Greetings, everyone. I'm Steve Clemens. I'm Senior Fellow and Founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and the New Washington Editor-at-Large of the Atlantic. And it's a matter of pride for me today to be here. One, I haven't seen my good colleague Flint levered in quite a while. So I've been out working on other fronts. So it's good to be here with Flint. And this young man, Samir LaWani, who's created this provocative paper, we see a lot of folks from the military establishment here. And I don't know whether go at him is all I can say, because he can take it. Samir is my former research assistant. He's also, more importantly, an MIT presidential fellow, member of the Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies at MIT, currently pursuing his PhD in political science at MIT, a research fellow with the American Strategy Program here at the New America Foundation. His co-author of this paper that we're discussing today with our command of the commons, Choosing Security Over Control, was co-authored with Joshua Schifrinzen, a PhD candidate in MIT's Department of Political Science, also affiliated with the MIT Security Studies Program. And Josh is also a research fellow at the International Security Program at the Belfer Center at Harvard. So it's a great pleasure to have Josh with us for what I think is our first time. To Josh's right, as Flint levered, as I mentioned, is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and director of our Geopolitics of Energy Initiative in our American Strategy Program. He's one of the country's leading authorities on US foreign policy, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. His blog, Race for Iran, is something I recommend to everyone, particularly in terms of getting a daily dose of completely contrary. And imagine, just before Nixon went to China, this is Flint on Iran. He's a former senior director for the Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, a senior analyst at the CIA, and was a Middle East expert on the State Department, Secretary of State's policy planning staff. So it's a great pleasure to be with Flint. Larry Korb, who has to testify at 2 o'clock today, so he'll be leaving just a bit early. Great friend from the Center for American Progress, former senior Reagan administration, Department of Defense official. He is a senior advisor to the Center for Defense Information and adjunct at Georgetown University. He really has, in my view, been one of the real interesting voices of sanity during lots of tumultuous times when we think about what I consider to be a discontinuous moment for America's national security thinking and what's going on in the world. So we've got an outstanding program. I'm going to ask Samir to take the helm first. No, Josh is going to take the helm first. You should tell me that. Josh is going to take the helm first, then Samir, then I think that Flint and Larry will have at you guys, and then I will make it a free for all right after that. I also want to say hello to those watching online. We'll be back to you too. So Josh. Thank you, Steve, for the introduction and thank you to Sheryl and the rest of the New America team for really making this project happen. Now as Steve mentioned, this project is entitled Wither Command of the Commons, Choosing Security Over Control. And you'll note the background here. This is a famous painting of Lord Nelson's victory the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, a victory that has come to symbolize the ascendance of British naval master in the 19th century. Now today when we think naval master, when we think command of the maritime commons, we don't think Britain, Britain as Paul Kennedy has pointed out was brought low by the relative decline of its economy and strategic overextension. And today there's a debate whether the U.S. is in a similar position. It exerts command of today's commons, the air sea and land domains through which people goods and information flow. But many in both the policy and academic worlds are questioning whether U.S. command will win the future as budgetary constraints take hold and as new great powers emerge that seem to pose new security challenges for the United States. The cues facing the United States today are thus one, whether the U.S. can maintain command of the commons and two, how it can best do so. And we are gonna focus today on the maritime domain, the maritime commons. And just to give a quick definition, see if this works. Oh, there we go. Command of the commons simply put is the ability to project military and economic power across the maritime domain at times and places of America's choosing, deriving greater benefit from this situation and having the ability to deny access to this common to others in wartime. That's a critical feature. And we believe that today the United States can in fact maintain command of the commons in the far into the future. But it requires reorienting how we think about achieving this end state. Now, I mentioned that we advocate a new strategy. I'll get to that in a minute. But let me just say a few words by way of background. For much of the last 30 years, we argue that the United States has pursued command of the commons through a particular type of military strategy. Well, we term it control strategy and we outlined this in the paper. The control strategy has three interrelated elements. First, it equates openness of the commons, the maritime commons, with uncontested American dominance of this domain. Allies and adversaries are like, are used as domain by our writ, basically. And it requires both hugging our allies and adversaries close. We have to monitor them intensely and ensure the fact that they do not contest American dominance. Second, even though it argues that America must have uncontested dominance, it somehow treats the commons as fragile. That is, local disruptions can have a cascade effect and grand strategic challenges to US command are not to be allowed. As a result, the third element puts a premium on the early identification and elimination of threats by dissuading or deterring key adversaries. Now, what's interesting about this strategy or unsurprising about this strategy is that it's incredibly activist and also very expensive. And I'll bring up here, those in the military will know this, this is the map of the unified command plan. We're the only country in the world that actually divides the US, the world up into spheres of military activity. We have seven of these, encompassing literally the entire world, maybe minus Antarctica and even the polar regions up north are becoming an increased focus of attention. And that's on the one way to think about it. The other hand, let's look at just the budgetary implications. Even during the trough of the 1990s, during the so-called hollow, the peace dividend, we spent nearly four times as much as our nearest rivals, allies or adversaries alike. And today, the gap is even wider. It's an incredibly costly policy. We can't even think about this. This is a nice little map of, gosh. Can we go back a slide? Thank you. This is a nice little map of US tactical aviation assets in 1990 versus 2010. 1990, you can see the US had the second largest TAC-AV assets, second only to the USSR and a qualitative advantage with the most advanced air force in the world. I think you'd be more specific since I doubt very many people can see. Ah, sure. So in 1990, the United States had basically 6,000 tactical aviation assets. The USSR 7,500, China 5,400, again the most advanced in the world in our case. Today, the US has nearly, has over 3,500 TAC-AV assets, undoubtedly the most modern in the world. Whereas our nearest rival, China, has barely 1,700, many of which are first, second, third generation aircraft barely suited, barely able to stand up in a dogfight. So the US has gone over the course of the last 20 years from a situation where it was the second largest quantitatively and the best qualitatively to a situation of dominance in both dimensions. We can even think about this in the naval balance in East Asia. In the Pacific Ocean today, we deploy six aircraft carriers, other countries deploy a maximum of two, one of which is allied to us. 31 nuclear submarines, six among all other actors in the region, 31 guided missile destroyers, maybe 90 Samad throughout the region, writ large of which 45 are allied with us. 12 guided missile cruisers, again two in the region, one of which is allied with us. And then 12 frigates against 168 in the region but 98 of which are held by our allies. Simply put, we have a lot of stuff, it's well deployed throughout the world, and we own, and we, our friends have a lot of the other stuff that could bother us. The net effect of this dominance though, both in terms of what we own directly and what we have allied with us, is that it causes other actors, and Samir will talk about this a bit more in a second, to fear the US, it's possible intentions in the future, and to develop the means to counter US advantages, which the US and the pure spiral of insecurity oftentimes takes as a sign of these states to have adverse intentions, requiring further efforts in our part to maintain US command, and setting off a further spiral. So not just, not only does this strategy cost a lot, but it's also politically expensive. And the other problem is that at a time, this is just a nice map of where we keep our stuff, we can talk about that in Q and A, but at a time when the budget debate is really hitting, here we can see the growing US budget burden, or debt burden, we can really debate whether this strategy is sustainable, and there seems to be declining political will to sustain this approach, requiring really rethinking how we go about this. And in this paper, we advocate for what we call a security of the commons approach to retaining command. And again, our cue here is that the hallmark of command of the commons is the ability to defeat another actor, trying to wrest command of the commons away from us in wartime, and what the