Four percent for freedom
June 14, 2007| By John Fogarty
Heritage Distinguished Fellow Jim Talent, a former Senator from Missouri, spoke to Heritage Foundation members on Tuesday during the Heritage Community Leadership Exchange teleconference about the need to ensure the military can meet the challenges of the 21st century.
John Fogarty: Thanks very much and welcome back, everybody, to the fifth installment of our Community Leadership Exchange. This HCLE as we call it is the very own teleconference for you, our most important supporters. Those of you joining us for the first time, we’ve got here a series of regular teleconferences featuring a talk and a candid discussion with a Heritage Foundation expert or a Capital Hill policy leader, and we talk about the issues that are on your minds. Our speakers agree to take direct questions from you based on their remarks or on other policy issues that come to mind.
Today’s we’ve got dozens of Heritage members joining us from all over the country, including several from our guest speaker’s home state of Missouri. And I understand several of our callers today are joining us for the first time, so welcome, everybody.
Now before I introduce our special guest today, let me quickly run through the process of asking a question. It’s pretty easy. Any time during the call when a question pops into your head just press star one. You can press star one at any time during the call to ask a question to be entered into the queue. You don’t need to wait until after the speaker’s finished. First, you’ll provide your name, then a question to the operator for recording purposes, and then with you’re recognized you’ll need to repeat the question directly to the speaker. I’ll also remind you once more that the conference is being recorded and both a recording and a transcript will be made available at myheritage.org tomorrow.
Now let’s get started. Our special guest today is a real hero among conservative policy makers. Jim Talent was first elected to office as a Missouri state representative in 1984 at the age of 28. By the age of 32 he rose to the post of Minority Leader chosen unanimously by his colleagues, and he served in that capacity until 1992 when he was elected to Congress to represent Missouri’s Second District.
As a freshman Congressman, he introduced the Real Welfare Act of 1994 which subsequently became the basis of the historic bipartisan Welfare Reform Bill known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1986. And that’s a bill which he worked very closely with the Heritage Foundation and Robert (Rector) to craft. The legislation resulted in 4.2 million people moving from dependency on the government to jobs and self-sufficiency. He’s also served eight years on the House Armed Services Committee where he worked to protect America’s armed forces from cuts in size and in funding.
In 1997, he was named Chairman of the House Small Business Committee which has been noted as one of the most effective in the 106th Congress. Talent was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2002. During his tenure over there, he served on four key committees: The Aging Committee; The Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee; the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee; and most apropos for his talk today the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was narrowly defeated in 2006 and recently the [inaudible] in the Senate became a conservative hero’s victory and Heritage’s gain.
Currently, Senator Talent serves as a distinguished fellow here at Heritage where he specializes in two major issues: military readiness and welfare reform. One of Senator Talent’s objectives at the Heritage Foundation is to raise awareness within Congress and throughout the country of the importance of assuring a stable, robust funding of America’s military, in peace as well as war. And that’s exactly what he’ll—he’s here to talk to us about today. I know many of you probably saw his cover story in National Review just a few months ago entitled “More: The Crying Need For A Bigger U.S. Military.” So he’s here to tell us today how we get there.
Senator Talent, thanks for joining us and welcome aboard.
Jim Talent: Thank you, John. It’s great to be with you all and it’s a wonderful environment for me to do it with. We’re just starting our family vacation and we’re down in Disney World. I was just telling John that every time I’m out of office we take a family vacation. So the last time was 2001 and now we’re doing it again, and we’re looking forward to going to the theme parks.
But this is a subject that, you know, I’ll talk about any time and at any occasion. And in fact really the reason I went to the Heritage Foundation is because Heritage is the ideal platform to push ideas like this.
And I’m going to start off by saying thank you to everybody on this call for your support of the Heritage Foundation. I could spend the whole 15 or 20 minutes talk about Heritage, but I won’t. What I’ll say is that there are just so few platforms outside of the Congress itself where you can develop message and issue, as I put it, communicate it effectively and with credibility, and be effective in using the power of an idea to change the way Washington works. And Heritage is one of them, and it’s from the platform of Heritage that we’re pushing the four-percent for freedom solution to our problems with the national defense.
