Bill Gertz on National Security Challenges facing the Obama Administration
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DEFENSE FORUM FOUNDATION NATIONAL SECURITY AGENDA: WELCOME AND MODERATOR: SPEAKER: FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2009 Transcript by J. WILLIAM MIDDENDORF: Good afternoon. I’m Bill Middendorf, chairman of the Defense Forum Foundation. I would like to thank you for coming to today’s Congressional Defense and Foreign Policy Forum. For those of you who are participating in our forum for the first time, we especially want to thank you and hope you will become a regular here. Our forums began 25 or so years ago, and we’ve always had great bipartisan support and participation and given Congressional staff the opportunity to hear from expert speakers and meet others working in the areas of defense and foreign policy primarily. Before I introduce today’s speaker, I’d like to acknowledge our special guests and Defense Forum Foundation board members. Ed Borcherdt here, one of our great heroes from the Korean War. Ed, good to see you – right over here. (Applause.) Looking mean as hell. (Laughter.) And from the Defense Forum Foundation, our founder, Chad Gore – the beloved Chad – State Department and – (applause). Ambassador Ruddy – Frank Ruddy of our board of directors – Ambassador. (Applause.) Henry Song – our director of projects and grants – Henry. (Applause.) We won a grant from the State Department, thanks to Suzanne’s great work to do work with North Korea defectors. And we have an intern, Hyojo Kim, who is here – there she is. (Applause.) And of course – Colonel Christian Smith, here as a guest of Chad Gore – a strategic planner from the State Department. Is that an oxymoron? (Laughter, applause.) Okay, but anyway, we’re delighted to have you here. And of course our beloved and especially brilliant leader and recent prize winner who won South Korea’s highest honor Suzanne Scholte. (Applause.) When I was secretary of the Navy, I found out that 90 percent of the work was done by the staffers and so that’s why this organization invites staffers here and from the key committees because we’ve found – I found at least – as secretary, if I wanted to get a program through, whether it was an F-18 or the Trident submarine program or a new carrier or the AEGIS missile program – in those days we usually won by one or two votes – very partisan in those days – we had to work with the staff first and get them on board. They were the ones that had plenty of time to focus on these issues and really help us out. And so I owe a great deal of gratitude to your predecessors. And many of your predecessors have gone on to become congressmen and senators. So I was telling Bill today that down the road a few years, I expect to see many of your faces in the Congress. You’ll move on and take the leadership roles higher up. So it’s great to have you with us. Our speaker, Bill Gertz, has been a defense and national security reporter for the Washington Times for 23 years – since 1985. He’s the author of six books, four of which are national best sellers; all of which dealt with critical national security issues. Among them were - and this is particularly dear to my heart – “The Chinese Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America.” Bill and I both share concern because those of us in responsibility have to look at capabilities, not intentions. The State Department and the fuzzy heads over there figure out the intentions – they can change on a dime. But those of us in the armed services area have to focus on capabilities. And we’re looking at the Chinese naval threat now – building five times as many nuclear submarines as we are and – for what purpose? And we have to recognize that there’s a capability developing there – five, 10 years down the road, it’s going to be quite impressive. And what’s the purpose? That’s what we don’t know. He’s also written “Enemies: How America’s Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets – and How We Let It Happen.” Among his many major newspaper exclusives were his report on the Chinese naval submarine secretly sailing undetected within five miles of the USS Carrier – USS Kitty Hawk in October of 2006. I think we had a session on that a few years back and I remember calling Admiral Mullen that day when it happened and said, what the hell are we doing? Theoretically, to have any kind of a hostile force within 200, 300 miles of a carrier battle group – you’ve already lost the war. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t weaponize our carriers, because we have a group with it and we have all the antimissile defenses and anti-submarine forces available in our escorts. We’re supposed to be competent enough to offset any threat two or 300 hundred miles out. We can pretty much sanitize an area that far out rather easily. And that’s why it was such a shock to find a Chinese submarine surfacing within five miles of the Kitty Hawk. And sometimes those things are a blessing because it wakes us up and – of course, it will never happen again, hopefully. Another exclusive by Bill Gertz was how the Pentagon activated its missile defense system in June 2006 in preparation for a possible shoot-down of a North Korean missile launch; China’s deployment of a new class of attack submarines details Russia’s covert involvement in removing weapons from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the details of the North Korean government’s involvement in counterfeiting U.S. currency. Bill’s done all that and more and he writes a weekly column now and he’s been a guest lecturer at the FBI National Academy, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Defense University, Brookings Institution. Before I ask Bill to come up, I’d like to introduce to you two friends that just came in Marty Hoffman, former secretary of the army. I remember back in 1960, I was with Marty at the Somerset Club – very exclusive club in Boston. He was to talk about the army and I was to talk about the Navy and this was with the vice presidential nominee, Henry Cabot Lodge. A large crowd of 2,000 people were on Boston Common, cheering, we want Lodge, we want Lodge! And an emissary came to the door of the Somerset Club and asked him to come out to speak to the crowd – just a wave. And he sent back a note saying, “Don’t they realize I’m having lunch at the Somerset?” He lost the election. So Marty Hoffman, former secretary of the Army – it’s a privilege to have you with us. And Bill Chatfield, head of our selective service – if the great nightfall comes, you can all raise your right hand and he’ll bring you right in – hope you’ll take them into the Navy, Bill. So it’s an honor to ask Bill Gertz to come forward and – speaker to open our 2009 Congressional Defense Policy Forum. Bill. (Applause.) MR. GERTZ: Thanks very much – glad to be here. What I’d like to talk about today is kind of the challenges – national security challenges facing the Obama administration. Now, I wanted to put in there challenges and opportunities, but there really don’t seem to be that many opportunities. As I as going over the kind of list of threats and what I’d like to present you’ll probably be hearing more of in the coming weeks when the director of national intelligence does his annual threat briefing, where they do a – kind of around the world look at the various threats. This is kind of a 300-miles-in-space view and I’ll kind of cover it in a thorough but quick way so that I’ll leave some time for questions. And if you need higher one-meter resolution, we can do that in the question part. Clearly we know that before the inauguration, that the Pentagon, in the person of Admiral Mullen, talked about the threats that someone might do something prior to or right after the inauguration. So they’ve done a lot of preparations at the Pentagon to try and be ready for some kind of a major terrorist attack, some kind of geo-strategic conflict, whether it’s North Korea doing something or Iran doing something or – there’s a lot of hot spots out there and clearly anybody who is in a position of authority within the national security community has definitely got their hands full just by the number of hot spots or things that could boil over and result in involving the United States either in a military way or in a major diplomatic way. Clearly, after 9/11, the al Qaeda threat is clearly number one on the horizon. There’s been a lot of progress made – the Bush administration and its officials are very – were very anxious to say there hadn’t been a terrorist attack since 9/11 on U.S. soil. That said, the status of al Qaeda as a terrorist organization is a little bit unclear. An intelligence official just told me recently that al Qaeda has been hurt and hurt badly. And that’s been the result of the war on terrorism – going after the al Qaeda leaders and stopping their centralized organization. The organization has changed though – it’s kind of morphed into more of an ideological movement. They no longer have Afghanistan, although I’ll get to that in a moment – they’re trying to regroup there. They are going after the ungoverned parts of the world to find places where they can reestablish a major organization that could conduct long-range attacks. Clearly the tribal areas of Pakistan and that area is a big one, Somalia is another, the Maghreb in North Africa is a third – those are all very hot spots for watching al Qaeda. What happened was that – and heard from a lot of Special Forces people, they’re very frustrated, they feel that they’ve been constrained. These are highly trained, highly motivated commando forces that can be sent out and can really do a lot more than they are doing right now. One of the problems is that a lot of the – there was a – this gets into the bureaucracy of it. The CIA wanted to get control of – or maintain control over covert action operations. It’s interesting to note that the only recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that was not implemented was to give the Pentagon the lead role in covert action, which again brings to the forefront this whole question of how to employ special operations forces. They are really – the 9/11 Commission believed that they were the ones that should be out in the front along with intelligence forces as well. So it remains to be seen how that will unfold on the Obama administration, whether the special operations forces will be unleashed. Clearly that would be one way to decrease the large conventional military force in the war on terrorism. On Iraq, the situation there is