US advantage is being what they are, we simply can cut back a lot and still do this, especially if we think smartly about potential allies and potential partnerships. Samir, we'll talk about that in a minute. Security in this sense is analogous to what Paul Kennedy calls naval mastery, that is being superior to any one rival, but not to the extent that you don't perhaps lose local control, it's the ability to reassert local control if a contest emerges. It's reactive in this sense, and it's responsive in this sense. This begs the question, what are the hallmarks of a security strategy? Well, we take as a start given the budget debate and given the fact that other great powers are emerging that will have greater economic assets to devote to military affairs in the future. The US cannot prevent these states from developing greater military capabilities for indefinitely, there's gonna be some asymptotic limit to what we can do. As a result, we have to start thinking now as to how we prepare ourselves for this future. And at the same time, however, these different regional actors all have strong self-interested reasons not to challenge US command of the commons. This is a point that we often forget. Not only would a direct challenge be an act of war and precipitate the wrath of the US military upon it, but it would also undermine the advantages they derive from the status quo, economic trade, political quiescence in some way. And above all, it would crystallize a counterbalancing coalition, a counterbalancing military coalition that would severely undercut anyone's capacity to both challenge the US and then assert its own dominance over the region, right? There's a big step, it's a big leap between saying, okay, I challenge US dominance and therefore I assert my own dominance. And it's into that gap that we're looking into. And this incentive to balance is critical. It means that there are ample opportunities for the United States to partner with these nations, regardless of who they are today, to protect the US command at a much lower cost. And to do this, we think that the US could very simply rely on these other regional actors as a first line of defense, these actors who share an interest in openness of the commons, to protect themselves and protect the region, protect regional openness, if and when a challenge emerges. The US would, if and when these challenges prove so great that these regional actors could not act on its own, the US could then intervene as a security guarantor of last resort, but it would be a security guarantor of last resort. We'd be there in the background and be able to assert dominance, but only if and when a challenge proves so dramatic that it can no longer act. And Samir will talk about how this looks in various regions, but for instance, in East Asia, China, India, Russia, Japan what actually should, by this logic, be encouraged to develop their own means to own military means, simply put, they have a reason to keep the commons open. We should not fear this because at the end of the day, if they decide to challenge us, other actors will flock to our side. We still have a lot of assets to throw at it even if we cut back and we can maintain dominance even in extremists. The key here, though, is that this does not mean the US would totally disarm and simply say, okay, we're done now. At the end of the day, we have a huge military. As I pointed out, we have six carriers in the Pacific, 11 carriers total, just as a quick heuristic. And we could still cut back quite a bit and have the military wear with all to reassert our presence in the region if push comes to shove. The same thing applies to the Air Force and we could talk about land power as well. At the end of the day, this cutback would do two things. On the one hand, it would reduce the possibility that the US will be seen as threatening as aggrandizing. But at the same time, it also undercuts regional incentives to free right upon the United States. That is just because if the US is active in given regions, other states don't have the means, don't have the interest, don't have the incentive to develop the assets needed to protect their own interests, which as we say in the paper, are largely in line with those of the United States. So by reducing, we both undercut the incentive other states have to balance us while undercutting their own incentive to free right upon us. And this requires, and if we want to think about this would contrast the control strategy, and let me get there for a second. As I say, security would argue for defeating challenges after a challenge emerges to respond, whereas control has a very costly emphasis on dissuading or deterring from emerging in the first place. The focus on responding then puts a premium on defending, whereas control puts a premium on preempting or taking offensive action. I say fluid and agile relationships is a third element of the security strategy by saying we act in line with those actors sharing interests with the United States. It requires thinking outside the box of our current alliance framework and partnering with countries sharing similar interests in the future. If a threat emerges in China, in fact doesn't, if a threat emerges the comments and China doesn't want the threat to take control of the comments, there's no reason why the US should not work with them. Whereas the control strategy by putting a premium on knowing the environment and hugging allies and adversaries close really kind of has a static view of alliance and adversarial relationships.  That's just another way of saying we can free ride upon our allies rather than the other way around. Whereas the control strategy kind of argues for the status quo where our allies free ride upon us and our notion is if we do more, the allies will do more. We say just the opposite. We do less and the allies will have to do more. And then finally, I say security advocates leveraging US geography. That is we are an incredibly secure nation that is largely in Europe from threats to the geopolitical areas of East Asia and Europe and not to mention Africa and the Middle East. We need to respond to this. We need to act against challenges in these regions but we don't have to be the first actor in this regard. Whereas the control strategy by arguing for a very offensive forward leaning posture in fact undercuts and tries to overcome the natural geographic advantages to the United States. And so overall a security based approach requires monitoring threats to the comments not actually just the rhetoric of actors. Recognizing the resilience of the maritime domain, changing force posture and military behavior no longer acting first and asking questions second but in fact doing the opposite. Political flexibility and strategic flexibility. And finally recognizing that the US does not need to move unilaterally can partner with other countries even those we don't often think about as potential partners. And with that I'll turn it over to Samir to think through some of the other dynamics. So I'll briefly summarize just the principles of the security of the commons that we're arguing for. So the first is assessing material not rhetorical threats or intentions. And this has a lot to do with how we posture ourselves in these various regions that we'll be discussing. The second is avoiding aggressive or offensive postures which can trigger spirals of insecurity or blowback. The third is we don't necessarily need sort of a unilateral first mover action. We can essentially as Josh says free ride upon our allies or other states that have a particular interest in maintaining the openness of the commons. The twin forces that we describe in the paper is capitalism, international global capitalism and balance of power within these regions that motivate states to maintain the openness of the commons even independent of the United States. And the fourth is essentially the fourth sort of principle of the security of the commons is that the commons is far more resilient against non-state actor threats in particular than we have thus far given it credit for. Non-state actor threats can sort of be disruptive to the commons at times but they really don't have the capacity to induce any closure of the commons. So I'll apply some of these principles as three different areas that we discuss in the paper that we think are sort of emerging sites of contestation but just generally in response to like emerging challenges a control strategy would have us actively contain and preempt China in the Pacific counter all irregular threats in the Indian Ocean ally with India and other democracies to institutionalize an alliance maintain an active foothold in the Gulf to hedge against Iranian threats and an active defense of all choke points to preempt all closures. So these are sort of the three theaters that we wanna discuss right now and apply this logic of the security of the commons. The first is Pacific Ocean East Asia and here the chief concern that we obviously know is the shifting balance of power in Asia and the rise of China. Now, the reason we think this is less of a concern than I'd say the advocates of control suggest is because China is constrained by two major forces capitalism and balancing. First capitalism as evidenced by China's dependence on its strategic sea lanes, sea lanes of communication to various parts of the Middle East, Africa and the rest of the world essentially are heavily or highly vulnerable. And this force that we talk about in China is not just like a change in the economy of China it's a sociopolitical transformation over the past 20 years in China that essentially some would describe it as something of a regime change. I don't think we give proper credit for that. As a result, there's a heavy dependence on international capitalism which motivates China to protect the commons rather than to disrupt them in any particular way. And it's a very powerful force that constrains China's freedom of action and actually aligns a lot of their interests with ours. The