Now, really the best way to explain what the four-percent for freedom solution is and the reason for it is to give you all a little history. So let me go back to the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President and we were suffering from a period of systematic under-funding of the national defense relative to the national military strategy. And what I mean by that is that at that period of time we’d gone through a number of years where Washington really had knowingly not funded the regular defense establishment, the regular force structure—not particular engagements—but the cost of maintaining defense day to day, year in and year out. They’d almost deliberately not funded it at a level that was necessary to make—to enable us to perform the national military strategy within an acceptable margin of risk. And what happened was the force hollowed out. They funded the things that you could see easily because that was politically the desirable thing to do. So the force was like a house that was freshly pained but had no wiring or plumbing on the inside. It looked good but it wasn’t—it wasn’t able to perform its function.
And then Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. And I think the most—there were a lot of obviously very significant things Ronald Reagan did. But certainly none more significant than the fact that he instantly grasped the strategic situation the United States was in and he pushed through the Congress two double-digit increases in the defense budget in a row. Well, the effect was electric. Morale within the military skyrocketed.
The military had the money to re-capitalize its platforms. And by platforms the military means ships, planes, track vehicles. It re-capitalized its platforms with information-age technology; it sustained a significant increase in the size of the military, particularly in the Navy. And the effect of that was to completely demoralize our enemies around the world, most specifically the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan understood that when you’re a super power your defense policy is your foreign policy to a significant extent. The way that you sustain your defense is going to signal to friend and foe alike your resolution and your strength as regards your foreign policy.
Well, the effect of it was after six or seven years the Soviets through in the towel. It wasn’t only what Reagan did with defense, but that coupled with his rhetoric and resolution of the President and Margaret Thatcher and not a little bit of a contribution from the Pope, and the Soviets through in the towel. It was on the strength of that military that we won Desert Storm overwhelmingly and really in the strength of that—of that—of those decisions by Ronald Reagan that we had peace and prosperity throughout the 1990s.
President Clinton came in in 1993. This was when I was elected to the Congress. I was in the Congress through exactly the same period that Bill Clinton was. I came in ‘92 and went out in 2000. I used—I told people at the time, though, the difference was that when I left they didn’t have to count the spoons, unlike when President Clinton left. But one of President Clinton’s most significant mistakes was under-funding systematically the military. He cut the size of the military by almost a half and did not adequately fund the military that remained. There were years when we did not buy, in the ‘90s, did not buy fixed-wing aircraft for the United States Air Force. So the military got older and older as it smaller. We also were using the military than ever before in the post Cold War era. And by the—by the time George Bush took over the military had already significantly, as I called it, rusted. It was too old and in many respects too small even though we had and have today the best people who’ve ever served in any military at any time.
George Bush increased spending on the military, but I have to say not enough, especially given the needs of the post 9/11 era and the fact that increasingly money’s been eaten up in operation and maintenance, in readiness, just the day to day cost of the military even outside of the global war on terror as well as quality of life issues like health care and pay. When you have top-notch people in the military you have to compensate them to keep them, particularly when you’re in the stress of a—of a long standing conflict, even though a low intensity conflict like Iraq.
Well, to telescope ahead to today, the crisis is really upon us now because of these years of under-funding and the fact that we have postponed the new generation of platforms that the military has to buy. We’ve postponed them as long as we can. In the next five years all three of the services are going to procure the new generation of equipment they’re going to use for the next 25 years. And I can go through the various programs for you. The Army is going to replace almost all of its track vehicles and many of its tanks, the Navy has to buy littoral combat vessels, has to develop and build a new cruiser. And I could go on and on. Similarly with the Air Force. And the funding simply is not there.
Our best estimates at Heritage—and this is consistent with what the Congressional Budget Office says, what AEI says, what really every reasonable defense expert says—as a matter of fact, if anything we come in under where they come in in terms of estimates—we think there’s a shortfall of $30 to $40 billion per year. And so we have proposed the four-percent for freedom solution. As it happens if we spend only four percent of the nation’s GDP on the nation’s regular defense budget we could make up that gap. We could do what Ronald Reagan did in the ‘80s.
I can’t think of a better message to send particularly now with the Iraqi operation in such peril, I can’t think of a better message to send to friend and foe alike about American resolution than to re-capitalize the military for the generation of top-quality high-tech equipment that would also enable us to sustain the increases in the Army and the Marines that we all believe is necessary. And the good new, folks, it is well within America’s economic ability to do this. Our economy is our great resource and a great power. We ought to use it now. It is consistent with transforming the military.
As a matter of fact, it’s necessary to transform the military. Transformation is great, but you must modernize and you have to spend money in order to modernize. It would allow us to begin buying programs efficiently.