the trends are in the right direction – you’re seeing stability but it’s not complete. And a lot of military commanders are very worried that a 16-month pullout of troops – which is doable, but it’s not easy – will lead to a reversal of those gains. So there is a debate going on right now and we will probably hear more of that in the coming weeks as well as the commanders weigh in and they try to balance this top priority of the new president, which is to pull out in 16 months, with the military commanders. And the way that conversation goes – it’s pretty easy. The commanders will say, look, we’ve expended a lot of blood and treasure in stabilizing this country. Do you want to be in a position to be able to say that you lost these gains. And no politician and no leader is going to want to make a precipative (ph) move that would undermine that stability. You’re facing a weak government in Baghdad and the terrorist attacks are down but they’re not gone. But the overall assessment there is that the trends are in the right direction, but it remains, quote, “very fragile.” Afghanistan has become kind of the new frontline in the conventional war on terrorism and we’re going to see a major troop surge going on there. In my – one of my columns two weeks ago, I had a very good assessment from a military officer who is in Afghanistan and he said that this year is going to be a very crucial year. It could be the beginning point of success or it also could be a tipping point for failure. So there’s a lot of focus right now on how to adapt the counterinsurgency strategy that was successful in Iraq or is becoming successful in Iraq and applying that to Afghanistan. The first is expanding, training and equipping the Afghan military and police forces to provide security – that’s a fundamental. The next is developing good governance and rule of law. Third is creating a sustainable market economy and fourth is developing a free press and nationwide communications to reach local communities and to provide a counter-propaganda system. And that has been perhaps the biggest shortfall – if I could digress one moment – in the U.S. waging a war against terrorism. We don’t have a good war of ideas strategy. Everybody has recognized it from the top defense officials to the top State Department officials. But we haven’t been able to put together a counter-propaganda, an ideological offensive against terrorists and it’s a real problem. For example, I’ve heard from a number of military analysts that, here we are seven, eight years into the war on terrorism, and the military has not really formulated a comprehensive, cohesive doctrine to understand how Muslims wage war. This is partly the result of political correctness, it’s partly the result of a secular government not being able to deal directly or effectively with a religious problem, which is Islamist extremism. So that’s going to be a real challenge in being able to – ultimately that’s where the war against terror is going to be won – when you can find a way to develop a critique and counterproposal to Islamist extremism and declare the extremists un-Islamic – they basically you win. Certainly not going to be easy, but it’s a challenge that has to be met head-on. Pakistan in the next area I would say is a real hotspot. You have a vulnerable nation of 173 million people. And the figures there are that 10 percent of this population share some sympathy with the Islamist extremists. So you can do the math there, and there’s a lot of people that have this view of going after the United States, pushing all non-Muslims out of this crescent from North Africa through southwest Asia and southeast Asia. The government of Asif Zardari is weak. It’s – we’ve seen a number of terrorist attacks there; it’s kind of a boiling cauldron in one sense – you don’t know what’s going on. On top of that, it has nuclear weapons, and although the Paks have assured us that their nuclear weapons are under safe control, clearly with the situation there, you could lose control of those weapons. U.S. government has contingency plans to try and go in there if the control of those weapons is threatened, but certainly that would not be an easy military operation. Israel-Palestine – obviously another one that is right in the headlines now. Clearly Hamas overreached in its missile attacks. The Israelis decided to go in, in force. They had less than a conclusive victory against Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and they were very intent this time on making a statement and mitigating this rocket threat from Hamas. And they’ve done a lot of military operations, but again, one intelligence official told me that conflict is one rocket attack or two away from again boiling over. Strategically, the thinking there is that the Israelis – it’s a measure of defense. It also may have some aspect to any kind of a future Israel-Iranian conflict. Now, the Israelis are very, very wary of Iran and its nuclear program. You have a government in Tehran that has been advocating wiping Israel off the map and the thinking is perhaps the Gaza operation may be one part of a preparation for that – being able to mitigate a domestic terrorist threat. Then you also have to worry about Hezbollah and Southern Lebanon, which also has been rearming. So