second is just a simple balance of power logic that is time tested. As we're showing through this map that China's sea lanes of communication are also highly vulnerable and they're highly vulnerable both by us, by India which is another major regional power and by the numerous other various coalitions of states that could potentially emerge if China were tried to be disruptive within the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean. The point is that regional actors can coalesce and hold vulnerable what China holds most dear and the United States could backstop this. So essentially this functions as a deterrent of China. Can we go back Hillary? One more? Okay, well, there we go, great, great. So this map is just also indicates obviously the global military footprints that even if we don't have land footholds in East Asia or other parts of the world we have a substantial naval presence in the Pacific Ocean. We can rely upon our positions offshore like Guam, Marshall Islands, Hawaii and obviously a number of regional states that both share our interests and would engage in counter coalitions if China or any other state in East Asia were to pose a threat. And these states are highlighted in red, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and you already see the emergence of counter balancing options by these states. They're both developing their military so there's some internal balancing building up their naval capacities and also engaging in alliances between each other, naval exercise, military exercises and cooperation suggesting that these states also value this area deeply and would take measures to protect it if need be. Another constraint that we discussed on China's East is the two island chains that we have here. So even if China as it's exercising or expanding its anti-access area denial capabilities potentially to push through the first island chain there's still a second island chain that could be a fortification for US naval power. Additionally, the notion that China right now is going to be able to push through this first island chain is still highly dubious. The anti-access area denial capabilities are primarily to deny access to the latorals not necessarily to project force outwards and it's not clear that China even has the naval supply capabilities to maintain a presence beyond very close to its latorals. So China is still fairly constrained. Its geography is not necessarily conducive to an offensive posture and the reason it has a motivation to sort of develop these anti-access area denial capabilities is because what it holds most year is along the Eastern shore right along here. It's where the majority of its military and economic and population powers are based. So these are most vulnerable and with the US assets right offshore from them it's only natural that China would have sort of a defensive motivation to develop these capabilities but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are offensive in nature or for example that they are translating into a blue water navy. Okay, moving on to the Indian Ocean. The recent Quadrennial Defense Review states that the Indian Ocean provides vital sea lines of communication that are essential to global commerce, international energy security and regional stability. But in a number of strategic documents that have come out for example like the naval operations concept the threats to US command of the commons in this region are thoughts that come from either China's potential entrance into the Indian Ocean or irregular non-state actors that take the form of terrorism, regional instability, insurgency, illicit trafficking and piracy. So we address both of these. The first is this the belief of that China's string of pearl strategy to enter the Indian Ocean. This assumption or the fear is that China would have some capacity to project power in the Indian Ocean and either potentially mediate or choke off the strategic lines of communication if it so chose. This string of pearl strategy I think has largely been either disproven or undermined to a large degree by emerging trends in recent years. So here's a map and I'll try to point out some of the things of the naval balance of power or at least the naval bases within the Indian Ocean. And as you can see, I mean there's a few constraints. First of all, the potential sites of the pearls like Guadar, Chidegong and Hambanat, I can't even pronounce it but the Sri Lankan port as well. They're gradually sort of, China's coming to recognize that these are, well it's not clear what China's coming to recognize. I don't intend to divine their intentions but these states have all indicated that they don't intend for these ports to be anything more than commercial ports and they have a deep concern, except for Pakistan. They have a deep concern that this could be sort of used against them because India is still the regional hegemon in the area. So Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi governments don't have any interest in China expanding this into sort of a security posture, merely a commercial port. And they're essentially playing China off against India and the development of these ports. Meanwhile, India has a substantial presence in the Indian Ocean, has five naval bases including the Edamon Islands. It's got a number of listening stations throughout the South of the Indian Ocean. The United States has Diego Garcia. So it's not really clear that China is asserting any sort of dominance in the Indian Ocean or that it has the potential to be especially with the stretch of its supply lines all the way out here and the under development of these ports. So I would say the balance of power in the region is firmly divided. There's no real trend towards China at least in the present and probably for the foreseeable future because the development of these ports would take substantial number of years and to get up to naval power projection and naval exercise in the region by China would take quite some time. So the organizational learning would take quite some time. So for right now, I think there's really no question about this. This is the same map basically but it's about counter piracy in the Indian Ocean. Piracy is deemed to be sort of the pinnacle of these irregular threats that are possibly disrupting and challenging the commons and a control strategy would seek to dominate the Indian Ocean and the Horn of Africa in order to contain these threats. But really we know that piracy is not that substantial a threat. It's disruptive certainly as costly at times. I think the estimate for the cost of piracy last year is about five to seven billion which is a drop in the bucket in terms of the cost of overall maritime commerce. So these problems are being adequately addressed not just by the United States but by a coalition of states that all have a shared interest in containing these threats and they're satisfied with the idea of containing piracy rather than trying to eliminate it entirely or moving onshore into areas like the Horn of Africa to contain the problem because those are just like very expensive and costly options. And so we should welcome this. We should welcome the idea that other states are taking active role in the Indian Ocean, that they're actively cooperating and coalescing to deal with these threats and there's not a substantial need for the United States to sort of have a forward presence beyond like the role that we're playing because most of these irregular threats are already being dealt with or they're just simply not actual threats to access to the commons. They don't deny access to the commons. I'll skip over sort of discussion of a potential U.S.-India alliance but suffice it to say that there is some speculation that the United States should, in a control strategy, should ally with India to either counterbalance emerging threats in the Indian Ocean or counterbalance China's entrance. I would say that our strategy suggests that it's unnecessary to have sort of a firm alliance, a friendship is sufficient and there's no need to try to incense India to do what it already has an interest to do which is to protect its own interest in the Indian Ocean and protect its own access to it. The third area we discuss is the Persian Gulf and potential choke points. They're related though, we'll discuss them two separately. The first is there's a tremendous fear that Iran would try to close the Straits of Hormuz. Generally the scenario probably wouldn't arise and we discuss this in our paper unless there was some sort of offensive action taken against Iran. Otherwise it's extremely costly for Iran to close the Straits of Hormuz either politically, both economically and especially politically with the emerging political divides in Iran. And so what's probably motivating sort of the threat of this action again is a forward U.S. presence, the offensive posture that we think probably motivates a lot of states to develop their anti-access area, denial capabilities. And we'll discuss some of these fears throughout the Middle East and the Arab world as well as throughout the globe that indicates that the United States is deemed to be a serious threat. The choke points argument is one that again, control advocates suggest is a reason why we need to sort of have a robust and expansive naval presence throughout the Indian and Pacific Ocean. This is the, these are not all the choke points in the world but these are the major ones that are discussed at the nexus of the Pacific and Indian Ocean. But there's a number of reasons why these choke points aren't actually a serious problem and are quite overblown. The most obvious one is that they're alternative routes. They all provide alternative options to circumnavigate them should a state or a non-state actor try to close one of these Straits. The other reasons again that are discussed in the paper are that very few states have the capabilities to do this. There are natural counter coalitions that would be emerging to reopen the Straits. Non-state actors