You see, we’ve funded procurement on the cheap for so long that it actually introduces significant economic efficiencies. For example, instead of buying the modern cargo aircraft with a multi-year contract we’re buying them piecemeal and they cost $50 million more a copy. That’s going to end up costing the taxpayers at least a half a billion dollars we shouldn’t be spending. I mean, think how much more each individual food item would cost you if you bought them one by one at the 7-11 instead of going to the super market or the, you know, the buying club or something like that to buy food. That’s the situation the military’s in.
And finally, getting Congress to commit to the four percent solution—this may be one of the greatest benefits of all—will focus attention on that part of the budget that really is the problem, which is the entitlements. You know, and I—and I talk about this on left-wing radio programs and I’ve done it. They always come back and talk about how much we’re spending on defense and how that’s the problem with the budget. Well, that’s just hokum. The problem with the budget is the growing cost of entitlements. Funding defense on the cheap is not going to keep us from going bankrupt if we don’t do something about entitlements. And if we do something about entitlements there will be more than enough money for the real responsibilities of the government, including the national defense.
So the four-percent solution we think at Heritage is consistent with our mission, it’s the way we can protect American security and also focus everybody’s attention on the part of the budget that is really driving us into bankruptcy.
I’d be happy to take your questions. I actually brought this in a little bit fast, John, because I want to have plenty of time for questions. But again I appreciate everybody’s support of Heritage and really enjoy the opportunity to talk about this issue.
John Fogarty: Great, that’s terrific. Thanks very much, Senator Talent. And would you be willing to take questions on this issue and a few others.
Jim Talent: Sure.
John Fogarty: Our callers want to ask about [inaudible]
Jim Talent: Absolutely.
John Fogarty: Great.
Jim Talent: Except Paris Hilton. I’m not going to—I refuse to take Paris Hilton—no, I’ll even questions about that.
John Fogarty: I think she’s back in jail, so we’ll see. We’ll have to ask Greta Van Susteren on that one.
Jim Talent: Well, she’s in the infirmary, isn’t she?
John Fogarty: That’s it, yes. Well, let me—let’s go to some callers now. I know your remarks really did hit home. Let me just remind the callers press star one to ask your question. And we’ll do that.
Can we get Tom L.? I know we have a call from Tom L., from Florida. Tom, are you there?
Tom Linnen: I sure am. Can you hear me OK?
John Fogarty: Yes.
Tom L.: I sure can, Tom. I hear you real well.
Tom L.: Well, my—I really got a hodgepodge of questions and—not questions but—well, there’s questions, too. Recall Eisenhower talking about the industrial—military industrial complex.
Jim Talent: Right.
Tom L.: Also recall some of the $500 toilet seats.
Jim Talent: Right.
Tom L.: Recall how we have mismanaged the expenditure of funding in the military over the years. And I tend to agree that we’ve got to do something, but we’re also—the question is not a question of doing something, the question is what do we do. We have navel officers now who are going to head all the major commands in the United States.
Well, let me put it this way, they’re about to head all the major commands of the military. I don’t know about the Navy, and it looks like the Army’s going to be totally excluded. But I was—I was one of the original officers of Special Forces and special ops back in the Korean War. And I can remember the military—the 82nd Airborne, which was down the street from Smoke Bottom Hill where we were at Fort Bragg, they were a convention arm of the military and we were—we were really looked down at, even though we were behind fences and so on and so forth.
But the military has to—you have to be very careful when you build a military that you’re building the right strategy. And we’re into asymmetric warfare and irregular warfares of all types and varieties and terrorism. And how the funding is spent—the funding is not the problem, it’s how it’s spent and whether or not we’re doing—making the current decisions. And I sometimes—I just read a—and I don’t—I don’t have it in my mind completely and accurately, but somewhere the United States spends 50-something percent on—out of its gross domestic—or no, out of its gross national product on defense.
Jim Talent: No, that’s not …
Tom L.: Well, China—well, agent, I don’t have it in my mind—I don’t have it in front of me either. I should have kept it. But China and every other nation, including Britain, France, and so on are in the five to four percent category.
Jim Talent: Right.
Tom L.: So I know we’re biggest and I know we have more to handle and I know we have to pay our military, particularly as a volunteer force.
Jim Talent: Right.
Tom L.: But we’ve got to take a very careful look as we expand the military and strengthen it. And I don’t know whether Washington is up to that, frankly.
