins outside of an element. Right now, you are thinking about an element being whatever it needs to be, whether it's a word or an image. And then all that space that makes it difficult to design across different devices is something that FlexBlocks is putting all of its energy into handling for you. It's taking all that extra space and distributing it in different fashions that will make it look nice across devices. Okay, so in a basic tutorial of FlexBlocks, here is some markup for a navigation. And in order to enable FlexBlocks, you are thinking about a parent-child relationship in your HTML. So in this case, we have a nav wrapper around some link tags. We are going to say that that nav wrapper should display Flex. And now we have opened up all the magic of FlexBlocks to our disposal. We are going to use the property justify content. We're going to go to a value of center. And right now, we're thinking about spacing on the horizontal axis. And we are allowing FlexBlocks to control that spacing for us. So visually, when we look at this, we see that we have three elements. They are within a flex container. They are all children of that flex container. And they've been told to justify center on the horizontal axis. I'm not thinking about the space on the left or the right. I'm just saying put it in the center. And it will put it in the center regardless of the device. If you take justify content and you use the value of space between, you get a layout that is pretty common with the navigation, spread things out, left, center, right. In this case, we have three items. But if you have four, it would distribute them in quarters. Space around is a one-off of space between. And what you're getting is an equal amount of spacing left and right on each element. Cool. The beauty of this is that you aren't doing it for a particular width. You aren't thinking about how wide this device is. All of this is responsive across devices, as we see. So justify content takes in these values. This is easy to look up. CSS Tricks has a great article that goes through every property and value of FlexBlocks. It's really thoughtfully laid out. And if you were just learning it and the only real hindrance you have is just remembering the names, that article puts it all together in a really nice way to see it. When you're thinking about vertical spacing, you can use the align items property. And it has similar values that allow you to control spacing on the vertical axis. Now, there are situations where these properties do the inverse, which I'm not going to touch on for the sake of this. But you always have the ability to control horizontal and vertical spacing. OK, so here's a little chart from CSS Tricks on what align items is doing. Similar fonts at the top, bottom, center, stretch, which is pretty handy. Cover all the space equally. And then baseline, I guarantee that you're going from PSDs to creating something, a template. You're going to find a PSD that has different font sizes that are supposed to be lined up perfectly. And you won't think about it in any sort of discussion or thinking about scope or time. And also, you have to get those texts lined up with each other. Flexbox is the way to do it. Any other way to do it, we'll drive you now. So here is where I find myself using Flexbox a lot. When you are creating a template, and all the times when you're working with a content management system like WordPress, you're going to end up with these cards. And I'm envisioning a content type coming out. And I need to template it into this card consistently. So this particular content type will say it's a news article. It has a featured image. It has a title in red. It has a little body text. It has some sort of button called to action. And then another link on the bottom. Now, our first conception of Flexbox is just we can make a navigation. But there's no reason why we can't nest flex containers or use flex containers in the more elaborate ways to control spacing with content like this that's coming from the database in different formats to create layouts that are going to look really nice across devices. So what I do here is first, I think about this and I grab it in a container, everything. And then within that container, I want to create two internal containers. And at this point, I can use Flexbox to control spacing for it. I can say put one thing at the top, put one thing at the bottom. I also want both of these things to be centered. They're near the edge, but I want them to be in the middle of the card. Then I nest Flexbox and I will grab an additional element at the bottom of the page and I say split these two elements apart. So Flexbox can be really, really handy with layout. One other common problem that it solves is usually not dealing with one of these cards alone. You would have a set of them. A lot of times you get these like three columns across and you end up in these situations where you have a little bit more text than you would on other cards. Flexbox Align Item Center, or Stretch, excuse me, will create equal height for all of these elements and that's the default property for Align items. So it consistently helps with layouts. Now, I hope that you can see this, but we start off with something small like a navigation. We think about like a piece, like a card, but what you can do when templating with Flexbox is really elaborate and remember that all this is holding across different devices. At some point you're gonna have things clunk up next to each other and Flexbox actually has like a really easy means of like controlling your access. Originally you're thinking about things on horizontal, you can stack things vertically depending on what you need per device. But in terms of trying to deal with that headache from like 650 pixels up to a huge screen, this will be consistent for you. So we're looking at a template like this. We can think about our logo and our tagline as one flex container. We can move items to the bottom of that box. We can separate them out from each other. When we jump into our navigation, we can think of two separate items that we wanna spread on opposite sides of that particular row of content. We can go into each of these elements and we can create space around on the left side and we can center the item on the right side. For this image, I wanna basically put that text in the bottom corner. I want a little bit of space on the left which I can address with margin. The way that we use margin in Flexbox is a variant from CSS Grid which has a different way of dealing with spacing which we'll see which is one of not a tremendous amount of nuances between the two of them. We'll get there. Cool. Tree of Serenity. Brief moment. I know everything about Flexbox. I know everything about Flexbox. Whatever. We're going deeper. Okay, Grid. Two times the key. Little did you know that the cap on the first slide and the cap on the Flexbox slide were actually siblings. Just kidding, sorry. No, no, no, no. Okay, CSS Grid. CSS Grid is super exciting. It allows you to make art online. You can do anything. What's really cool about CSS Grid is that the way that you can control a layout, an early conception of CSS Grid versus Flexboxes. Flexbox really helps with your rows of content and that can be a little bit of a mental jump when you're still thinking about moving things on the vertical axis but you're dealing with like a row of content that you're moving on a vertical axis. Flexbox actually has a great ability to do things that span multiple rows. When you want variance within those rows, you can achieve it but there are some headaches there. CSS Grid is great when you're thinking about a broader layout of several pieces that need to be spread out in a particular manner. Or if you want to create empty spacing, CSS Grid can handle that in a way that would either not be possible or quite difficult with Flexbox. So I show the art because it's exciting. All these are from Jen Simon's labs. She has some really cool use cases for CSS Grid on the aesthetic end of things. Okay, so just like with Flexbox, we're going through the same formula or we're taking a parent container from your HTML markup. It's going to have children in order to enable the powers of CSS Grid. We're going to take our parent container, in this case, a section tag and we're going to say display grid and now we have all the magic of CSS Grid at our disposal. So we're going to look at some basic grid examples.  And I am introducing a new property here, grid template columns. Or thinking about grid, we, a simple way to conceptualize this is to think about a table. We're creating cells, columns and rows. So right here, I'm saying give me three columns. Each column should be 100 pixels wide. Cool. So our first three elements pop into the top row. Each one is 100 pixels wide and then our next three elements implicitly create the next row of the grid and we get an additional three cells. Cool. What about this is magical? Okay. After this, we are also getting the FR unit within CSS Grid. The FR unit is effectively replacing the need for percentages and what it's doing is it stands for a fraction unit and it takes up whatever space is left over. If it's replacing percentages, what exactly are we getting? I don't know, but let's take a look at it. So we are doing the same thing, three columns, one F R, one F R, one F R instead of 100 pixels and in this case, our DOM comes in, three columns, they're spread out, they're all even. Great. The difference here is that we're getting something that is flexible across devices but how is this different than a percentage? Still nothing quite there. However, something that's kind of cool is that you can combine a static value with one F R and you could probably cheat your way to something like this using calc and some subtraction but it's so much cleaner to say give me a static column that's 250 pixels in this example and then with the rest of the space, regardless of how big this device is, create a column that is that wide. So we end up with something like this, we have six elements, they come in to our new two column grid and they go 250 pixels wide and then one F R with the rest of the space. This will yet again work flexibly will be responsive across devices. So a situation where this might be handy is if maybe you're doing a blog layout or Wes Bos has a tutorial that's referenced at the end of this where he has like an album cover with like description and there are these times where you have an element that looks really great out of particular width that would look quite funny if you let it get too small or quite funny if it gets too large. Most common would probably be something like an image and you have elements that work really well across devices stretching and shrinking like text to be able to have a static value with a fluid value next to it without thinking about this is on a mobile device this is on the desktop, it's really handy. Okay, if we wanted to take this one step further we would introduce MinMax. So MinMax is a new keyword within or any function rather within CSS Grid which allows us to provide, you guessed it a minimum value and a maximum value. So if we were to do something similar to what we were just doing where we knew that something looked good at a static value but it actually would be nice if it could grow with the screen as it gets larger it just would lose context after a certain point of getting too small we could say grid template columns give us two columns even though we're providing three values we're saying for one value here's a minimum and maximum range of don't get any smaller than 250 