don't really have the capability to close these. And the U.S. response is just as feasible from over the horizon. Back to sort of this concern about whether there's a fear of the United States. These are just statistics that we pulled up from the last few years. It suggests that even after the end of sort of the neoconservative moments in Washington and sort of the expanse of American hegemony or unipolarity, there's still tremendous fear of the United States that we're believed to be one of the major threats to a lot of these states. Some of them, which are our allies, like Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, a number of Middle Eastern states. Again, some of our allies, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, the United States ranks way up there in terms of potential threat to them. This is as we believe it's largely to do with our posture in those regions. And then this is sort of a list of states that fear the US naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Some of them, again, which are our allies, it's split within Britain, but for the most part, a number of other countries and European allies think that it does more harm than good for that presence. This is from 2008, so it's a little bit dated, but nevertheless, the point is that there is a deep concern about the US presence. So just to wrap things up, again, the security of the commons in practice, what it would require is for us to alter our force posture in these regions that we discussed, devolving responsibility to our allies and other regional powers that are not necessarily allies, but share the same interests and the same stakes in a lot of these regions, reducing onshore presence, seeking naval cooperation in both oceans that should be an equal opportunity balancer. It shouldn't necessarily require that we just align with India to counterbalance other threats. We should have the same options for naval exercise and cooperation with China, with Russia, with a number of the states in the region that all have a shared interest, similar to the way we conduct the Malabar exercises. And finally, we should take a lot of these savings that we have and reinvest it at home into the drivers of what is like the basis of American power. It's the economic and military capacity that is undergirded by education, human capital, technology, research developments, and infrastructure. And that's all we have. We welcome your questions and comments. Thank you, Samir, and thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Very pleased to be with you today talking about this paper. I think it is a very, very important piece of work and has the potential to make a really significant contribution to the debate as we move forward about America's military and strategic posture around the world. I've not known Josh's work before this, but this is a very, very impressive piece. Samir, I've known for a good while from when he was at New America previously, and I've always thought he had a genuinely first-rate strategic mind, and he has brought that to bear here with his very, very able partner, and I thank both of them for a very, very provocative in the best sense of the word, piece of work. In the interest of furthering the discussion, I'm gonna say what I think is missing from the paper. As far as it goes, there's very little in the paper that I could identify which I would say I disagreed with. Most of it I would say I clearly agree with. There may be a few points on very specific kinds of tactical questions about military deployments where I'd probably want to think through things and have more input from people who actually do these kinds of force deployments for a living to make sure I was really comfortable with them, but by and large, I'm with these guys in what they write. What I find missing in the paper, I guess I would summarize it like this. To my mind, Josh and Samir have presented a really, really thoughtful defense policy solution to what I think is fundamentally a foreign policy problem. And the foreign policy problem, as I would define it, is does the United States, can it be content with being a great power, perhaps even the greatest among great powers that acts as a great power to defend its interests around the world? Or does it have to be a hegemon? Does American security require something approaching hegemony? I think this is really the key foreign policy question that needs to be addressed before something like what Josh and Samir have laid out can really become possible. I mean for myself, I know where I come down on that question. I think the United States has gotten itself in a world of trouble since the end of the Cold War by trying to be a hegemon. I think it has been counterproductive for US interests. I think it has weakened the American strategic position over time. But there are powerful forces in American political culture, powerful forces in American politics that like hegemony. You know, if you want to argue against American hegemony, you are really up against some pretty formidable opposition, but I think that is the argument that needs to be engaged and won in order to get the kinds of adjustments in American defense policy that Josh and Samir, I think very appropriately would recommend. Let me focus a little bit on the Persian Gulf because that's the part of the world that I think I know better than some of the other places that they discuss. A lot of what they say the United States should do in the Persian Gulf to adjust its military posture there, I absolutely agree with. I don't think the United States should have a soldier on the ground in the Persian Gulf. I would basically agree with all of their recommendations on that, okay? But when they are critiquing this posture, they explain the posture as motivated by a concern about protecting supposedly vulnerable choke points. And that, okay, they marshal a lot of very sound arguments to show that the choke points really aren't all that vulnerable and you don't have to do some of the things that the United States has done in order to protect them. And that's fine as far as it goes. I just think the way that American Middle East policy has gone over the last 20 years isn't really about protecting choke points. And it's not really resting on an argument, a misguided argument which you could correct that, oh no, you don't have to have troops on the ground in order to keep the Iranians from blocking the straits of Hormuz. American policy in the Persian Gulf has evolved the way it has over the past 20 years because the United States has wanted hegemony in this part of the world. During the Cold War, we had absolutely vital interest in the Persian Gulf. Every American administration, you know, since FDR has seen Persian Gulf hydrocarbons as absolutely vital to America's post-war position. But until 1980, the United States never even made a declaratory commitment to use force to defend the free flow of Persian Gulf hydrocarbons as a vital interest of the United States. Not until 1980, we went out of our way to avoid doing it. Until 1971, we let the Brits do day-to-day military security in this vital part of the world. We'd be prepared to come in as a backup. After the Brits pull out in 71, we do this so-called Twin Pillars policy where we have Iran under the Shah and Saudi Arabia as the pillars for day-to-day security in the Persian Gulf. Then the Shah goes away in 1979. The Soviets invade Afghanistan later that year. Carter has his epiphany about the Soviet Union and in the State of the Union address in January 1980 for the first time, the United States makes a declaratory commitment that actions to impede the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf will be treated as an attack on the vital interest of the United States. The United States will respond with all means necessary, including military force. Not until 1980. And even then, for the first 10 years that we declared this commitment and took it on and actually began to organize military forces to deliver on it, we acted as an offshore balancer. We built up a robust naval presence in the Gulf. We had all kinds of arrangements, prepositioning equipment, basing arrangements so that even if a crisis, we could surge, ground and tactical air forces into the region. We kept the Persian Gulf open during the Iran-Iraq War this way. We fought the first Gulf War from this position after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. But that first Gulf War comes essentially as it coincides with the Cold War coming to an end. And what do we do when that war is over? When we have kicked Saddam out of Kuwait we withdraw a fair number of the forces that we had deployed there but we keep a significant ground presence in the Gulf, particularly in Saudi Arabia. This is the original sin of America's misguided pursuit of hegemony in the Persian Gulf. And I would argue it was not done for primarily military reasons. There was not a thing that we cared about protecting or defending in the Gulf that you can't defend from an offshore balancing posture. Not a blessed thing. If you are going to have troops on the ground, on an ongoing, everyday basis, you have them there for some other reason. And it was about hegemony. It was about creating a base of hegemony. It was about creating a U.S.