Jim Talent: Well, I hear you.
Tom L.: [inaudible] might be.
Jim Talent: Well, Tom, first of all I agree with large parts of everything you said. I’m not sure you—you just have seen that 50-percent figure in a different context. Last year’s budget we spent about 3.3 percent of the gross domestic product. That’s the total economy. It’s higher than obviously if you look at [inaudible]
Tom L.: What about the—how about the GNP? Gross National Product.
Jim Talent: Well, I think it’d be—I think it’d be even—it would be even a smaller percentage of that because that’s bigger than GDP.
Tom L.: Yes. Well, I don’t know what [inaudible] anyhow go ahead. I’m sorry.
Jim Talent: It’s historically at an extremely—at an extremely low level. Now, having said that you are absolutely correct about reform of how we buy and procure, not just procure but just the whole design/build cycle, which as you know can take 20 years. I mean, we can’t continue to design and build new weapon systems and new platforms in the way that we did it in the 1950s. You’re absolutely correct about that.
Now, I mean, it’s a whole other side to it. Actually the figure that Heritage is putting forth and the gap that we’ve estimated, what we think will be—what we want to spend will be sufficient assuming we get some efficiencies in terms of procurement. This is why, for example, the Congressional Budget Office and AEI have a bigger number than we have because if we can’t control program cost we can’t even do it at four percent. OK?
Tom L.: Right.
Jim Talent: So what I’m saying is not, you know—what you’re saying is not at all inconsistent with what we’re saying. We want transformational procurement policies. Now, I’ll give you my ideas. There are two areas that I think are going to be fruitful. I don’t think more bureaucrats and more regulations is going to do it. I mean, we’ve done that. Been there, done that, got that tee shirt. I mean, I was there in the ‘90s. I think what—we’ve got to two things. I think we’ve got to begin—instead of trying the procurement process to figure out exactly what we’re going to need 10 years down the road and exactly the technology and keep changing and shuffling requirements through the process which drives up cost, I think we build more of a basic platform but we leave room—we get the engineers to leave room and leave capability to evolve the platform over time. So we go back. We’ve done this with military aircraft like F15, F18, and that has been very efficient. Those have come in under cost and under—on time, under cost and under-weight, too. In other words, we’ve done very well with that. I think we need to do the same thing with regard to track vehicles and ships.
The other thing is we have to have a procurement policy that gets small business competition in at more stages. So for example, if it looks like a piece of a program’s going way over cost we ought to re-open that and invite the high-tech small businesses around the country to bid to see if they can provide the same kinds of capability.
One other point I want to make, and I—and it’s intriguing and it would be worth looking into. When we say that there’s a shortfall we’re talking about a shortfall of capability in terms of the existing national and military strategy.
Now if you change that strategy—if, for example, we develop effective alliances on the—around the world with, say, India and Japan, and Japan rebuilds part of its Naval strength, well, this changes things. But assuming that we have the existing national military strategy, which is to fight two regional contingencies at the same time, essentially, four peace keeping endeavors and a number of other things, then we don’t have an adequate force. So we’ve either got to change the national military strategy, which calls for rethinking our whole foreign policy, which might very well be reasonable to do, or we’re going to have to build up our strength.
Tom L.: Well, under BRAC—can you hear me?
Jim Talent: Yes.
Tom Linnen: Under BRAC, which has really not been implemented yet, we’re going to have to—the old barracks that a lot of us from the old wars are used to are going to have to be solid structures. They can’t be what they were before.
Jim Talent: Right.
Tom L.: And as we bring troops back from Europe or wherever, or even hopefully out of Iraq eventually, there are certain guidelines that are going to have to be followed, are going to require some money. But it could be also done wrong. You can have brick and mortar type structures or you can have some kind of trailer type structures or you can have something in between because there is new technology in this area, but …
Jim Talent: What we’re—what we’re finding with BRAC is—you say—you say it has to be—it can’t be done wrong. Well, I think unfortunately we’ve done a lot of the BRAC grounds wrong. The government—and we conservatives I think missed this a little bit. The government doesn’t even do privatization efficiently. In other words, in a company if you, you know, cut back on capital costs or whatever, the bottom line disciplines you so that you do it in an efficient way.