pixels it's gonna look silly if this image gets any smaller then if there is more space we'll have a column that can grow one of our and it's another column that's one of our so what does that mean? We have a minimum of 250 pixels so our image in this will not get any smaller than 250 pixels so the bottom's out at some point it reaches its minimum but as the device gets bigger it starts to grow with the text somewhere where this is easy to grasp some of the fluidity across columns and rows is with image galleries so in Jen Simmons labs you'll find this example where you have a seven column layout here of images now if you were to create a seven column layout it's tricky to be able to create a seven column layout that can stay seven columns but can grow and shrink as the device moves but beyond that it would be rather difficult to create the same layout that could go down to six columns on a smaller device it could go down to four columns on a smaller device all with one CSS rule so how do we do it? Okay, to get closer to it we have to learn about the repeat function so this isn't a huge conceptual leap from where we were moments ago repeat works as we see here you provide two values one is the number of times that you want your column to repeat so I'm saying I want three columns the second number that you provide is the value that you want repeated so I am saying in both rules give me one up R, one up R, one up R at this point I'm still only creating grids that have columns and it's having my rows come in okay, however when the Jen Simmons example that we're just looking at we have the ability to change the number of columns we're not getting much further with repeat because we're still providing a fixed value of three to say how many columns we want in this layout we can use the autofill keyword to automatically populate the number of columns that the device can fit and we are saying put as many 100 pixel columns as will fit here say repeat, autofill do as many columns as I want make them all 100 pixels see it visualized, made up with something like this where our DOM has letters A through L each of those elements is 100 pixels wide dependent on the device width our columns will grow and shrink within that range problem here is we want optimum fluidity and we saw in Jen Simmons example that there were seven columns in the original shot and the seven columns those images could grow for a larger device size in order to have our columns grow and shrink right now our number of columns is changing but the columns themselves are staying that static value of 100 pixels in order to achieve that fluidity where they grow and shrink with the device we have to reintroduce min, max into this formula and I know this gets kind of chunky for CSS but that's the first time you're looking at it or maybe it's not the first time you're looking at it it's not so bad so we're saying grid template columns I'm only thinking about columns though we're using repeat because we want to be able to do this in terms that aren't static we want to be able to create multiple columns for our repeat value the number of columns we're using the autofill keyword which will just magically take our DOM our HTML and say grow within this area or shrink within this area and then we're saying min, max to say this is the value of the column don't make it any smaller than 115 pixels so still giving it a static value but it can grow up to 1fr meaning that we look at essentially the same thing that we're just looking at it picks up our columns before they jump up to the next row watch it again before b you can go to a there has to be a minimum of 150 pixel space on the row above for it to jump up there so they go 150 pixels each and then they grow 150 pixels each and then they grow it's pretty cool so going a little bit further down the route of images but this doesn't have to be images this can be content cards or this can be any interesting layout that your designer is handing over to you flow in CSS Korea as we've seen it so far it's taking your HTML we've seen our alphabet A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C, A it's taking the alphabet and feeding it into the DOM top to bottom, left to right and this is how HTML always works it wants to go in this order however if you have cells that are larger and you want to make a layout that's a little bit more complex and your DOM doesn't happen to be fitting just perfectly so in this example we see A is big and then we have B, C, D and then ideally E would be the same size as B, C, D however it's too wide and it comes down a line and then we're left with this empty gap so this is the default flow of CSS Grid however there is a property in CSS Grid where you can say grid auto-flow dense and what this will do is it will go through the DOM and go the way that it wants to and go A, B, C, D, jump down a line E just like it did the first time so the next time it comes to an element that fits an empty space that it passes it will go back and fill it in pretty amazing and you end up with something that yet again is incredibly fluid across devices that will grow and shrink now this could create an amazing layout and there's no real hindrance to creating it and you don't have to think about it too hard from mobile to desktop this is what we want to achieve however in order to do this you have to sync very hard in advance like what can I crop to be these various pieces to fit this grid yet again Wes Bosch's tutorial reference at the end has a pretty cool gallery that he makes of this and he also provides some JS where you can like it's like an image gallery where you click on it and you get the modal hop-up but it looks super clean, it's very cool okay last tray of serenity okay so when we're thinking about this up to this point we're just sort of we're discussing the ability to mess with columns in CSS Grid we thought about how Flexbox is really great at spacing we thought about how CSS Grid helps us to do like broader layouts we had some fun with the columns but at the same time you can create empty cells and do a lot of magic with CSS Grid that's a little bit trickier and lots more something kind of amazing that CSS Grid can do gets enabled when you start using grid areas now early conception of where we're going and I know that this is like painfully small but the idea here is that in our left hand column we're looking at a desktop device and it's not in terms of width it's just in terms of layout and we have our elements so we have some sort of logo at the top we have a navigation we have a body and then we have a sidebar maybe I think this is advertising and then footer it's like a reading test then we have a tablet layout where our pieces kind of come together and then we have our mobile layout actually we did that completely backwards mobile is on the left but the point is that like our layout is changing across these devices now just like we learned not unique to CSS Grid it's just the way that HTML comes onto a page it goes top to bottom right whatever is first in your HTML your header and then some body paragraph in an image it's going to go straight onto the page that way and you can style it with CSS but in terms of moving it around and rearranging the border you have some ability in Flexbox to do this you have the ability to like order within both of these display types but to truly move your markup around is something that you just want to do you would write two versions of the markup and you'd have some sort of script to say load this or you would hide things and then show them I imagine everyone here has probably done that at some point but they have like a huge image and they had to swap it out with one okay so the grid template areas we are able to control the flow of our DOM even further than just saying dense and kind of counting on it filling in pieces we can hand place pieces into our DOM elements into our grid it's pretty cool same concept here we have a container a wrapper we have some children our children in this case are named header, hero, content, sidebar these are going to be our grid cells within our grid container this is the first time that we're not just creating a column but we're explicitly saying these are our rows so we're going to have a single column that's going to be the full width 1fr and then we are explicitly declaring five rows and we're going to since they're our fractions they add up to a whole so you have 1fr then 2fr to be twice as big 3fr to be three times as big that's the first then 1fr, 1fr cool going back to our layout we see that we have one column we have our row heights explicitly defined and we have five cells in this grid cool our DOM is going to want to naturally blow in header, hero, content, sidebar, butter what we want to do is assume that this is Ungola device we want to assume that on our desktop we want to move these pieces around just like we saw in that first slide of various layouts so with grid template areas you have the ability to name the cell regions within your grid so in this case we have five cells and just for sake of example they are all at this point called grid cell, grid cell, grid cell grid cell you can stack them on top of each other you get this visual representation of what your layout ends up looking like now to actually take advantage of this naming convention we want to use names that make some sense and we make up those names so we say that we want our header to be first our hero to be second our content, our sidebar, our butter cool at this point we're just mimicking what the HTML markup is doing naturally however alright okay this is more explicitly saying where these pieces are going we're telling NRCSS saying where in the layout they should go we've named each of these cells something we're saying NRCSS take the element that has a class of header put it in the grid area that I have named header however if we wanted to we could say take the hero and put it in the grid area of footer NRCSS and it would put it in the grid area of footer and we could say take our footer and put it in the hero we're nuts alright so bringing media queries back into the mix here if we were to take that same layout five cells stacked on top of each other and we were to say now for a larger device I want to create this layout that has two columns and four rows so we'd end up with something like this we now have eight cells we use grid template areas to come in our naturally our HTML markup will fall into the first five cells there are still those three additional cells because I have an explicit grid created that has eight cells two columns four rows what we can do from here is we can name our grid cells with grid template areas and I have to account for eight different cells on four rows I'm going to give them the name what you can do is you can have a template area span across two cells you can have it span across two rows if you want so I can say header header and hero hero content sidebar you can put it cells next to each other footer footer now I have five DOM elements that are going to fill into these areas once I assign them those grid template area names so I say that I want my header to go into header which means that it will span the entirety of the header I want my hero to go into hero it will span the second row content left side of the third row sidebar etc you can see this visually it's all mapped out in our CSS so flexbox versus CSS grid this is a common question I added this slide like 10 minutes ago so Wesbos does have a video in his free course that's like flexbox versus CSS grid and he goes into 20 different examples and I think