-dominated, highly militarized security order in the Gulf. And it was about getting rid of the two main obstacles to that order, namely Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was not President George W. Bush who made regime change America's Iraq policy. It was President Clinton who did that in 1998. It was not President Bush who imposed a comprehensive embargo on Iran. It was President Clinton who did that in 1995 after the Iranians had the audacity to offer their first post-revolutionary upstream oil contract to an American oil company. It's not about security. It is about hegemony. And until we are willing to grapple with that and take on the argument of, does the United States really need hegemony in places like the Gulf to be secure? Or, as I would argue, is this a really classically counterproductive way to try and assure American security? Till we take that argument on, I think it's going to be very, very difficult to do in a rational way the kinds of things that Samir and Josh very rightfully recommend. Thank you very much, Clint. Larry Korb. Thank you very much for having me. I must say I enjoyed reading this paper for a number of reasons. One, when I was a naval flight officer and I was an anti-submarine warfare, we were kind of the lowest of the low. What do you mean you're not in attack in here? You talk about how important, you know, that I always thought it was important, but a lot of people did not. The other thing I think is very important because this comes at a very important time in the United States because I think we're, you know, basically, this is a good time for us to kind of rethink our world in the world. I mean, you know, Al-Qaeda's been degraded, you know, our panettas are only 50 or 100, and it should no longer be the focus of our foreign policy or our national security policy. You've got the cost, okay? I mean, basically, you know, we're 5% of the world's population. We're spending close to 50% of the world's military expenditures. If you go back and you look at 2000, we had one-third of the world's military expenditures, one-third of the world's GDP. Today, we have almost 50%, but we're down to like 23% of the world's GDP. We have a, you know, we have a, you know, a financial crisis. And then I think if you take a look at, you know, the way we've used military forces, particularly since 9-11, we've emphasized effectiveness rather than efficiency. And I think you need to do both because if your thing is, well, we've got to accomplish this objective regardless of the cost, particularly when it's not a vital national interest, you end up putting money on things that you shouldn't. Now, I think if you take a look at, you know, what, you know, in the paper, I can't disagree with it. And I think that, you know, this whole idea of global hegemon, when I was getting ready, I read the paper over the weekend, and I came across this thing in the Washington Post. I don't know if you saw it. It was kind of buried in the Outlook section. And they were talking about, you know, the Wishful Thinking Award. And somebody wrote this back in October 5, 2001. Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen, as you guys were talking about, in pith helmets and everything. Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led international regency in Baghdad to go along with the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatened us. That was Max Boot in the weekly standard, okay? As soon as I heard pith helmet, I was like, yes. I mean, it's incredible that we thought, we could. So I think, you know, as Flynn pointed out, this idea of the global hegemon, and it's important to go back. The global hegemon started, really, if you go back and you read the defense planning guidance in 1992 when Wolfowitz and company tried to talk about, not only did we have to, you know, dominate, we had to prevent other people from dominating that, to prevent any rivals. So I think that has been discredited, at least I hope so. I think Flynn is right because when you talk about this and you get into this, oh, American exceptionalism, you know, and all of this type of thing, they talk, I think, it's very important, and I can't, this has bothered me for quite a while, this whole idea of the free riders.  Well, why wouldn't they? We've got 80,000 people there, so they don't have to, you know, they don't have to worry. A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a paper on the court of doctrine as it's still relevant, and Flynn talked about that. And one of the things I said, if it's still relevant, we should not be the only ones concerned about that. The Chinese, the Indians, the Europeans get their, you know, their oil from there, so they also ought to be concerned. I think another point that you guys make in the paper that is really, really good is let's not overreact to the Chinese military buildup. Oh, the Chinese are building planes. Well, so are we. Chinese are building missiles, so, you know, are we.  Now, I think the only thing I would ask you guys is maybe as a follow-on, it wasn't part of your paper. Okay, we agree, what do we buy because we've got a budget situation coming up here. We're going to have to make some hard choices. You know, we're going to cut it somewhere $350 billion. I don't know what the number will be. It depends upon what the 12 apostles do, you know, on that, you know, super committee that they have. But I think we were, do we want to buy another aircraft carrier?  Literal combat ships, are they relevant to what you're talking about? I think that's really the key thing because in the Pentagon, I can tell you, having been there, you're playing your program, but the budget's where it happens because if you don't get it, plans become, you know, irrelevant and operations impossible. So I think that's a real key you need to follow on. Thanks. Great, thank you, Larry.  I'm going to move over here. Guys, congratulations on your paper. I'm going to open up for questions in a moment, but let me just share a couple of thoughts of my own and be less fair than Larry and Flint. To some degree, what I found was a mistaken piece of the paper. At least as I think about marketing ideas, trying to seduce people to think that you're different is, if I read this paper and I looked at this as a policy document along the way, I would have a hard time not looking at this as, you know, if you wanted to critique it as really sealing the deal on American strategic contraction that we were withdrawing. You know, when the President issued his national security strategy, there was a very good PLA analyst who said that the story that we're seeing here from the United States is essentially withdrawing from its commitments and essentially leaving the world open in very many ways. And if I were to label the brand, what you call it, not the common strategy per se, but I would call it the getting by with less strategy, the sort of hope that somebody would pick up something there. What seems to be missing, at least in what I've read of the paper, is a sense of command and control of a design where you would sort of look at how, you know, going back to what Flint was laying out in terms of there was a very good understanding in the era when the British were providing that kind of global public good about who was doing what. And I don't think your paper goes into that question of how would you maintain, essentially, America's role as the anchor of at least a systems integration strategy or complex partner strategy. Some might call it the Tom Sawyer strategy of getting other people to paint your fence, but Tom Sawyer is still in charge, essentially, while others are doing the work. That would then imply, you know, that there's more coherence to the plan than I think what you do as opposed to sort of saying, since we have to get along with less and since others will do the work because it's in their own interests, I think you forfeit the question about American leadership and leverage. And the reason that's important, after having lived in Beijing for three months last year, I had a bullet race past my head in Kabul recently, and it's an unforgettable experience. I'm sure many guys in the military have had that. I have never had that experience before. It sounds just like the movies. When you live in Beijing, you can feel and sense palpably the way the rest of the world is chasing Beijing, finance ministers, foreign ministers, heads of state, in and out. I live a mile from the White House. DC is a busy town. This is a sleepy San Diego-like village compared to what's going on in Beijing right now where you can feel the world chasing what they think. Superpower is a function of future expectations. So if you just make the equation that China is just going to fill the void because of what's its own interests in its own neighborhood and will be able to play well, you're essentially actually adding and exacerbating the sense that the rest of the world will have that they're the player that matters. And this is about the mystique of being a superpower, not about the substance and what is real. And I think that in these discussions about power and strategy and provision of global public goods, the question of mystique really does matter and gets real little attention. And so I guess my one question, which we'll open and then I'd like to open up the floor, is how do you deal with this critique of a... that what you do is you're essentially... you've come up with a logical argument saying America can achieve its security in a lot of other ways. But it to me still looks like that PLA analyst would say this really is great because this is America rationalizing its withdrawal and strategic contraction and it will produce white papers and that will add to the sense that China is in control of global security and the U.S. is pulled back. Yeah, and then I'll open the floor. Okay, well thank you again. Is this on? Okay. Thanks for the comments and critiques. You know, this is, again, this is a think piece, so we're still thinking through our own ideas we're young and impressionable, but we really appreciate sort of the feedback that we can get and we hope to sort of develop this further. I think I'll try to respond to some of Steve's comments as best I can and I think I'll turn it over to Josh and he can try to respond to some of the other things. I think you're right. This is like sort of the ultimate question is like how will this be... how will this move towards a security of the common's approach be perceived, especially since the last 20 years we spent like the last 20 years convincing both ourselves and the world that the posture that we have now is necessary and, you know, without it, you know, both chaos from sort of non-state actors as well as the competition