that’s a real hotspot and I think every administration going back to the Carter administration has said that they’re going to try to make the Israeli-Palestinian situation their top priority and – it’s a real, real difficult problem. I don’t see any immediate solution to that just because the positions are just so hard. That brings us to Iran. Clearly, I think that is going to be one of the hottest of the hot priorities for the administration – dealing with the Ahmadinejad regime, which is developing nuclear weapons. They have at least 23 known nuclear facilities that are known to U.S. intelligence – most of them are underground, protected by missiles. The Iranians have about 6,000 of these centrifuges and they have made developing uranium enrichment a national priority. And I think this is a problem that is going to be very, very difficult to resolve. The Bush administration sought to multilateralize its negotiations with Iran and it did not produce any results. Instead, the Iranians were able to continue what they’re doing and basically violate their agreement not to conduct this illegal uranium enrichment program. The idea there was, this was the brainchild of Nicholas Burns, who is the State Department’s policy planner, and his idea was to bring the Europeans into the equation and by doing that it would somehow present a united international front that would somehow talk the Iranians out of the enrichment program. It hasn’t worked. North Korea – a similar situation with the nuclear program. You have a regime that, for all intents and purposes, is not going to give up its nuclear weapons, certainly not through negotiations and certainly not through the six-party negotiations that have been going on for a number of years. And the reason is quite simple: This is basically a failed state – the Kim Jong-Il regime – and they understand that nuclear weapons, which they’ve already demonstrated – they had a partial nuclear test – are a guarantee for that regime’s survival in the face of a South Korea that is booming economically and is a vibrant democracy and one of the more powerful economic nations in Asia. I don’t see any immediate solution to this; right now the status of the Six-Party Talks, again, this was an effort by the U.S. government to try to multilateralize its diplomacy in the hopes that they could negotiate with the North Koreans into giving up their nuclear weapons. And in doing that, they gave China, basically, much more authority than it deserved. Basically, the Chinese view – they do not want to see a unified Korea, they have their own strategic interests and it’s been a mistake for – the U.S. government has failed to understand what China is really up to. Just to close the loop on North Korea, very unstable situation – they expect that North Koreans could do anything from conducting a second nuclear test to any one of its numerous missile tests that it did in the past. Also, the human rights situation there continues to be abysmal. I reported, just this week, on a report by Jay Lefkowitz, the outgoing human rights envoy, where he talked about there needs to be linkage between human rights and security issues, and the failure to do that has been a major shortcoming of the U.S. government. And he argues that we should do in North Korea what we did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the ’70s, during the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which became known as the Helsinki Accords. That brings me to China. My view is that China remains a growing threat because, very simply, it remains a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship. That’s undeniable. Yet, I’ve talked to numerous U.S. businessmen that China is no longer communist, they’ve never met a communist in China. And the fact of the matter is, they’ve abandoned the Leninist-Marxist economic principles, but the entire system is a Soviet-designed system – large ministries, internal security forces and recently, within the past 10 years, a major buildup of military forces. And they’re not building up their military forces for domestic use, although they’re certainly willing to do that; they have what they call the People’s Armed Police, and a lot of military forces have been sent to those units. But they’re clearly preparing for a conflict with the United States. And this has been outlined in numerous reports, but yet, in the interests of maintaining business ties with China, we’ve definitely tamped down that growing threat. And in my reporting, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to highlight that. And I think it’s something that’s not going to go away, and clearly, the danger from China is miscalculation. The Chinese, as well as the Iranians and North Koreans, are experts at strategic deception. And the U.S. government has not come to terms with how to deal with states that use strategic deception. The general American approach to world affairs is, if a government tells us something, we’re willing to accept that at face value. The reality is that these nations are using lies and disinformation and deceit in order to fool the U.S. in order to buy time so that they can do things behind the scenes. In the case of China, it’s the development of these large military forces. We are seeing some alarming signs – the