they're like a little bit hard to follow but the biggest takeaway is like an early conception of this is yet again flexbox handles your rows and CSS grid handles like a broader layout I do think for broader layout challenges it's nice to use CSS grid to conceptualize like where pieces should go or to do something complicated like empty spacing or if you want things to flow in a varied pattern across rows which I'll touch on in a sec again that CSS grid has some advantages in that room flexbox can do a lot of what CSS grid is doing and as we saw in that brief mockup of the website, the choices website if you go row by row with content which most like templates require unless you have like a really elaborate chunk of content to create from PSD to a template file you can get away with using flexbox for a lot of things and it goes really smoothly so if you're comfortable with that use it one variation between the two of them is that grid has this thing called grid gap which creates spaces between cells while flexbox has no such thing as flexbox gap or flex gap so you have to bring in margin to create spacing around your elements and when you're dealing with these things that handle spacing for you in a really elegant way to bring in your own exceptions of spacing with margin, in a fashion that's not incorporated into the syntax of that particular rule can get a little bit mucky as you go down the road while CSS grid has gap built into it and it's just part of like the broader conception of this grid. We'll go back one more time to dealing with like things of span rows and flexbox if you were to say space around and you had that flow across multiple rows this is the one where you have a little bit of space on the left, a little bit of space on the right and then spacing in between as you come to the next row if you have four elements and you have three columns you're gonna have space around, space around, space around it's gonna look nice on that first row then you have the additional piece come down and it's gonna end up centered and I find this really annoying with flexbox you can target that element individually and push it over to the left so that it looks like it's like in the broader spacing and looking but you don't really know at what point it's gonna go down to the next line CSS grid on the other hand you have cells mapped out and you can create that flow across rows in an easier way that's one headache that I find myself running into with flexbox that grid solves okay, no more code calc is at the end of this if it's of any interest to you moving forward if you are scared about compatibility look into app support it's kind of like a media query but you put code that you're like scared will this run in the browser inside of that rule and it won't run if the browser does not support it food for thought so foundation which is comparable to bigstrap has rebuilt its column structure using flexbox which is really cool but historically in my personal experience I've used frameworks like bootstrap and foundation for the columns within them I don't really use columns anymore like I find flexbox or CSS grid easier to do layouts with so maybe you don't need it and if you wanna keep learning flexbox froggy CSS garden are really easy ways to just like touch it for the first time if you want something more robust Westboss has a course on flexbox and of course on CSS grid if you're excited about the world cup which may just be me you know what I'm saying yeah, yes, yes, yeah I'm sorry there is a CSS grid tutorial to lay out soccer player formation I wanna strike, go Germany from the record if you're on the next team really someone really smart talk about the same things Warren Henderson has a talk and word for us TV Jen Simmons has really cool visual examples of a lot of the stuff and then Rachel Andrews has a blog she has common examples she has a YouTube video tutorial she has an e-book and all of her stuff on CSS grid is amazing slides are at sayedobossy.com forward slash WC for camp or community great, thank you how long was that transition how long did it take you to go from using things like bootstraps and columns to flexbox and grid? so when I was using bootstrap it was like I was saying strictly for columns so I wasn't as tied into like getting button styles really quick or something like that so it would have been a harder transition out if I was like deeper into it in terms of when it like really came like why would I make a template myself and incorporate columns unless it's like very specifically done on like a 15-column grid and it's just annoying to like think about like what that equates to it came after the first time I made this presentation it was like oh I like really understand the stuff now I should use it so it sounds like each of you is one or the other to make a layout with I think my original like answer to this was like think about a broader layout and this is like the common answer people say like think of I think that's 3D news how they say it which doesn't make sense on the screen but like think about like multiple rows in CSS grid and then think about flexbox across one row I think in terms of application that's probably accurate I what you can do in flexbox and what you can do in CSS grid for most problems both can't handle so it's really only in those edge cases which was laws like defines rather well so I've used flexbox CSS grid this is the first time honestly I've seen it or whatever you should have showed some examples that showed the functions is this all needed to CSS supported now or does CSS grid go through the parser something else or is it just check so the question is this is the first time that is looked at CSS grid and we introduce all these functions like minmax and repeat et cetera does this have to go through a pre-processor like SAS would or is this native to CSS and this is all native to CSS it just works in plain CSS all right we're out of time thank you


Just trying to see how this works. Good. So I'm here to tell you a little about the research that we've been doing in Amsterdam throughout the last 10 or so years on face-mounted photographs and cleaning of these. We were part of the initial face-mounting, an international face-mounting initiative, where a number of institutions worked together voluntarily to just have a look at face-mounted photographs, at cleaning, damage, and things like this. And I'd just like to share with you a little bit what we've been doing in Amsterdam. Some of the information has been published and some has not, for which I apologize, but we're doing our best to try to get that out. So this is my co-author, Bill Wei, Dr. William Wei. And he could not be here sadly enough today, but I thought, you know, include a picture so that you all know who he is, but if you go to the next conference where he might be at, and he's here in spirit. So, although, just a quick overview from a face-mounted photograph, we've talked about this often today and yesterday, or rather Monday during the workshop. Although each artist uses slightly different materials and methods, the general construction of a face-mounted photograph consists of a sheet of polymethymethacrylate permanently mounted to the image side of a chromogenic, a silver-dyed bleach, or an inkjet print. This is done using silicone adhesive or a double-sided acrylic adhesive tape, film. With the inkjets, a laminate may first be adhered to the surface before face-mounting. The photograph, adhesive, acrylic, and also secondary support can be added, are adhered by placing layers together in electronic press, and this combines to become one indivisible object, so it's all now a permanent layering structure. PMMA is really the name of the material, but of course, we know it as plexiglass, acrylite, lusite, perspex, and there are some other names for the people who went to the workshop on Monday and will go tomorrow, you'll see that as well. So just to tell you a little bit about the cleaning experience that we've been doing, we started out in 2005 with a condition survey to see what is the damage, what is the condition of these face-mounted photographs in collections. And then we went to the Curler-Miller, that Abba Museum, the Pont Stichting, Haus Mercedes, the Steylick Museum, pretty much all the modern art museums are the museums that are collecting modern art in the Netherlands. We did some light exposure testing, this has not been published, and we do hope to publish that, light fading of face-mounted photographs, and we've done cleaning and dust accumulation testing. And this is something that actually I'd like to just talk to you a little bit more about today, about the testing we've done recently with cleaning and the electrostatic charge that is left behind after cleaning. The testing that we did for from the very beginning were done with various cloths, the DRS roller, which I'll talk to you a little bit about, and ionized air. And some of this, as I said, has been published and have just noted the publication from the ICOM CC Triennial Meeting in 2008 in India. So for those of you who would like to have some more information on that, that's where you can find it. So what we did is we started out cleaning, and we got into these discussions as conservation scientists and conservators often does, where we were looking at microscopic levels of how much scratching does a certain cloth cause, and Bill said to me at one point here, but what does it matter if you can't see it? And so this is really where the idea of perception testing came into place, and this is something that I think is very interesting to look into further. What is too much dust? What is too much scratching? What is something that maybe is reasonable? So in 2010, we started the perception testing, and you can see here, this is the detail of the work from Valerie Bellin, who is the work I'll show you in a second, but if you look really closely as a conservator would, you can see the typical round cleaning, circular cleaning marks, and you can say, oh, no, it's happened. And then when you look at the work hanging there, it's huge, and a visitor probably won't even see that. I'm talking a little bit in extremes, but it's good to maybe have a discussion later. But can this be maybe part of a patina of a face around photographs? These are all ideas that we've discussed. So the perception testing is going on. What we did is we made panels and we cleaned them 50 times with the varying cleaning methods, and we realized how electrostatically charged service becomes, and this is where, for me, it became kind of important to find out what is the static charge left behind after cleaning, and how does it affect desk accumulation? Is it important, or can we just dismiss it as not important? These are the questions that we had, and so this is what we've been doing presently. Here, just another example of, these are the panels that we used from 2005, 2008 for dust collecting after cleaning, and you can see the various types of dust that have accumulated, and actually, this is something, and a form of dust accumulation that I think is also very interesting. You can see it here a little bit with breaking light, and here just with specular light. Is this something that happens when you're, because you're peeling the facing plastic from the plexiglass surface, and the charge that's left behind actually produces small areas, islands of the electrostag charge where the dust ends up collecting. These are just ideas that I have that I'd like to just look into somewhere. So the cleaning methods that we used were microfiber and anti-static cloths. We used them dry