of regional actors like induces significant conflicts. So I think there is going to be a required to be like a substantial communication strategy in this approach that I, you know, I haven't had time to think about. But I think, you know, one thing is like when you can start to offset the spending that goes into some of the, you know, maybe the systems that we may not need or may not want, we can, if we can reduce the number of aircraft carriers not buy more, maybe not necessarily have to use the littoral combat ship, we have a substantial amount of savings which we can reinvest into other things. So part of that is, as we talked about sort of investment at home, but part of that could be sort of soft power activities. We have the first quadrennial diplomacy and development review that came out, I think, last year. Can I interrupt you? Is there over the horizon strategy which you talk about going to require more aircraft carriers rather than less? Not necessarily, no. And I think, you know, that's the, part of it is the posture and part of it is sort of the quantity. And I think actually both can be reduced in order to implement it. Now, this is something that we do need to test and we need to, you know, get sort of firmer understandings of like, you know, what the actual numbers would be required. You know, in total quantity, you just don't need to position as many forces all over the world. You don't need to sustain them like the cost of supply lines to maintain, you know, forces around the world is tremendously expensive. Yeah, go ahead. In terms of some of the stuff you'd want to buy, the carriers to Larry's point about what you'd want to buy, you know, we had 13 carriers at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s. We have 11 today. There's no superpower able to challenge us like the USSR could do. Even if you believe you need to blast your way into some countries taken over and establish a defensive perimeter, A, aircraft carriers aren't the way to do it because if we believe ASBM is a viable asset, those are going to be vulnerable. And then B, unless you actually believe you're going to be called upon some second or third region of the world, even if you have six aircraft carriers and you could put two, three of them to see at any given time, it over matches any other country in the world today. So no, in fact, you can actually still do quite a bit even with quite a bit less. I guess I would just jump in on that point. Why, you know, we got 11 aircraft carriers, nobody in the rest of the world has more than one comparable. The problem I have with him, they didn't do anything about it. You raised the issue, but I think that's where we got to make the trade-offs, you know, in the budget. The trade-offs in the sense of... In other words, if you, you know, it's from Gates' first budget to Congress in the Bush administration. I remember going to breakfast with him and said, we're going to reduce the number of aircraft carriers from 11 to 10 in 2040. I said, is this a misprint? No. I mean, I think we can go down the knife right now if you ask me, okay, and still carry out their strategy because you would surge them. I mean, a lot of things you can do. And the other is with, you know, the Chinese are developing at a much lesser cost missiles and stuff that will make it difficult for us to use them against them if in fact we, you know, we want to. But I think, you know, in using them in other areas, you're not going to be as vulnerable. But, you know, and again, we didn't get into this. I don't want to make this because I want to stay on the strategic thing. You've got these amphibious, you know, carriers which are bigger than anybody else, which nobody counts. Right. And we can talk force posture either in a few minutes or aside. Okay, let me involve some other voices in this. We'll go right here. And then back and we'll jump in. Caitlin Antrim, Rural Law Committee for the Oceans. I've recognized Command of the Commons, all of Barry Posner's work in academics, but in practicality I don't see even the world as it is now being as stark as that presentation. I'd like to see if you'd address four items that have been incorporated into U.S. policy since Posner's article came out or have been there for a long time. One is the rule of law. The rule of the law of the sea convention and not just saying what our rights are but our commitment to abiding by the rights of others. In some cases I know we've had problems with allies who question whether we're committed to abiding by those rules because we haven't ratified the law of the sea convention. So that's one. And some of this may be in the paper, but since only a few of you have actually read it before this talk, I may duplicate them. How do activities like the Africa Partnership Station fit into the work you're talking about about engaging regional partners? And more broadly, what's the, how does the Global Maritime Partnership fit in with that? And finally, again with the idea of partnership, we have been developing both, and I think we have to count Coast Guard in as well as naval power in this, particularly in the Arctic. That looks to be much more a Coast Guard lake than a blue water ocean. And we've been collaborating between the U.S. and Russia with our Coast Guards in the North Pacific Forum. We have a lot more cooperation going on with our allies in the Atlantic side of the Arctic. Do you see that as part of the model of what you're, I'm trying to get a feel for practical terms what you're talking about this new vision. So these were the questions I had related to that. Quick response? Sure. So maybe I'll punt the rule of law over the use as you think intensely about that. But in terms of Global Maritime Partnership Africa, Partnership Stations, and the Antarctic as a model, I think you're spot on, right? For some of these things, they really are more Coast Guard or really, you don't require a lot to get a lot. You know, AFRICOM would be another good example here. We're not talking about a large U.S. onshore presence, yet African countries welcome our access to the air. Our presence in the area. Now, we can debate whether or not that's in the U.S. interest. We can debate AFRICOM per se. But the model at all, which I think is quite a good one, and you're right, the Coast Guard activities and the coordination activities in the Antarctic would be another good heuristic to play off of. But the other aspect to what this looks like in a fine-grained sense would be to say, you don't need to be in the region every day. I mean, there's a wonderful little website by a Japanese analyst. I don't really know what he does at this time, but it's called Where Are the Carriers? You can just track where the carriers are at any given point in time. Oh, yes, it's fascinating. It's very odd. Do you guys know this? I don't know how he makes his living, but you look at where the carriers are, and over time they're consistently forward-deployed and consistently circling around the region. We get many benefits in that, but the point to our payers is that we pay many costs in the process, and I guess what we would say is, look, we don't need those carriers to be out there. We need them to be trained, we need them to be ready to go if push comes to shove, and there are going to be some trade-offs if we pull them back, absolutely. But they don't need to be in East Asia, in the Med and the Persian Gulf on a fairly regular basis. We're arguing for sticking closer to home, basically, until a crisis erupts. Let me say something about the Coast Guard, because that's important. The Department of Homeland Security, their total budget is less than single programs like missile defense in the Department of Defense. The average age of their ships is 40 years, and unless somebody in making these trade-offs doesn't look at the Coast Guard versus the Secret Service or whoever they compete, right now you look at missile defense or Navy carriers against the Air Force or the Army. Somebody's got to look at those two together because they are very critical, and this is going to be a big area. I'd like this gentleman in the back, but I just want to comment very quickly because I've been having this exchange with Leon Panetta's press secretary. It's a very friendly exchange, but he took exception somewhat to something I wrote on my blog recently, where I challenged Secretary Panetta for a talk that he gave it off at Air Force Base, where he laid out his concerns about what's called the sequence-questration mechanism, this automatic budget-cutting slash and hack at various budgets if they don't get a debt deal. But in outlining the defining challenges, security challenges of the United States, he said al-Qaeda was number one, and of course it was the same week that the intelligence services, which he had previously headed, had also talked about the degraded al-Qaeda strategy, so I sort of looked at it as somewhat degree fear-mongering to justify budgets, but wrong point one. And in the process his press secretary came back and said there was really a comment about the sequence-questration question. It made me begin thinking about how we talk about security and defense. We tend to think in terms of number of people deployed and we think about defense budgets. We don't often talk, as I think we used to, about broad security and strategy, that there may be other ways to achieve greater security and strategy than the way in which we're doing it now. And it's taken me back to Don Rumsfeld's early pitches in the beginning, which are fascinating. People should go back and look at what Rumsfeld was trying to do, whether they like the guy or don't like the guy. Before 9-11, he was on a reform-oriented strategy to look at how you could achieve more security, not necessarily less, because I don't want to put words in his mouth, but with alternative defense structures and making choices between the tracks you were on. 9-11 actually flooded all the choices, flooded the coffers of everything. So we're now back in a period