recent anti-satellite test, where they were able to shoot down a satellite using a missile. The message there was that we can cripple the U.S. military – not just the U.S. military, but the U.S. economy, by knocking out a number of U.S. communications and surveillance satellites. Okay, I should also mention I think we’re going to hear a lot more about South America and Mexico from – on threat scheme. And the situation in Mexico is fairly alarming. Last year, the figures were 6,700 people were killed in drug violence, most of it along the border regions with the United States. Does this mean that, you know, Mexico is becoming another Somalia? No, but it has the potential to do that, and clearly, the rule of law there is under threat, at this point, by these rival drug gangs that are creating havoc. Even the figures for the first month of 2009 are that several hundred other people are being killed in this drug violence. It’s going to be one of those issues that this administration is going to be forced to deal with. Moving further south, you have the rise of leftist regimes. You have the Hugo Chavez government, which is hooking up with the Russians. We’ve seen strategic bomber flights there, we’ve seen the Venezuelans connection with China, we’ve seen them connecting with Iran, and all of this has an anti-U.S. cast, a way to go after U.S. interests in the region. Cuba is another factor in that. Russia I mentioned. We’ve seen in Russia a sharp shift in a more hostile Russian government under Putin and Medvedev. This has boiled over with the Russian incursion into Georgia, which there still is a big, vigorous debate about who is to blame for that. A close inspection of that, I think that the clearest example was that Russian troops had already been deployed into one of these tunnels leading into Georgia when the Georgians took some action against the breakaway area of Abkhazia, and that triggered a major military move that certainly got the attention of a lot of the former Soviet republics in that region, including Ukraine and others in Eastern Europe. Piracy, another issue that’s coming to the fore. It’s been used, I think, as fairly limited to the areas off Somalia and the Malaka Strait. I don’t see this as a major strategic issue, but it’s certainly one issue that nations that are involved in shipping are going to take a bigger issue. Right now, I think there’s something like 10 or 12 different nations that are engaged in antipiracy operations off of Somalia. And just to finish up, more – not so much of a geographical area but more a domestic, functional area is the U.S. government and the kinds of things that the U.S. government itself is facing, in terms of problems. I think at the top of the list there is our intelligence capabilities. Despite 9/11, despite the Iraq WMD, the U.S. intelligence community remains very deficient. The problem is over-bureaucratization. The problem with large organizations is that they have a mission, they have resources and they’re supposed to do that mission, but what happens to large bureaucracies is they tend to turn inward and they begin to focus more on their own resources and their own people, and this is an especially big problem for intelligence, which for the most part operates in the shadows and in secret. And it’s up to intelligence oversight, especially on Capitol Hill here, to be able to provide not just a critical assessment of things that these agencies may be doing wrong but to provide a more quality-control element. To be able to make sure that we’re getting our money’s worth for this $47 billion a year that taxpayers are spending on intelligence. The bottom line is that we have very, very good electronic intelligence. If there’s a signal, whether it’s coded, any kind of a communication, we can get it, we can decode it, we can use that information as valuable intelligence. But the problem is for groups like al Qaeda or for the Chinese standing committee of the Politburo, you’re not going to be able to find out what’s going on in those organizations without human intelligence. Now, the CIA has been trying to reinvent itself under the new reorganization as a HUMINT organization. Unfortunately, the news is not good. Every time you ask the CIA, and we’ll probably hear this during the upcoming testimony, they say we just need five more years; we’re working on it. The problem is that human intelligence is very hard to do. In most countries, it’s illegal. It gets you into trouble. There’s an excellent book out there I’d recommend by a former CIA non-official cover officer named Ishmael Jones – that’s a pseudonym. He was – for 20 years, worked targeting rogue-state scientists, and he provides a horrifying picture of a dysfunctional CIA HUMINT capability. For example, he said that he would – his job was to recruit these rogue-state scientists, and before he could even make a phone call to approach them, something like five different bureaucracies within CIA headquarters had to sign off on it. So he managed to find creative ways to recruit these people and then go back and go through this cumbersome, bureaucratic process. Another problem I didn’t really mention was counterintelligence. The foreign spying threat is growing. At the top of the list there are the Russians and the Chinese. Ask