and wet. When I say wet, we used a 50% solution of ethanol and water, deionized water. The DRS roller system, which is a system that a lot of artists are intending to use that are creating face-matted photographs. We talked about it in the plastics workshop on Monday, and you'll see it for those of you who are participating tomorrow. We also used ionized and compressed air, thinking, you know, not touching the surface would probably be the best way, but can you actually get rid of all the dust that's on the surface with just compressed air and ionizing this, you know, ionized air where you're neutralizing the surface. One thing we didn't use initially, but we started testing with this last phase that we're in now is the Kunsthoff Reiniger, which is a cleaning agent made by Brunus, and it's also said to leave an anti-static layer on the surface. So here you're seeing a couple of the clouds that we're using. The dust bunny was initially in the cleaning methods, which is available by preservation equipment and Gaylord, so it's really kind of made for conservation. This is the common supermarket microfiber cloth and the quick-star cloth you see here. There's another cloth that we used, but it's no longer being made, so I'm not gonna go into that. And here you're seeing just, this is one of the other targets we're using for cleaning. We've gone through a number of different face-mounted photographs. These have been donated to us by Grieger in Düsseldorf, so we're very thankful for that. And now we're just kind of using a PMA sheet for the dust collecting and static charge. I have also tested face-mounted photographs just to see if that's comparable, if there's something, if there's a layering structure instead of just one acrylic layer. The dust removal rollers, there are a number on the market, and here you're seeing two at the top, oh, pardon me. At the top, you see the DRS, which is also used by many of the German Düsseldorf School and what Alex uses with cleaning the Jeff Wall photographs. It's made by, it's the dust removal system made by DryTac, a company based in Richmond, Virginia. And the roller below is the AMS, Advanced Mechatronics Solutions Roller, and that's made by a company that's based in San Diego, so both are American-made. And you can just see, this is the technique, the vertical, we're putting the panel vertically on the, yeah, can't think of the word right now. And you have the roller, which is a polymer. They talked, the description is that it's a polymer. I believe there's silicone component to it. It's kind of soft.  And I believe that it does that also because of static action, actually. When the roller has gotten a lot of dust, you can pass it across a sticky pad and then the dust will be transferred to the pad and you can keep going with a roller. Something else that we used, that I had been using for framing purposes, actually, is the ES2J ionizing air gun made by Simcoe. Simcoe is an international company based in the United States that specializes in static and anti-static apparatus.  So these are some other areas that this is used in. And the ionizing air gun works because it uses electronically-starched plates to produce positively or negatively-charged gas ions and they are squirted out of the gun.  Lastly, the Kunsthoff-Reiniger. I mentioned it's a cleaning agent. There's also another one that we looked at, the workshop that I've now forgotten the name, brilliant eyes, that's right. And that's, in American version, maybe you could say, I haven't tested that so I don't really know the qualities of that. But this is made by Bernus and what we did notice when we applied it, and you can see the streaks, is that it leaves a film. So this is something as a conservator that I might question the use of that for any reason. So the testing that we performed is we cleaned using the methods that I just mentioned. We measured the charge before and after peeling the PMMA's facing plastic off just to see what is the initial charge that comes on these surfaces. And then we did the charge, measured the charge before cleaning, after cleaning, and we looked at the duration of the charge. How long does the charge stay and remain on the surface of the plexiglass or PMMA? We're looking into, if there is a correlation with dust accumulation depending on how large the charge is, there are more dust on those panels. So this is what we're doing now. Dust monitoring, we're doing actually, we're doing a very easy type of monitoring, something that Bill has published. We're using a glass meter, and a glass meter directs a light at a specific angle, and we're actually using the Glass Master 260 manufactured by Sheen, and it measures angles 20 degrees, 60 degrees and 85 degrees. And so what you do is you, a glossy surface would reflect the light in the same angle and that would go right back into the detector of the glass meter, and so it would give you a certain number. If the surface isn't glossy, then the light has a diffuse reflection, and so you have lots of different rays going all over the place, so you have less light coming back into the detector. And this is how, so we're not actually measuring the amount of dust, but we're measuring the amount of the difference between the beginning glass and after time, glass after time. So this is, it's an easy thing to use. As I said, it calibrates with that little shoe that it's placed into, and what you take, it's a contact method. You place it on the acrylic glazing, and as long as you don't move it around, it isn't causing any scratching that we can see, and you can see here a dust plate and you would just put it on top and then you would get three measurements depending on how dusty it is, and then you can compare these measurements over time. Measuring the electrostatic charge, we're doing that with electrostatic field meters or one field meter that we've also gotten from Simcoe. It measures the magnitude and polarity of static charge, in fact. It's a non-contact measurement, so that this is nice, and it measures in kilovolts, and you can see there's just four buttons, you see the kilovolt sign, you'll have either a positive or a negative charge on the surface, so that this is something that it indicates, and if you're at a high place and you're going to measure, and you can't quite see the image, you can even press the whole button, and then when you come down, you can see it. It doesn't, unlike the glass meter, it doesn't hook up to a computer and it can't remember all your measurements, so this is something you have to note when you're doing the measuring. And here you see me measuring a large photograph by Gerald von der Kapp in the storage facility of the Steylick Museum, just to see if what our measurements were doing, if this is something that is comparable to real-life practice. And you can see I'm holding the electrostatic field meter about, I think, an inch from the work, and maybe you can see this little red dot, and when that's in focus, that's the distance that you want to have, basically. So just to tell you a little bit about what is electrostatic electricity, and I think everybody knows this, or the balloon trick, you know, where you rub a balloon to your hair and it sticks to your hair and it sticks to the ball. Well, basically what's happening is you create an imbalance of electric charges within or on the surface of the material, and we're talking with our materials more of the surface. And you have these electrons that are moving, these are all insulators and not conductors. Conductors think about the metals, think about copper wire and how it conducts electricity. They are the electrons they move freely throughout the materials, and that's how batteries work and so forth. But insulators, they don't release their electrons, so they have to actually discharge. And so the charge lasts as long as a discharge until the discharge comes, basically. So some materials cause or create more electricity than others. Since the static electricity is the collection of electrically charged particles on the surface of a material, various materials have a tendency of either giving up electrons and becoming positive or attracting electrons and becoming negative in charge. And there's something that's called, oh, the tribal electric series that lists the materials and depending on their charge and the more further these materials are away from each other, the higher the charge. I'm gonna just speed up a little bit cause I have a little time left. So contact adhesion and peeling away of an insulator will affect the static charge. Moving air will affect the static charge and moisture. And usually the higher the relative humidity, the less long the charge will be on the surface. So this is something we're also looking into. Just to go over the findings that we've had, this is the test of the fast peel and slope here. We did six panels for each. And you can see the means and standard deviation at the bottom. And the student T test at 95 confidence level shows that there is definitely a significant difference between the two measurements. However, I mean, slow peel, fast peel, you saw the sizes of the Jeff Wilde photographs. You don't really have control of that one point. I think the important message here is that you're causing quite a large amount of electr, static electricity when you're peeling away the plastic. And we actually, and we've been doing different testing, we actually have also numbers that go, well you can see it actually here, that go up to the 25 kilovolts more or less. In the cleaning methods that we use, here you see the graph, the blue lines is before cleaning and the red lines are after cleaning. So these results on only one specimen, we haven't done this three times. But this slide shows a trend that any cleaning procedure will reduce the electrostatic charge after peeling. It shows the effect of the iron gun, which de-ionizes the surface, whether fast or slow peel. The dust burning also had some good results. Further, there is more charge left after cleaning with the DRS, soft brush, and the two quick start treatments. And the Kunsthoff-Reiniger, the DRS by far showed the most electro-static charge. Clearly not doing anything after peeling off the foil will leave the largest residual charge. So this is something to think about. And not only when you're cleaning off the foil, but if you look at the photographs that Alex just showed, when you're unpacking, you're gonna have the same kind of effects. This is something that I'd still, we're still looking into, but theoretically it's the same thing. Something that was in contact, rubbing against each other, peeling off, what is the charge that's left behind and how do you deal with that? Here this graph shows the electrostatic charge over time. And what we're seeing is that the charge dissipates with time from the moment that the specimens were cleaned. And that in about 24 hours you have a significant drop. But it doesn't really, it's only about two weeks later that you have a pretty neutral surface. So this is something to think about when packaging and exhibiting and things like this. Glass measurements, you see, yeah, the way to read this diagram is to look at the slopes of the curves, not the absolute values themselves. The steeper the slopes, the faster the dust is accumulating. And you don't read too much into this slide because it's only a single specimen measurement, but also, but you do see two trends. There's a tendency of the specimens that had residual charge after cleaning, lost glass faster after the first month. The dust bunny and the quick start ride don't support this. This could be due to the dust accumulating immediately, but further testing has to be done. So just to give you a little bit of an idea of how we're gonna go further with this research, we're gonna keep going on the dust measurements and make more runs so that we can see how accurate it is every time we do it. We need to investigate the electrostatic charge by transport and packaging. I think this is something that is really important to look at, especially at the chaos of exhibiting and those 24 hours just before the opening, what are these works doing and when were they unpacked, were they unpacked in the clean room or not? And the effects of the air currents, if a work is under an HVAC vent, what does that mean for electrostatic charge and how does that react with, in terms of dust accumulation? The perception testing will keep going on and something else I'd like to look at is the effects of the solvents, water ethanol, the Kunstgeverreiniger on the stability of the PMMA. I'd just like to acknowledge the people that are listed here and especially the Creative Center of Photography, F-A-I-C and TrueView and you all. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Well, good morning all. I think we'll try to get started. I'm Steven Flanagan, Henry Kissinger Chair and Senior Vice President here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and it's a pleasure to welcome such a thoughtful and engaged audience this morning. I know we're delighted when we saw the list of those of you who took time on a fine spring day to come out and talk about what's rather gloomy situation in transatlantic affairs. But one point I want to make at the outset is particularly to our European friends in the audience that to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson as a group of our fellow transatlanticists, we come to you today with heavy heart. We're not here to throw stones or lay blame or to add fuel to a new burden sharing debate, but we want to talk about how we all work through this period of difficult fiscal situation in defense and foreign assistance and how the transatlantic relationship can survive the new austerity. So we're delighted to have this opportunity to discuss with you and with also, of course, the number of our American friends and colleagues, the findings of our report, a diminished transatlantic partnership, question mark, and I am to score the question mark. We're not saying it's inevitable, but the secondary title suggests that this is the challenge we've got to deal with. So our first draft of this report, we had a number of European colleagues who we helped us in reviewing this draft, and they said we had been a little bit too diplomatic in the way we discussed the trends that we saw both in the European fiscal situation and the impact that it would have on defense and foreign affairs. So we want to try to get to that today in a more direct and dramatic and candid fashion. And because we do really believe that absent dramatic action, the European side of the transatlantic partnership of the last six decades in maintaining international security and promoting a global development is in danger of being hollowed out by some of the trends that we see. And we're all going to have to, on both sides of the transatlantic partnership, going to figure out a way to get better value for the available resources that will be out there over the next five years, certainly, for both of those endeavors. And at a time when we know that defense in particular and foreign assistance is not a priority of governments facing very difficult choices at home and pressures to address pressing needs such as unemployment and maintaining social safety nets. And indeed, the U.S. is facing, as I say, similar decisions, calls certainly on Capitol Hill for sharp reductions in development assistance, some tough decisions head on defense. Of course, we have the benefit of operating off a much higher long-term level of defense spending, but we still have some erosion of capabilities and some challenges in maintaining them over the longer term that will have to be addressed. So we are here to talk primarily the European side of the equation, but we certainly are open to talking about how this relates. And indeed, some of the suggestions that we have, the policy recommendations on how to maintain the transatlantic capacity in these areas, do get to the heart of action on both sides of the Atlantic. So our plan this morning, as I said, we realize we have a very well-informed audience familiar with some of the general trends that we're going to talk about. So we want to really have this to be a dialogue and to get quickly through some of our main findings and recommendations. So I'll provide a brief overview of some of these key findings on the long-term economic challenge. And then I'll turn to my colleague in the middle of the panel here, Heather Conley, our director of our Europe program and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Northern and Central Europe who will provide some perspectives on overseas development assistance impacts and on how Europe is doing. She's been doing a great deal of work, as some of you know, on following how Europe is doing in managing some of the current economic turmoil. And then I'll turn to my colleague David Bertot, director of our Defense Industrial Initiatives Group, and a long time, many services in a number of positions in the Pentagon before that, who has done great work including one of the other studies that you see out there today. He and his colleagues from our Defense Industrial Initiatives Group have done another assessment of the European defense spending over the last two decades, which he's holding up, that also is out there available. And that report was written before the fiscal crisis, so we have more copies of that to give out. We only had reflecting the new austerity. We only have copies of the executive summary of the current report to give out, but it is available on our website to the whole group. And then I'll turn and come back to defense capabilities and some of the impact on some of the proposals that we have for how do we mitigate the impact of the financial crisis. So one of the things we looked at, and it was sort of looking at the economic and political context, was what is the impact of the financial crisis and the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis on the overall capacity and what were the longer-term economic trends, and again we're talking in broad brush about Europe as a whole, the EU 27 in particular when we're talking economics here, but what we've seen is sort of the big headline trend is that the good news at some level is that the cuts in defense and even more so in foreign assistance over the past two years since the onset of the crisis have not overall been as deep as some had feared and indeed not nearly as deep as some of the cuts and other discretionary spending in European countries. So defense and foreign assistance even more so has been, as our British friends would say, ring-fenced a bit from some of the heavier or closer haircuts. But the fact is I think this is not sustainable and we're seeing it already in some of the discussions that's underway and even again we're talking broad brush about Europe as a 27 here, it differs in various countries. But over the next five years we think that capabilities in the defense area are definitely going to decline off a base that reflects two decades of under-investment that's documented in the earlier Defense Industrial Initiatives Group report that ambitious foreign assistance plans are going to be trimmed and Europe's level of ambition in the world is going to be tempered by demands of getting its economic and political house in order. And the public discontent, the protests that we see in Greece and Spain, even in the UK over cuts to the NHS and to education, I think is a sign of the kind of political challenges that governments are going to face in Europe in maintaining commitments to defense and foreign assistance. Now just some quick headlines on the longer-term trends and I want to get Heather up here to talk about development assistance, but what we looked at as we looked at, and with the exception of Heather and maybe David a little bit more, I'm certainly no economist, but we looked at some of the long-term trends here and some of the best projections of all of the key analytic, the key analyses of longer-term defense, I mean of longer-term economic, the longer-term economic situation. And what we found was that most of these, the EU 27 is going to experience an average annual growth rate of 1.5% through 2013 with a continuing risk of double-dip recession and weak growth by historical standards out to at least 2015. So the sense of the new normal, if you will, is going to be very modest growth. And of course there are some exceptions, you know, Germany and others, Turkey of course is doing better than that, but others, you know, as a whole this is going to be a problem. And of course mounting debt, Heather will talk a little bit about this, but mounting debt which could grow from about 80% of gross domestic product in 2010 to more than 100% of GDP by 2015 without difficult policy challenges. And there are these other longer-term macroeconomic imbalances that we're going to see a large output gaps, high unemployment and wide fiscal deficits and the need to exit from exceptionally loose monetary policy. Now one of the other things that the economic analysis suggests is that even if there is a near-term and effective solution to the current sovereign debt crisis, Europe's implicit debts, is to say the cost of maintaining the social safety net of an aging population and many other costs are going to be quite difficult in terms of what the even growth potential is. Some of this is due to demographic trends which are going to increase the ratio of pensioners to taxpayers. It's going to lead to a sustainability gap. So aside from the current demands, we're going to see growing limited resources to support an aging population and such that the GDP potential growth of the EU 27 in the further period, out to 2020, is likely to see a fall from what was projected at about 2.4% to about 1.7% in the following two decades. So I think that you see that we're going to see this continuing constraint absent some other adjustments in policy. So that is the overall economic and political context in which we now will look at how is this impacting overseas official development assistance and defense industry. I'll turn first to Heather and then David will come up and talk about the defense industry. So thank you. Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. I want to just have a personal note. What a pleasure it has been to work on this project and to have an opportunity to work with David and Steve. And this truly is a story that we're just at the beginning of. So I hope this report and some of our comments help provide a frame of reference for the story that we're going to have to watch really closely over the next several months to next several years. Just a very, very brief comment on just sort of the snapshot of this morning's news that we're seeing that the 10-year yield on the Greek bond and difference to the German bond is now at a record high. We're seeing pressure on bond yields on Spain's debt, Portuguese, Irish debt. Typically how Europe has addressed these types of significant challenges is the muddle through challenge, which means try to wait it out, try to work through the problem. That strategy for Europe with regard to the sovereign debt crisis is closing rapidly. So we're at that moment, that fork at the road, if you will, whether this crisis is going to serve as an opportunity for a quantum leap in integration for both fiscal union and a stronger economic union, or we're going to see the potential for the rollback of the integration project. And I can't begin to tell you, and my colleagues at my apologies, they hear me say this every single day, this crisis is the defining and shaping event for Europe, how it projects its power and its own internal development. So this project in many respects is extremely important to understanding Europe and understanding the implications for the transatlantic relationship. But turning to overseas development assistance, official development assistance, I have to tell you the story right now is good. And I want to assure you that Europe's soft power, its ODA, is truly its power. And I don't usually like to use PowerPoint, but I thought that the numbers here helped shape the story. So I'm going to go a little bit into the numbers and then talk a bit about the methodology of how we looked inside Europe to see what's going on with the austerity measures, how it's affecting overseas development assistance. So if you just take a quick look at my first graph, the power here, European totals for official development assistance, 80.8 billion, that's 67% of the entire total. These are OECD figures from the Development Assistance Committee. The U.S., in contrast, is 28 billion, which is only 23%. So this is Europe's very strong leadership and power. And I want you to also see from institutional to member state, while the EU, the Commission as an institution, is a strong provider of assistance, you see where the strength really comes from the member states. And again, you see some pretty significant totals there. So great, great strength and power. Now let's dig a little deeply into the individual member state contribution. And again, there was some method to our madness here. What I wanted to do as we jumped into the numbers was divide into three groups. I wanted to look at the impact on the periphery. So the country I chose to look at was Ireland. I could have chosen Portugal. I could have chosen potentially Greece. But I want to take a look at Ireland. When we did our report, we only had the benefit of the 2009 OECD numbers. Subsequently, the 2010 numbers came out. You're not seeing an extraordinary amount of difference in Ireland. I will kind of come back to what's going on underneath those numbers. But look at Spain. Portugal hasn't changed, but I think in part because 70% of Portuguese ODA is tied aid. That's helping their export markets. And I think that's been protecting it in some respects. You look at the UK, in increase, Germany in increase, and then the Netherlands and Poland. So I grouped them. I looked at the periphery. I looked at the core Europe, meaning UK and Germany. And then I looked at what I'm calling the outliers, which was looking at some different things going on in the ODA community. Poland was not dramatically affected by the economic crisis initially. 2009, it actually had positive growth. In the Netherlands, there's been some interesting coalition politics that have gone into driving some of the future policies. But I just wanted to give you a sense of diving into those numbers. Okay, so let's take a look at the periphery. I wish I could tell you last fall as we were deciding, the countries to study, that I knew the president was visiting three out of the five countries next week. I'd like to take credit for that, but I can't. But I think this will help as President Obama takes his European trip next week to see some of the impact that the economic crisis has provided to Europe. So let's take a look at Ireland. Ireland really, the last several years, came on as a very strong presence and power in ODA, in its soft power becoming the ranked fifth in the EU as a most generous ODA donor, seventh most generous in per capita terms in the world. In 2009, we saw a drop off of a reduction of 224 million euros. What's important about that reduction is that 80% of Irish aid goes to sub-Saharan Africa. It's a very targeted poverty alleviation focus. And what we're seeing, and I'll come back to that trend line, is this has huge implications for development to sub-Saharan Africa. A foreign aid is very popular in Ireland. It absolutely held a strong public opinion in surveys. What we're seeing since the imposition of the austerity measures, that's starting to decline. People are having to make choices. And that overarching and overwhelming sense of generosity is starting to become under some challenge. And I think that's something also for us to watch as a trend line across Europe. So again, we are seeing a diminishment. We're going to have to watch next year's budget obviously as the austerity measures really come into play. So that's just an example of what we're seeing in the periphery. Let's go to core. And obviously the UK is the standard bearer for ODA and DFID has been exemplary. The UK has tripled its ODA in real terms. It's the fourth largest aid donor. When the UK announced its comprehensive spending review, one of the two things that were ring-fenced was DFID as well as some protection of the National Health Service. Now, you have to look into that though. DFID was protected and in fact increased its budget by 35% at the same time decreasing administrative costs by 33%. So they're doing more, but they're significantly reducing administrative oversight. And I think again, you'll see that trending here in Washington. It's going to be trending across the spectrum. We're also seeing some reprioritization and readjustments. The UK has established a commission to oversee and analyze current assistance trying to get those efficiencies. They're reprioritizing. They're not funding aid programs to Russia and to China. We're seeing again a much greater focus on poverty alleviation and their millennium development goals. So we're seeing leadership there, but you're seeing some changes within that dynamic. Now, I looked at Germany obviously because of its exceptional economic growth, seeing if that, that we're seeing some stronger benefits in Germany. In 2009, there was a 12% reduction in German aid. Some of that, Germany is now focusing more on providing loans, sort of reducing that grant debt relief. We saw some small increases in 2010 focusing on Afghanistan, the part of their assistance work there, and climate adaptation financing. What we're seeing across the board, Germany is failing to meet some of its commitments that it made at the G8 summit in 2005 in Glen Eagles. And it's certainly a percentage of the shortfall that we're seeing in the total EU contribution to its ODA. We'd like to see a little more focus, a little more vision for German assistance. And we're certainly not seeing where its economic leadership, its ODA leadership, is falling behind that. Finally, my two outliers. We're not seeing an incredible amount of leadership from Poland in ODA. Small increases, but it's focused on Afghanistan. We're 30% of its ODA goes. We're looking at a concentration of its assistance on its neighbors, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, the Eastern Partnership Initiative. And I think you're going to see, and this will probably be announced a lot next week when the President visits Warsaw, a lot of work on democracy promotion and seeing where Poland's niche value is democracy promotion. But you're not seeing, again, economically a burst for Poland, as you would think, because its economy is growing. And as a new member, not necessarily taking those important steps. Finally, the Netherlands. I chose the Netherlands because I was seeing some interesting behaviors based on the new coalition government. And while the Netherlands is a wonderful and strong ODA partner and contributor, we're seeing now that there is a reduction of 4.5% in its ODA as part of the coalition agreement in 2010. It will reduce its foreign aid budget by a billion euro. It's seeking to expand the definition of its ODA. It wants to include peacekeeping. It wants to include its work in Afghanistan. And you're starting to see where some of the coalition developments, and this is the introduction of some of the Gert Wilder's influence, is having an impact on ODA. Finally, some trends. This is not going to be music to many of our AID colleagues' ears. We're seeing that there's going to be a significant decrease in the commitments that were previously made to sub-Saharan Africa. That's just an effect of both austerity and I think some existing trend lines. We're going to see a return to tide aid, where export markets for these countries are going to receive their ODA and it's not necessarily targeting a poverty alleviation. We're going to expand the definition of ODA. We're going to demand efficiencies, great scrutiny over the aid that is provided. Loans are going to be increased and grant aid will be decreased, which will increase the debt burden for developing countries. And clearly we're going to see a huge need to coordinate. And one of the recommendations that came out of this report, and what we're seeing, the Obama administration announced after the U.S.-EU Lisbon Summit in November, a new coordination of assistance I think next week in the UK. There will be some announcements about U.S.-UK work on trying to coordinate this development assistance. So we're starting just to see the beginning of austerity. It's not going to be impactful this year and next year. We don't have the numbers to reflect that. But I think it speaks to greater coordination and also how does the private sector, the role of the private sector development play into this space. So it's an ongoing story. And I thank you very much. And with that, I will turn to David. I'm sorry. The issue is offering the good news story today that we have a finding of a healthy and diversified defense industrial base, but a question is about declining demand. So, David, over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Like Heather, I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to have worked with my partners up here today. One of the elements of coming to a think tank is you can walk in with the illusion that it's actually easier to cooperate inside a nonprofit organization than it is inside a profit-making firm. It turns out that's actually not true. But if you work at it enough, you can do it, and it does have enormous benefits. I would also like to thank the work of my staff, both in terms of the project here and our contributions here and our broader European defense spending and defense trends activities. Guy Benari, who is my deputy in the Defense Industrial Initiatives Group. Roy Levy. Joachim Hofbauer, I think, is here. Greg Sanders, I think, is actually working on Afghanistan now and is not here today, because it turns out Europe is not the only problem we have on the planet. I'm particularly reminded of back when I was a civil servant, and I was first emerging from living paycheck to paycheck, and somebody asked me about my investments, and I said, well, that's easy. All of my investments are in debt. At the time, I meant it as a joke, but it turns out the economic reality of the day is almost everybody else is in the same boat now. And I think that if we measure the future by post-crisis Europe, it's a very interesting way of thinking about it. I'm going to limit my remarks to the section of our report, which is largely constituted in Chapter 4 and a little bit of Chapter 5. That's pages 9 and 10 in your executive summary, and give you a couple of summary comments and then talk a little bit about what we might extrapolate that from where it's going. Defense spending, of course, in Europe is down over the last decade. That's obvious to everybody. We've documented it pretty thoroughly. It's down a little bit under an average of 2% per year across all European countries, more in some, less in others. But intriguingly, of course, the spending per soldier, and here I use the word soldier as multi-service and multi-named, if you will, is actually up because over the last decade, force structures have come down faster than spending has come down. And that's actually an astonishing phenomenon. I wish I could say that this is according to somebody's plan. It's not. It's just what happened. And actually, interestingly enough, there's opportunity for that to continue in the aggregate but not in most countries because there are a few places where force structure is still probably excessive to any future use or threat. And so there's an opportunity for additional force structure reductions. The second kind of surprising element from our perspective is that typically in the United States, when we have dramatic reductions in defense spending, the accounts that are reduced the most, both in terms of percentage and in terms of dollars, are the investment accounts, the procurement account from an appropriations point of view, the research and development account, the money that goes to buy systems and end items and products. Why?  