where you need to then reconsider that. I think Rumsfeld... Do you want to bring Rumsfeld back? I kind of do. I kind of think that he was right there, but don't let him respond to a crisis. But I think in terms of thinking broadly about security and strategy in that point, it comes back to your point about the ships and where they may be and where they're seen. And again, not to overplay my view, because I try to argue with myself. I'm sort of instinctively where Flint is. I think there's a lot that's very strong in your paper. I do think that other big powers in the world, I think about... You know, Tom Schelling was on this stage once, and he got a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory and the Cold War. And one of the most intriguing comments he made is, you know, people all think game theory is human nature. It wasn't. You had to actually educate the Soviets to understand the signals. Both sides needed to be educated. And I presume that there's a strategic class out there that if it sees less ships out on the oceans, it will look at that as a rollback and as a point of weakness. So the question is, what is your strong strategy for selling something that looks better or stronger, even if you're spending less on it? If you don't have that, then I don't think there's a way to sell what you have as anything other than American withdrawal. And I think that's the real marketing challenge you have. I'm not going to let you respond to me because I'm going to give this gentleman right here in the back. Thank you. I'm Leon Weintraub, University of Wisconsin, formerly U.S. Foreign Service. I'd like to take up the issue of you say the U.S. should withdraw a little bit from its position as a global hegemon and perhaps encourage others to pick up some of the slack because, after all, it's in their interest to keep up the wheels of trade and of commerce. But I think that other regional powers perhaps have interests apart from that. They may have territorial interests. I'm thinking of China in the Straits of Taiwan and its issues with territorial waters of Vietnam, the Sproutly Islands, others. These are not the only ones I can name. At least in some of these... I just assume they forfeit Taiwan in their strategy. Right. In some of these areas, the U.S. is seen as not having a particular interest one way or the other, but some of the regional powers being much closer to the issue may in fact have strong interests that may not be appreciated by others. Thank you. Response? Samir? Let me just jump in on a couple of things about sort of this regional... the question of like regional powers and their interests. I mean, I think what we're seeing is already evidence today that they have learned a degree to which, you know, how they need to balance either the rise of China or potential threats in the region. You see tremendous movement of foot within Southeast Asia. Vietnam is offering like access to its naval bases or potentially a naval base where multiple states can access it, including the United States. It's like direct counter to China. India and Indonesia are building naval partnerships. South Korea, Russia are all sort of building sort of and deploying naval forces in the Pacific. And these aren't, you know, happening out of nowhere. They're particularly to counter China. So I would argue that we may not need to teach states as much about how to, you know, about game theory, how to balance China because they have already observed and learned a lot of the implications. What happens is sort of to a rising power and, you know, their interests are pretty clear. They want to be able to protect their interests in those regions. In terms of China's sort of territorial interest, again, you know, let's hold aside Taiwan for a moment and talk about just a general sort of like motivations for expansion would be probably pretty costly for them in a lot of ways, especially sort of engaging any sort of land wars, you know, against Vietnam or, you know, in its west. And it would pay substantial cost to, you know, initiate these wars. It would, you know, to control territory, you know, it's far more expensive to project power outside of its borders. It's far more expensive. But projecting power and going to war are different things.  And it's not clear that China necessarily has that. And it also pays cost in terms of the international economy and in terms of geopolitical cost. Let me just jump in and just add another caveat to this, another layer onto this. To what end is the territorial expansion of China in the U.S. interest, right? Okay, we can debate how much the U.S. values, Taiwan is now in the sprawling, so on and so forth. What exactly is the U.S. stick in stopping China's territorial expansion into these domains? We're taking this as the question posed, takes it as a given that any Chinese territorial expansion equals bad for the U.S. We step back and ask the question, well, relative to what? Relative to starting a war with China? I'm not sure I'm willing to pay that. I mean, so it's worthwhile adding in these trade-offs that everyone has been hitting upon that our strategy looks to. If China wants to sort of have sort of a territorial contest with India over, you know, the disputed territories, I mean, I think the primary responsibility for that is India. Or, you know, the primary sort of state to respond to that is India. We don't need to be mediating like every tension that China has with its borders. But we're not. Well, we're sort of, we're positioning forces in the region as if we would want to. And the fact of the matter is just this most recent island in Puglia actually did bring the U.S. in. We started talking about backing Vietnam and backing people as Indonesia in that debate. So it wasn't like the U.S. didn't sideline either. And the background of all this, of course, is the U.S. naval presence. And I'd be very surprised, I'd be very surprised if I were a Chinese strategic planner. If I, A, didn't account for that in the back of my mind, and B, say to myself, well, gee, this was just a brief dust-up. What happens if we have a real, real, you know, in this contest? I want to give Larry an opportunity to comment because I know he's, what are you giving testimony on today? Strategic comments? Okay. Let me, let me make, I think you've raised a couple of interesting points. And, you know, I was with a Navy Admiral recently and he said, well, we got to buy more ships to confront the Chinese. And I said, and we're going to borrow the money from the Chinese to do it.  And I think, you know, you're right.  It's naval and air power.  And I, in my personal view, the Chinese have overstretched because the Vietnamese are coming to us. They've got to help us. Now, isn't this amazing? Remember when we left Vietnam?  So, I think, you know, it's a different world. We need to adjust to it. The sooner we do it, the better because we can't keep doing this. I mean, you know we're going to cut defense 350 to a trillion somewhere in there. Going to have to make some hard choices. And I think they lay the ground work for doing this.   I mean, I think one of the compelling things you raised, Larry, was the defense spending to GDP figures about what the global share of GDP is compared to what we spend globally, the 50 percent versus the 23 percent. You know, I remind people that when we were in the first Gulf War, Japan wrote us a 13 billion dollar check. We actually ran that war at a profit. We did. If we could run the Pentagon and see what we saw, it's another public goods provision problem. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Again, just an idea to take back to Secretary Panetta. So Larry's going to step out. Let me, you want to comment quickly? Yeah. But this gets back to the fundamental question of hegemony. I mean, part of why we play this role is because, as they say in the paper, we want to be seen as the provider of these global public goods associated with the secure commons. Well, in part because we derive benefits from that. We think we derive enormous benefit from it. But we need the analysis to get there. Yeah. Right. It's an article of faith. Jed Schilling. Good questions. I'm going to cluster a few questions. I have a conference called 145. So I'm going to get as many of you as I can, but I'm stepping off because it's 145. Yes. Yeah. Jed Schilling with the Millennium Institute. And I got a couple of quick questions. The first one between the security and control, it seems and it might be better to merge together those particularly that have a longer term view and rather than simply suggesting to pulling out of areas and let other countries going in developing agreements among countries to continue some of the control, like why haven't we signed the ocean agreement or things like that? And my second quick question is to what extent do you think a lot of the pressure behind some of these things, particularly on the control site are run by the infamous military industrial complex that are protecting their own interests rather than national interests? Okay. This gentleman in the back, is that Scott? Oh, hey, you. Good to see you. Scott Paul. You're older.  