anybody in the counterintelligence business and they’ll tell you, we are being robbed blind. Our best technology is being stolen – things that our corporations are developing – and this has a real impact, not just on our economy, but our national security. Defense weaponry – that’s going to be a huge problem. It’s time to recapitalize the force, and, unfortunately, the money pot is very, very low. One of the drawbacks of the large, conventional force footprint in the war on terror is it’s costing $12 billion a month. This, I believe, in just my own view, is not a sustainable thing. This is why we should be focusing more on covert human intelligence operations and especially covert special operations forces. They’re smaller and they’re less expensive. And they can do more if they’re employed in the right fashion. The State Department – also major deficiencies there. Under the Obama administration, they’re calling for, quote, “aggressive diplomacy and greater international cooperation.” This is, I think, a formula for disaster in international affairs. Diplomacy, by its nature, tends to want to get along with foreign governments. We hear a lot about soft power, and I’m very much a supporter of that, but we haven’t really developed soft power. So I’ll conclude with my one suggestion, and this was in my latest book, called “The Failure Factory”: We need to de-politicize the intelligence system. Right now, intelligence analysis has become the tail that is wagging the dog. The biggest example was the Iran NIE, which said that in 2003, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program. This was completely false, and I believe this was a political effort by officials within the intelligence community to directly influence U.S policy, and it had that effect. It undermined diplomatic pressure and it undermined threats of military force against Iran for its covert weapons program. So my proposal is that the way to get around that is that the government needs to set up something called the National Net Assessment Council. And net assessment is a term that is somewhat arcane, but in the Pentagon, there’s an office called the Office of Net Assessment. And it’s kind of a think tank. It’s headed by an 80 year-old – 80-something year-old specialist named Andy Marshall, and it does assessments of future problems and issues and how to solve them. And it uses intelligence, but it also presents policy prescriptions. So a National Net Assessment Council could trump some of this politicized intelligence estimates that are out there. And, again, it would use intelligence, but it would also be a prescription – it would provide the president and his closest advisors with information and assessments on world problems and locations and how to solve them. And I’ll stop there and, hopefully, I’ve inspired some questions. Yes? Q: How would you define failure in Afghanistan if you were the United States? MR. GERTZ: Failure in Afghanistan would be if the U.S. withdrew all of its forces, all of the European and coalition forces there withdrew all of their forces, and Afghanistan went back to where it was in September of 2001. Is that going to happen? Not likely, but that would be my gauge for it. Yes? Q: Manny Miranda, with the Iraq Society. You published my departure memo to Ambassador Crocker about this time last year – the first one. What – Secretary Rice was promoting a plan to create a new departmental bureau unit in the State Department for civilian response – basically, nation-building – but to be staffed by State Department folks – former Foreign Service, retired, and so on – and apparently, now, the Obama administration is talking about not 5,000 people but 30,000 people to do that job. And apparently, Secretary Gates has bought into the idea, but from what I’m told, the general staff is not keen on having the State Department do the job that they have seen it do in the past five years. Have you been monitoring that issue? MR. GERTZ: No, I’m not familiar with that, but I agree that it’s an area that needs to be – it needs some high-level attention, because what happens is you get one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing, and I think this is most visible in Afghanistan. From my conversation with a strategist in Afghanistan, he said he’s been very impressed, interestingly, with the State Department people there. They’re dedicated; they’re trying to do their job in a difficult bureaucratic environment. I think one of the problems in Afghanistan is that the Europeans are very constrained, especially their military forces. And the U.S. military is under-resourced; they have not gotten the same level of resources. Would the State Department be the right place for that? I think it would probably be better at a National Security Council level, to try to do something like that, and then have the components – the action components – work in different areas. But clearly, if you’re going to be – I’m not a big fan of nation-building, but if you’re going to be in the nation-building business, you ought to at least do it right and structure the system so that it would work. So 30,000 – and I’m not sure that the State Department would be the best place for all of those. Obviously, there would be other elements, too, I guess. Yes? Q: Yeah, my