Most of you here in the personnel business know that it actually costs money to cut people, at least initially, because you've got to pay all of their accumulated sick leave and their retirement and then you've got to hire somebody else to take their place or figure out how to spread their work, give it to a contractor, whatever. So you actually get reductions in the current year when you make reductions in the investment accounts. You don't if you make those reductions in people. That's not what's happened in Europe over the last decade. And in fact, the investment accounts, procurement and R&D, and it's a little hard to tease the data out the same way that we do it in the U.S. but we've got pretty good representation, have actually been more good than the other ways in which money is spent. This has been good for industry, right, because actually that's where industry makes most of their money. One of the things that we do is we track the performance of defense industry companies both here in the U.S. We have our own U.S. defense index that we track and we also have created a European defense index of publicly traded companies. A little hard in Europe because the ownership structures are a little bit different compared to the other companies that have traded data. But we do this really for two reasons. One is we want to see how European defense companies are performing compared to other companies, if you will, like kinds of companies in the manufacturing and the technology business, et cetera. And we also want to look at how the financial market looks at them because ultimately defense companies have to have access to capital the same way all other companies do, where else the capital is not going to be able to get capital at attractive terms, they're not going to be able to invest, they're not going to be able to sustain their growth, they won't be able to maintain the jobs that are in place today. What we have found over the last decade is that European defense companies are performing on a comparable level with non-defense companies in the European global market. That's probably not a surprise if you think about it. On the other hand, we're not sure anybody else is going to be able to do that. The question is, what does all that mean going forward? Because that's a nice way of looking back at the last decade and saying this is what we've seen, what are we projecting going forward? Much tougher. I'll come back to that in a minute. I want to lay out a couple of things first, though, because one of the questions that comes into play as you're reducing both force structure and spending is how are you going to maintain any kind of defense capability? And this is Heather hinted across NATO and the European Union and all of Europe. This is a much, much more expansive question than just a question of money and what you're getting for it. But clearly it opens up enormous new opportunities for collaboration, for specialization, for cooperation across boundaries, across programs, so that in fact collectively we gain more capability for fewer dollars spent or fewer euros spent. Now, that's easy to say. History says it's pretty darn hard to do. What's the future of multilateral cooperation? There have been some good examples, but none of them have been cheap and they have tended to be focused on large, platform-driven long-term, multi-year, multi-billion euro programs. Similarly with transatlantic defense cooperation, the focus has been on the big program. And of course those of you who have been here before know that I boldly predicted that we would not see the termination of me-ads until we had something to take its place. I was flat wrong, unless you consider nothing to be something, because that's in fact what has taken its place. But I think that the opportunity is still there and it's there both inside a European cooperation point of view and from a transatlantic cooperation point of view. But the target has got to be smaller, more focused kinds of cooperations rather than large platform-based or major multi-billion dollar or multi-billion euro programs. I don't see, however, anybody working that idea into reality. And if you look at the recent developments, particularly post-me-ads, no one is raising sort of, okay, where are there other opportunities for cooperation that could come into play. Some of them are coming up at the bilateral level, but there's no good multilateral approach yet visible to do that. I think we're kind of missing an opportunity. So what does that mean for the industry? What it means for the industry is you're not going to have your big markets domestically in an intra-European sense unless something changes. And on a global sense, the export markets, of course, offer enormous opportunity, but we have a couple of constraints. One of the biggest constraints is U.S. export controls. And obviously we have an effort underway in the U.S. to streamline and modernize that approach. We all know the mantra of some fewer products. We also know that that mantra has yet to materialize in anything other than op-eds and articles. And so we're still moving forwards, but at a pace that's not discernibly different than standing still. And so, you know, it may be some psycho-electronic activity underway, but as yet, the regulations themselves are not fundamentally changed. You also have the potential chilling effect of the WTO rulings, although as near as I can tell, that's going to play out through the appeal process for probably longer than I'm going to be in my position here, and so I'm not going to predict exactly the end date of that. Finally, though, there's a European counterpart on the export controls, and that is we're nearing the implementation dates for the EU directives on procurement and on transfers, which, if carried through to their logical conclusion, could lead to an opportunity for an ITAR free, single license intra-European transfer for European companies in which US companies may not be able to participate. This is an understudied area, one that we continue to watch very closely, but if you look at all of these elements together, I think you have the opportunity for doing a couple of things on collaboration and specialization. You have almost no US government support in favor of that, not much visibility to it, if you will. We've suffered two secretaries of defense in a row now, spread out over 11 years almost, who believe that Europe is not important in terms of investing in partnership capacity and development. Whether or not that changes with the incoming new secretary of defense remains to be seen, and I think it will be as much driven by opportunities as it will be by policy, and so I look forward, I think, to our questions as we look at some of these pieces and how they fit what we've talked about this morning. Steve, back to you. Thank you, David. Let me just wrap up with some of the issues that we see in defense capabilities and how to get through this in terms of managing better and getting better value for resources available. Picking up where David left off though, I think what we see then in the out years, he talked about the trend lines that we've seen. The sense that as we looked at budget plans, some program laws of different countries and just the fiscal realities, what we think we see is there are going to be further cuts required in force levels, in capabilities and particularly in readiness, particularly for those forces that are not engaged in current operations, as well as some deferred procurements and eroding and overall erosion, I think, of European military capabilities in that out year period. The cost of current operations, I mean, this is the one area where most governments have as, you know, obviously we see in the U.S., too, with the notion of providing support to forces in the field, that becomes the priority and it has been so far, but in a number of cases, particularly in some of the major contributors, such as the U.K., the source of funding, as have been extra budgetary outside the defense budget, that's been good news at some level because, of course, it has taken some of that burden off of already you know, defense budgets feeling a great deal of pressure, but how long that extra budgetary funding can be maintained is questionable. The U.K. has certainly said very explicitly that the current coalition has maintained its commitment to the 2014 end of the transition period to Afghan lead and security, but in a number of other countries, certainly that kind of level of commitment and the ability to sustain the operations, particularly those countries that are paying for current operations, not only, of course, now Afghanistan, but also Libya, out of defense budgets, is taking its toll and we already see some of the limitations, some forces complaining that they're having shortages in Libya of munitions, particularly of costly precision strike munitions, difficulty maintaining the operational tempo, both of air forces in the region, so again, we're talking very broad Bush, but I think this is some of the challenge that we're going to see. Now Afghanistan, of course, has been transformative and I think we shouldn't overlook the fact that European forces and Canadian forces have been really transformed by their experience in Afghanistan. They become more expeditionary, their level of readiness of those forces that have been deployed there and they tend to be the same forces or same units deployed time have seen their training and capabilities really develop, but for those other forces that are not going to be involved in those current and future current operations, both Afghanistan through, say, 2014, 2015 and whatever other operations NATO will be and other European countries will be engaged in with the United States, we're probably going to see the readiness and capacity of some of those secondary forces, the less ready forces to continue to erode and particularly in the area of reduced training costs for pilots and for other aspects of field exercises and other things that will maintain those capabilities. And certainly we see a growing interest among European governments for, if you look at various white papers, certainly