Now with BRAC, for example, the up-front costs of taking county spaces has been much higher than anybody predicted. Because, for example, environmental remediation, we’ve had to spend billions more than we thought. So it’s going to take a long time before we begin making money off of BRAC. Down the road we will. But it—we just have found that these concepts that work well in the private sector in terms of efficiency haven’t worked very well and we haven’t done as good a job as we should have in implementing them.
John Fogarty: Thanks, Senator. Let’s go to Phil C. Phil is a member of the New York Area Committee for Heritage and he’s coming to us from Mount Claire, New Jersey, I believe. Phil, are you with us?
Phil Crowley: Yes, I am, John. Senator Talent, let me begin by thanking you for your service. I know I express the feeling of all of my Heritage colleagues. Public service is a difficult course to take and you have to really have a high regard for your citizens. And I don’t think we say enough thank you to the people who take on the burden and are in the public spotlight trying to get—educate people about these issues in the way that you have. And I want to thank you for that.
Jim Talent: Thank you.
Phil C.: My question is about immigration. With respect to—and I know that’s one the issues that you have an interest in as well. Certainly having a strong military is an important part of securing the safety and—as well as health and welfare of our people. But the immigration plan that was recently proposed in the Senate it seemed to me had a number of deficiencies from the standpoint of the safety of—and security of our people.
And fortunately the initial try seemed to go down to defeat. But it seems to me that it may be coming back. And from your perspective as having been up on the Hill, I’d be very interested in your insights into what we need to be doing in order to assure that the new bill if it should ever arise from the ashes is defeated as soundly the second time around as this one was the first time around.
Jim Talent: I’d be happy to address that, Phil. I do feel strongly about it. It’s not my area of expertise like defense and welfare reform, but obviously, I became familiar with the issue when I was in the Senate. First of all, let me just say what you need to do to continue, there is a number of things obviously. Get educated, advocate, et cetera. But you’re support of Heritage is just absolutely crucial. And I think feel I can say this because although I’m part of Heritage now and I’m a fellow at Heritage and will be for some little time, I still feel like—I mean, most of my contact with the Foundation has been as a partner in its efforts.
And so I just don’t—it’s just not self-serving for me to tell you all this. When Heritage entered the list the way it did with its intellectual firepower, its credibility within the conservative movement and the Republican Party, it was a decisive intervention, at least within our movement and our party. You know, to sustain the kinds of arguments that the bill sponsors were trying to sustain on behalf of the legislation, with Heritage at every corner contesting those arguments was very, very difficult.
I mean, just, frankly, Heritage just has a lot of credibility with the Republican base, more so than the sponsors of this bill. And you could see the changes in votes. I mean, there were some amendments that were voted and then re-voted and a dozen votes may have changed. And I really think that was the conservative movement in general and Heritage in particular.
Now I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I think any bill with broad-based amnesty is a big mistake. I think it’s just going to—it’s the opposite of the incentives that you want. The value of American citizenship or even permanent residence in the United States is so great that if people believe all you have to do to get it is to get here somehow and some stay here it will just usually increase pressure on the border. And that’s exactly what happened when we did the amnesty 20 years ago. We don’t need a new open-ended visa program either in my judgment. And I think any kind of massive new global program or global amnesty on top of everything else will just be impossible to administer.
One of the great ironies of this legislation is that the sponsors argued in favor of it on the grounds that it was the only practical solution—you heard this a lot—and that it was the best we could do under the circumstances. Well, it was completely impractical. I mean, the idea that the existing immigration bureaucracy could administrator a multi-tiered conditional amnesty program and a vast new guest worker program is—to believe that that’s practical just shows how separated from reality the sponsors of the bill had become.
What we ought to do is a series of important incremental steps beginning with border security, good employer verification system, as I said no amnesty, fixing in so far as we can the existing logical immigration system. And then if we need extra workers in particular areas we can increase visas or quotas in those areas, which is what Congress traditional has done.
I would continue to stay alert. Washington wants an amnesty. Frankly, the establishment in both parties wants that. That’s what they keep trying to get. Ever since this—you know, they real—this issue started surfacing a few years ago. They have backed down because of intense political pressure, but I don’t think they’ve changed their objectives. I think there’re sincere about it and there are many people in the movement—in our movement who support that and I respect their sincerity. But I just think they’re wrong.
And I’ll say something else and then I’ll be quiet and we’ll go on to the next question if you want or you can come back, Phil. But, you know, in the Congress we’re supposed to represent the American people. And I don’t blame people out there who are tradesman who have to compete against this labor when it comes in. I don’t blame them for being concerned about the opportunities for their families and their kids. There’s nothing nativistic about that.