I'll make it quick. I was wondering if you foresee a problem or potential problem with transition costs in the shift between control the strategy. And specifically if this is really, if we're relying on regional powers driven by their own interests to fill the gap, whether there are whether there's a risk of a sort of moment of insecurity or momentary power vacuum and whether there are relational or institutional policy solutions that you both prescribe to fill that. A question over here now? Right here. Benjamin Tua, just a brief comment concerning perceptions and the mystique of power and so on. If we're going to be cutting back aircraft carriers and so on and so forth, the numbers will tell the story no matter how we dress it up. I strongly disagree with that. I'm going to just jump in. I think that when you're in an era of information, I mean, you know, anytime that spent any time in the modern military and you go out to an aircraft carrier, you go look at their command and control. It's fundamentally the fusion of intelligence and information systems and other kinds of military capacity. There's an order of magnitude difference. I used to not, I used to believe what you did, but I just don't believe that dollars and soldiers deployed tell the story of security and defense capacity in the world today. And I think that the Pentagon, to some degree, particularly in the Clinton administration, then in the Bush administration, tried to tell that story. But now when I look about the squaring off over the debate over whether we're going to have more or less security given more or less budgets or John Kyle's position, I find it a kind of throwback to a very anachronistic and uninformed debate that was about where we were going towards smart soldiers, smart systems, smart water. That's disappeared from the press in media commentary about defense debate. So I respect you, but I strongly disagree with the point. Let's take your question. It wasn't really a question. It was more of just an observation that I'd, you said before, you mentioned how do we really want to get pulled into a conflict with China over, let's say, Taiwan. And I believe I saw you nod before pretty much saying, yeah, we pretty much sacrifice Taiwan for the sake. No, I said that. Oh, I noticed that. Oh, did you? I noticed that. They smiled and nodded pretty much. I have no poker face. Okay. And that was just, the observation is that if we take a step back and we realize from a historical perspective from a hundred years ago or so, the U.S. was able to emerge on the world stage as a leader after the great powers pretty much destroyed each other in World War I. We got in very late into World War I. Let's finish the question. World War II. It's just an observation. Just for my comment about Taiwan, I was being a bit facetious. So lest there be my friends at the Taiwan Economic and Cooperative Representative Office in the audience. But guys, I'll run through a few answers as fast as I can. On this question of whether we can merge security and control. You know, the session you make of, like, you know, having agreements with the country, I think is, yeah, it's absolutely necessary. It's not like we can just withdraw entirely. I think we do have to coordinate it with a number of our allies. But I think we should also be open to coordinating with states that we don't necessarily deem our allies, but our vested interest and have the capabilities to assert, you know, a role in the area. In terms of the military, what's that? In terms of the military-industrial complex, you know, I can't speculate as to what role that plays. But I will say that I think this is important is that procurement can drive strategy. I remember we had a meeting once with, I can't remember, he was from, you know, he was part of the office that sort of does the testing for OT&E. And, you know, you made an argument, I think it was like a fair one, which is that, like, your procurement today drives strategy 20 years down the line, because those are the instruments and the equipment and the capacities that you have in the future.  And I think, you know, at least even if there are macro-political decisions that need to be made about whether, you know, whether the United States is going to choose hegemony over another approach, the defense policy is a critical component of it. And finally, in terms of transaction costs, I think there's going to be savings, like, pretty quickly. I remember reading something, I think Michael Mazar made a suggestion that, you know, army personnel can be cut by 10 percent, which would generate immediate savings because it would be sort of, you know, offsetting recruitment would generate some savings. I know there's been a talk about sort of, you know, formal institutionalized agreements like Law of the Sea. I think that's a valuable idea. I don't think it's sufficient though. You know, ratifying a lot of seas, like obviously a no-brainer, but there are other things that are going to backstop it, right? Like, just because we ratify Law of the Sea doesn't mean that China is not going to attempt to assert its role in the South China Sea or assert its claims. And ultimately, what's going to constrain them or deter them from their capabilities? And it is, you know, balancing by South Asian states. At a minimum. At a minimum, yes. And we can formalize this with institutional agreements, but oftentimes, the security requirements precede the institutional agreements. Right. So very briefly, another way of looking at transaction costs, right? The possible that a momentary power vacuum will emerge and somehow short-circuit the elegant strategy we've laid out. Look, we're not arguing that this is cost-free and that you don't see in which the world looks in the process of retrenching. The argument I would offer, and I think Samir would agree on this, is if you do it wisely and you do it over a longer period of time, over a reasonable period of time, you don't just announce, okay, we're gone tomorrow, see ya. And you do it in such a way that you completely communicate your interests and your red lines. You should be able to do this without triggering too many problems, too many crises that should sort and short-circuit the strategy, right? We oftentimes think about this as an adult, elegant kind of man, number one. Second point on the history of great powers emerging after other great powers destroying themselves, that's spot-on. I wasn't quite sure where your comment was going, but I would argue that this actually incentivizes the U.S. to prevent its conflict with the emerging great powers, which in turn requires settling some of these disputes that might trigger spirals of insecure, that might trigger a crisis day that spirals out of control tomorrow. We actually had around 13,14, Flint. Yeah. I pick up on something that Sameer said. I mean, yeah, military capabilities can either facilitate or constrain certain types of grand strategy. But I tend to think that despite all of the other inputs that drive defense procurement decisions that, you know, if you have a relatively clear strategic framework that has some pretty clear implications about what kinds of military forces you need to pursue that, you know, that I think can still carry a lot of weight in a budget argument. If you don't make that case, if you don't win that argument, you know, you're always vulnerable to people wanting to do basically more of the same. I was really struck by this when, I think it was last year, Steve posted the conference here in Washington, for Bob Pape's most recent book. And I was on a panel which included, among other people, Corey Shockey.  She's on the West Point faculty. She served in the George W. Bush administration doing defense policy at the NSC. She was an advisor to the McCain campaign. I suspect when President Perry is forming his administration in 2013 that Corey is going to get some sort of job in it.  Because suicide terrorism is this, the data is overwhelmingly clear. Suicide terror is this asymmetric strategic response to the perception of occupation by a democratic power, OK? So it basically is an argument that leads to offshore balancing. Go back to being an offshore balancer, and this is the smartest thing the United States can do. I absolutely agree with the argument. It's really interesting to hear why Corey was not willing to go along with it. It was not because she thought Bob's analysis was wrong. It was not because she thought, you know, that some of the problems he was identifying weren't there, weren't real, or didn't need to be taken into account. But she said an offshore balancing posture, you know, does not take account of the political and social purposes. Those were her words, the political and social purposes for which we deploy military forces in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  I think Corey was very accurate in that interesting comment at that point, to a certain degree. I didn't necessarily agree with her, but I mean, her analysis of what was driving this was not, you know, it was, oh, not yet. I agree, it was utterly emblematic, yeah. Well, guys, I very much appreciate you getting us thinking this afternoon on these issues. You know, when I, again, to come back to this question that Josh sort of laid out about great power transitions, you know, one of the really interesting dilemmas I think we're facing, to some degree, is the United States, I think the world is sort of, you know, I think about power as a stock market. You know, I think to some degree, the world has oversold American power at the point, so there'll be a bounce back at some level of perception, but, and while I don't think the United States is ready to forfeit being a globally sprawling, hegemonic force, it nonetheless is doing a lot of things that's undermining its ability to maintain that. At the same time, most superpower transitions occur because another power's coming along and won't hold back that it wants at the table. In my view, China, it's not clear that China wants that role. It is clear to me that countries like Brazil and Turkey, perhaps eventually Iran, that there's a sprouting up of lots of other powers, and in that sense, I think your paper begins to provide some contours to think about what some shared responsibilities about, you know, security public goods or security commons could be. I just think that we need to go a degree deeper to begin looking at the fact that once you remove the us versus everyone else dynamic, the games that all other powers play become a lot more complex in terms of what drives their behavior and how they think. And I think that your paper would be strengthened if somehow you could capture that. I want to thank you both, congratulations. And I want to thank everybody for joining us, and I'm going to call the meeting to close three minutes early so I can get on my conference call. But thank you very much.