Afghanistan has been a strain on all of the contributing states, much more emphasis on crisis management, on operations that have clear in and out strategies and that have very explicit timelines about exit dates and not some open-ended and the fear of mission creep, which of course has taken its toll. We also think that the fiscal constraints, when you look at the impact on NATO, both the Lisbon Summit capabilities package and looking towards any kind of initiative in the 2012 NATO Summit on capabilities, I think there's a great deal of uncertainty about how much of those capabilities can be realized. I think it was telling that of course even the fact that it was called a capabilities package and not a commitment in the end of the day was a sign of uncertainty about how much of it could truly be realized. And I think also in missile defense there's a great deal of uncertainty about what part of the cost European governments are prepared to provide for the development of a defense system. Now we focus on the capabilities of the three most capable European NATO allies the UK, France and Germany and what they do will be determined. These three of course represent about 65% of all defense expenditure in NATO Europe and about 88% of research and technology investment. And just quickly, many of you know the details and of course we have representatives of these governments here to their plans and intentions. But I think what we see is an overall commitment of those three to certainly maintain sizable and sustainable capabilities for a number of contingencies. The UK's security and defense review calls for about 8% cut in defense spending over the next four years and levels off but there will be further cuts after 2014. In all likelihood there are a number of so-called unfunded mandates that have to be dealt with programs that are not fully funded out through the lifetime of their procurement costs that are going to cause difficult decisions ahead. But that said, and the UK has made a commitment that it will be able to have the capability to lead the lead nation in a coalition or a NATO-led operation and maintaining a self-sustaining brigade of a force of about 6,500 soldiers capable of being deployed anywhere in the world and sustained indefinitely. Now we've already seen though some questioning second guessing about that some of the decisions of the SDSR, even just this week Lord Stanhope, the Lord of the Adeno, the Navy suggesting that his wish list he might wished he could, if we could redo the strategic defense and security review perhaps we would have taken a harder look at the carrier decision to take and the strike capability of the aircraft out of service that that certainly would have improved options with regard to Libya, but again that's another matter. We've seen other questions about strains on current operations in the air forces and how pilots were being trained or not trained for ground attack in the case of the typhoon. A number of other questions out there but let's not get into too many of the details. On the French White Paper on Defense of course had already set a course the financial crisis had sunk in in full effect the 2008 paper had set a course for a force size reducing from about 270 to 225,000 with corresponding budget cuts over the subsequent six to seven years. The 2011 plan calls for further reduction in defense spending through 2013 but Paris is committed to maintaining the capacity to simultaneously 30,000 soldiers deployable within six months for a period of one year or for a major operation and will have a 5,000 strong reserve force on permanent operational alert with another 10,000 available for territorial defense. So again all of these three countries trying to manage in difficult circumstances but maintaining that these countries maintaining that commitment to some expeditionary and substantial expeditionary capability. Now in Germany of course just this week Defense Minister de Mazier has just come forward with the final assessment after a number of internal German reviews of their defense planning including the calls for an abolishment of conscription and a cut in troop levels from about 250,000 to a maximum of about 185,000 there would be 170,000 professionals plus a number of reservists with a 5 to 15,000 maximum of short-term volunteers who would come in for a period of 12 to 24 months. Now I think there was some good currents and maybe some post-Libya reconsideration in some of the rhetoric surrounding the release of de Mazier's report the quote I thought was very telling prosperity brings responsibility and the Germany needs to take greater responsibility to consider interests that require engagement and the consequences of not engaging and I thought that was very telling. The report came out the de Mazier plan comes out somewhat closer to the higher end not quite as high as some plans the so-called VISA plan had talked about of up to 14,000 but was agreed that about 10,000 German soldiers should be available for two major including one as a lead nation that is with a brigade-sized force and up to six minor operations over a period of several months so I think that we see at least some sense in the German decisions here about the need to maintain a more a fairly substantial capacity and that perhaps even some reconsideration of the consequences and implications of its opting out of the Libyan mission. Now in the context of these trends among the Big Three I think if we look at the other allies NATO Europe really the bottom line is only going to be able to make the rest of the alliance is really going to be able to make marginal contributions to capabilities to undertake various missions absent a significant restructuring and much greater defense integration. Most of the allies would be able to contribute something on the order of a battalion to future expeditionary operations in the naval domain allies will have the ability to contribute to limited number of surface combatants for sea control for maritime security for humanitarian operations but force levels and operational flexibility and global presence is also going to have seen some contraction. Air forces are going to be constrained by shrinking fleets, reduced pilot training and tightened budgets that will also constrain sustained combat operations and again as I said we are seeing this in spades in the context of the Libyan operation unified protector. So just quickly some of the highlights of our suggestions on how do we how do we get through this in the defense area. One concern we found is that it strikes us that most European governments are pursuing defense reforms and reductions on a purely national basis driven largely by resource constraints with little or no reference to NATO or EU obligations and some of these plans indeed a number of the reviews were undertaken well before that even the new NATO strategic concept was adopted. The NATO defense planning process has been reformed and revised to try to become more effective in managing some of these but many say that it's not quite the right mechanism it's too slow and besides a lot of allies have usually used the process to justify national decisions. Secretary General Rasmussen has talked about the need to have so-called smart defense to make sure that we're both getting maximum value for available resources but also to ensure that he's used the term the coherence of the overall residual capability that's going to be out there and I think that's really the key question that we see and the whole question of can we adapt perhaps the NATO defense planning not to set up a new long-term defense plan or other kinds of capabilities commitments but do we need to augment the traditional planning process and include a mechanism that would ensure that there is some greater reference to the out year forces and how they're going to work together how do they complement or not complement one another and this I think is relevant to a number of European defense cooperation initiatives that are underway outside of NATO. Now Allied Command transformation is underway has underway a process of looking at synchronizing and developing capabilities for multinational capability development pooling and sharing of capabilities looking for opportunities in role specialization and other things that have been tried with some success and I think that's all to the good we have to recognize that these corporations have to take into account a great deal of differing capabilities and goals and requirements within all of these nations but there are some plans out there that I think merit some real attention and some support including from the United States. Now of course the Anglo-French Defense Cooperation Treaty of 2010 I think was an important step one that certainly has been welcomed by the U.S. as a real opportunity to ensure the sustainability and capability of both those governments in the long term as they maintain capabilities and complementarity and it is very much reflective of just that goal I was saying that these two governments are looking at how their two forces will fit together the British indeed of course abducting their plans about the carrier to have interoperability with the French in the longer term to go to the through direct version of the Joint Strike Fighter in the long term rather than the short takeoff version. So I think this is a kind of a step that has been welcomed could be encouraged but I think the U.S. should be more actively engaged in that discussion because what these two countries do clearly is going to have a big impact both on what other European allies do and also on permanent structured cooperation within the EU. There are a number of other initiatives out there in various regional groupings and I think that they send to show the most promise cooperation among the Nordic Baltic states, the Visegrad, the Poles have just announced in the last few days a commitment of a new battle group that would be a Visegrad battle group of Weimar group in France and Poland and Germany working together in another of other areas trying to shape European contributions to this and I think all of these are to be commended and also we need to look at how they fit together within overall NATO capabilities. There's another German Swedish initiative that also looking at promise of EU polling and sharing that has laid out some very, I think some very thoughtful considerations of how this can work effectively, what nations are willing to truly share, where they really do want to retain national capabilities and where they can move forward to ensure that they are getting best value for resources. So all of these things I think are things that we need to look at more in the transatlantic dimension and how do we ensure that together we are making the right choices and that there will be this complementarity of the residual capabilities that we're likely to see in both sides of the Atlantic in the defense area in the period of 2015 and beyond. But that said, I think our bottom line is that with a healthy defense industrial base, a cadre of operationally experienced and effective forces and its status continuing as a leader in soft power the prospect of still some recovery after some difficult period of austerity, Europe has the tools required to play a larger role in world affairs but we're going to have to work closely together to ensure that the transatlantic ties in this context that we don't end up into an acrimonious and difficult burden sharing debate and that the overall coherence of our end state capacities both in defense and foreign assistance together in the most effective way.