Now, we’re very generous in our legal immigration policy. But there has to be a limit if we’re going to guarantee opportunity for our own people. And, you know, we believe in the market at Heritage. Well, you know, the biggest the supply of labor the lower the cost of it’s going to be. And I think this immigration has had a downward impact on wages and we should be concerned about that.
So I thank you for—and I’ve talked too long about it. But basically continue supporting Heritage and other institutions that are opposing this, because I think we won this this time around.
John Fogarty: I think that’s right. And as Ed Feulner warns us, though, there are no permanent in Washington just as there are no permanent defeats. So we’re going to be as vigilant as necessary here in Washington with Heritage.
Senator, let’s go to a call from the Midwest. Mary Jo T. is the Chairman of our Omaha Committee For Heritage. And she is someone who does not chicken out when it comes to really fighting the liberal assault. Mary Jo, welcome aboard.
Mary Jo T.: Thanks, John. Sometimes I’m I get a little too radical, but I don’t think there is too much radicalism when it comes to conservatives that’s well thought out and well placed. Thank you, Senator Talent, for being with us today. And I have kind of two-part question.
First, I’d like to go back to when you were talking with Tom about the military and funding. And they probably actually jibe into each other. But it came to my mind that who is really in charge of watching the costs when you said something about if we’re working on a project and we find that it’s cost prohibitive, as the BRAC things have been very much more costly than we were ever told to begin with—and I don’t think we’ve ever been told that, oh, my gosh, we’ve got cost overruns.
And then the other thing that—the originally question I had for you was I can’t figure out—I always thought until probably the last five or six years the Pentagon worked in conjunction with the administration. But in the last few years I have found—I can’t figure out if they’re friends, foes, or just another layer of bureaucracy who is fighting for their very own funding and their lives—their fiscal lives and just keep growing and growing like this never-ending monster.
Jim Talent: Yes. Let me address that second point first, Mary Jo. And I, you know, I come from the perspective—and I was on the Armed Services Committee all of my years in the Congress. I have a tremendous respect for the military. And I, you know, I’m just—I’m pro defense.
I’m a huge believer in what Teddy Roosevelt talked about, you know, walking softly but carrying a big stick. I just think it’s the absolute guarantor of our safety and our security. What is supposed to happen between political authorities and the—the top ranking active chiefs, basically, in the Pentagon is they’re supposed to iron out their differences. Ultimately of course the civilian authorities make decisions and the Pentagon goes along.
What’s happened—and it was especially during the Clinton Administration—but you have seen some of it in the Bush Administration as well—is that the chiefs have known that they cannot—they cannot carry out the mission that they’ve been given, they cannot maintain force structure at a level that is adequate to perform the mission within what they call an acceptable level of risk at the budget numbers that they’ve been given. And so there’s this increasing tension. They salute and go along. I mean, they don’t come before the Congress and openly criticize these budget numbers.
But there’s just an increasing kind of tension because anybody who looks at it can see the situation that we’re in. There were times when they were given a number and then, you know, OMB wanted to save money, which is—which is good. But then they directed that defense—just cut the number. In other words, we’ve had budget-driven decisions made about military requirements. And that’s—that’s just not a good thing. And the terrible thing is, as you all recall, the rest of the defense –of the domestic budge grew akimbo in the early part of this decade at the same time as we were not funding defense adequately. Drove me out my skull.
Now, if the question is who’s in charge, you’ve got to have an aggressive hands-on office of Secretary of Defense. If not the Secretary himself, his acquisition under securities. And there are some areas where they’ve done things pretty well. I mean, I don’t mean to be critical entirely. For example, Secretary Cheney just cancelled programs if he felt they weren’t necessary. And I could give you programs that I think are of marginal value that we could get rid of. It still will leave a very, very substantial gap. And that’s what believe at Heritage.
So, again, what we’re talking about is not inconsistent whatsoever. In fact, it assumes that we’re going to use the money wisely and efficiently. We can’t do it at for percent if we don’t.
John Fogarty: Thanks, Senator. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s go up to the belly of the beast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and take a call from our good friend Bill E.
Bill, hi. How are you?
Bill E.: Hi. How are you?
John Fogarty: Great.
Bill E.: From the belly of the beast.
John Fogarty: What’s your question for Senator Talent?
Bill E.: How can we get a higher priority on missile defense, especially space-based interceptors? And especially on defense against electromagnetic pulse which could wipe out our economy with one nuclear explosion.
Jim Talent: Well, you know, we ought to have either Jim Carafano—Jim’s one of our great defense experts—or Senator Kyl, who’s as knowledgeable as anybody in the government on this. It’s an extremely frustrating point for me and it relates to what Mary Jo was talking about. Strategically there’s no question that we need an effective missile defense. And I mean, it’s just—and it’s become more relevant, not less, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rogue missile attack with a—with a—with a nuclear warhead I think is—well, it’s the nightmare scenario.
We are closer to the use of nuclear weapons than I think we ever were during the Cold War era. And I would include even the Cuban missile crisis in that. And yet we have had consistent problems implementing this program. It’s strategically necessary, but operationally we’ve not done it as well as we need to do it. And I just think it’s effective management and new people who will, you kick a few you know what’s to get this program moving. I can’t really describe the means in any other way than that. And here we have to, you know, we just play into the hands of the liberals who disagree with the basic strategic decision every time there’s a problem with the program.
Now, we have—there are parts of it that we have in place, as you—it sounds like you know so well. But it’s not performed as well as it should have. And I think we should have had it further along than we’ve got it now.
John Fogarty: Thanks, again, Senator. We’ve got a question from Ralph Jenkins who is from your home state of Missouri out in Saint Joseph’s.
Jim Talent: Yes, Ralph.
John Fogarty: Ralph, welcome.
Ralph J.: Thank you.
John Fogarty: Good to hear from you. What’s your question for Senator Talent?
Ralph J.: My question on the four-percent solution is with the current liberal democrats carrying the load in the Congresses, what’s your—what’s your real bottom line as to—as to the possibility of taking this out of entitlements and putting it into the fourth-percent program?
Jim Talent: Oh. Well, taking it out—with the liberals in the position they’re in, getting entitlement reform is going to be very difficult. Forget about what we do with the money, whether it goes to defense or anything else.
Let’s face it, entitlement reform was hard enough to get when the Republicans were in control, because you have to—this is—this is something Heritage understands so well. It’s not enough just to come up with the right thing to do. That’s very, very important. But you have to do the right thing effectively. And part of that is translating it into a lexicon, into an idiom that is powerful and that moves people. And we’ve not done that effectively with entitlement reform. We’ve got to do it in the next administration.
Now, I think on the—on the defense side of it this is an area where strong presidential leadership would I think make a huge different. The Democrats are falling all over themselves to show how patriotic they are while I think are undermining a lot of what we’re doing. The liberals are doing this. This would be a good way to test whether they’re really patriotic. Because, you know, it’s easy to talk in terms of defense, it’s easy to say you’re going to build up the Army and you’re going to take the money away from, you know, the other services. But to actually sustain the top-line budget number at an adequate number, that requires a real commitment to the country’s interest.
And, you know, it’s a good opportunity to push the left, if you will. But the entitlement reform is a whole separate issue. And, look, they’re the pro government party, or least the left-wing of the Democratic party is, and they’re not going to want to reform these programs so as to—as to reduce their costs. It’s just antithetical to everything that they believe. Even though if you—if you actually want the programs to be sustainable over time we have to do something about their cost. They’re just not sustainable.
John Fogarty: Right. This is very—this is very insightful. I want to move to one other caller. In fact, we have two—time for two more callers if you’ve got time, Senator.
Jim Talent: Sure.
John Fogarty: Let’s go up to Chicago and Ron T., who is a member of our Chicago Committee. Ron.
Ron Tesarik: Thank you, John. Good afternoon, Senator Talent.
Jim Talent: Hey, Ron.
Ron T.: Speaking of shortfalls, I noted that the Army missed their recruiting level for May, first time in a number of months. But that made me wonder about the prospects for actually increasing the size of the military service with the volunteer Army. And I’m just wondering if you have any insights as to the prospects of a conscription or draft or how you feel about the voluntary Army going forward.
Jim Talent: Sure. Well, the volunteer military has been a huge success. It’s now mature. It works. We really just have the best people—I’m not taking anything away from veterans of the past—but we just have great people. And they have in fact held the military together through some very, very difficult times, because we have the top quality people.
A draft is not consistent with the culture of volunteer military. I mean, you—it’s just not very feasible right now. I think unless we got in some situation where you had to expand the military by a factor of eight or 10, you just—you could not go through the cultural trauma you’d have to go through to introduce the draft. I’ve never been a big fan of the draft. I don’t think conservatives ought to be actually. I mean, you talk about intrusion of the government on people, you know, that’s what a draft would do.
Now, in terms of the size of the military, the good news is that, yes, the Army needs to be bigger, but we’re not talking about—I mean, we’re not talking about huge numbers. Maybe—I mean, I’d like to see it about four division bigger, the active duty Army. We had 18 active duty divisions when we did Desert Storm, Clinton cut it to 10 which is the reason why we have to send people over, you know, two, three, four times into Iraq. And I think the right figure, the sweet spot is someplace in the middle. You know, but that’s only another 80 or 100,000 troops. And we can recruit those.
Now, you can’t recruit them overnight. And this points out a very important factor. The decisions that we make regarding the basic structure of the military affect options that presidents have eight or 10 years down the right. Now, George Bush did not have the options his father had. When the current President Bush went into Iraq he didn’t have the options to use as overwhelming a force as his father used in Desert Storm because his father had an army that almost twice as big. And that’s something I tried always to keep in mind when I was in the Armed Services Committee.
John Fogarty: Let’s finish it up with another call from your home state. We’ll go to David Caldwell, in St. Louis, Missouri. David, welcome aboard.
David C.: Hello. First of all, I would like to say that if I—as a Missouri resident if I can’t have Jim Talent as my Senator or Representative I’m next most happy having him as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Jim Talent: Thank you for that, David.
David Caldwell: My question is kind of a follow-up on the previous one about balancing this need for increased funding with the entitlement issue. That is can you give me any specifics as to how the Heritage Foundation intends to get this message out without inviting the Democrats to spend it as a need to not extend the tax cuts or even—
Jim Talent: Yes.
David C.: —to increase tax cuts, to increase taxes.
Jim Talent: It’s amazing the number of things they “paid for” with their tax on, you know, again “millionaires.” I remember an old Missouri politician who used to say—Bill Emerson used to say when the—from the opposite side of the state from you Dave, but he used to say when the Democrats talk about raising taxes on the wealthy make sure your wallet’s in your pocket because they’re coming after you.
Well, I think we just do that by fighting effectively the basic battle about taxation. And, you know, I think we do that on two levels. One of them is to appeal to just the basic common sense of the American people, and I think they know that the economy’s more productive when the people can keep more of their money. I mean, that’s how you grow jobs and grow the economy and, by the way, grow revenue. I mean, I—the whole Laffer Curve concept, old supply side economic concept, is proven really now. And I used to argue this all the time even with the liberal press, that, look, if you’re a fan of government you should—you should want taxes to be low because that produces more revenue over time. That’s one of the problems with it, frankly, you end up with surpluses and then you’re tempted to spend it.
And then the other argument, which I don’t think we make effectively enough except in the context of things like the debate tax, is the basic moral argument. I mean, I put it this way to people. The wealth of a nation belongs in the first instance to the people who produce it and not the government. And that’s just a basic right and wrong thing. And the people have produced this wealth and they’re entitled to it. And the government’s only entitled to take what it absolutely needs for functions it’s absolutely supposed to perform, you know, like defense. It’s not the presumption the other way around where the government gets it all and then lets you keep a little bit of it. It’s just not right.
And this is a basic difference, a fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives, being the left and the right. You know, we believe in the people and what they build and we’re very suspicious of the government, and they believe in government and they’re suspicious of what the people are doing. That’s why they want taxes higher and they want regulations more comprehensive, because they want to watch the people all the time, and that’s why we want taxes lower and government smaller.
So, you know, I think we fight this out on both levels. We’re going to have to do that apart from the whole defense thing. But when we do we do win. This is—you know, I’m not simplistic enough to say that if—that if we just stand up for what’s right we’re going to win all the time, because there’s—there’s more to it than that. You have to do it effectively. But this is an issue where if you just articulate it, you know, passionately and don’t apologize for it and you really do move people because I think you just appeal to the great common sense of the American people.
John Fogarty: Well, we are blessed and lucky to have you here, Senator Talent, not only on our call but as a Heritage leader and a visiting fellow. We hope we can keep you around for as long as you’ll have us.
Jim Talent: Well, thank you, John. And I enjoyed this. And again, thanks very much to your—to the callers in today for your—for their support of Heritage. It’s really important.
John Fogarty is Director of Donor Relations at The Heritage Foundation.