question is, what should the United States do to deal with China’s growing military threat to the United States, and also China’s intelligence operations in the United States? MR. GERTZ: Yeah, I’ve obviously, I’ve thought about this quite a bit. My whole view of China is that they are headed for very rough waters because of the way this system is structured. It was, under Mao, a communist, totalitarian system, rigidly and ideologically controlled. Under Deng Xiaoping, they decided, let’s try and get rich. But they didn’t change the political system, so what they have, in effect, said was, you can get prosperous – and again, there’s a very limited prosperity limited to coastal areas of China while the inland remains relatively undeveloped and difficult – and you’re creating a situation where there’s going to be a growing tension. As people gained more and more economic freedom, they’re automatically going to want political freedom. And I think we’re seeing the first signs of this in this Charter 08, which is a major manifesto, which is very interestingly similar to what was done in Europe during the ’70s. And this is a group of Chinese both government and business-sector people, as well as some dissidents, who issued a major proclamation calling for democratic reform in China. I’m really surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention, but as with many things in China, there’s a tendency to try to play down there without upsetting the dragon. The solution for China, in my view, is that they need to democratize. They need to get rid of the dictatorship. And I think that there’s been some fairly alarming signs, from the published reports by the Pentagon and others – I think it was the recent China commission report – U.S.-China Economic Security Commission, which is a congressional group – they talked about the danger of the Chinese military’s growing autonomy. You have a situation where we’ve seen a number of troubling signs, like when last November or two Novembers ago, the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk was going to go dock, for Thanksgiving, in Hong Kong. And as the ship got closer – and family members of the crew had already flown to Hong Kong – all of a sudden, the Chinese government said you can’t come here. And the Pentagon went into full diplomatic mode and tried to call up their good friends in the Chinese military, and lo and behold, no one answered the phone. That’s one area; the other was the satellite test – trying to get an explanation from the Chinese government. It was clear that there were different power centers operating. And this is even in dispute now by U.S. intelligence agencies, some of whom say there are no divisions within the Chinese – that it’s a monolithic system. But ultimately, the solution there is some type of democratic reform. I think that’s the best way. I advocate that overseas Chinese – that the U.S. and other pro-democracy countries should help organize the overseas Chinese community and turn them back on China and pressure the Chinese government into instituting the democratic reforms that many Chinese leaders have promised, but so far, have refused to do. On the military side, we definitely need to do more to counter the Chinese buildup. It’s a naval buildup; it’s asymmetric – they’re going after satellite weapons and computer warfare. The Chinese are very, very aggressive at developing this ability to get into systems. A lot of alarming signs there, too – a couple of years ago, within the Pentagon, Chinese military hackers – these were not hackers traced or using China as a waypoint – actually got into the secretary of defense’s computer system. So they’re showing that they can do it, and it’s a pretty serious danger. Yes? Q: What happened to Steve Coughlin and – what was – (inaudible)? MR. GERTZ: Stephen Coughlin was a Pentagon analyst – this is under the subject of the war of ideas against terrorism – and I highlighted this in my latest book, “The Failure Factory.” Coughlin was a Joint Staff analyst – he worked on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff – and he was one of the lead people who were looking at this issue of how to wage ideological war against Muslim extremists. And it was his view that you couldn’t understand Muslim extremism without understanding Islamic law, so he went – not just the Koran, but he actually went into Islamic law texts and he was developing a system that said, look, you have to understand this – if we’re waging war against Islamic extremists, we have to understand what they’re doing. And he ran afoul of an aide to the deputy defense secretary, Gordon England, whose name was Hasham Islam. And Hasham Islam represented what I call, for want of a better term, the Muslim outreach faction of the U.S. government. For the most part, there’s been a very aggressive outreach – community outreach program launched by many of the civil liberties lawyers within all elements of the government, and the notion here is that if you are friendly towards these Muslim groups, that this will be a way to mitigate the terrorist threat. Coughlin, on the other hand, based on documents that came out at some of the terrorism trials that have been going on, said that in reality, what is happening is that a lot of these groups, again, using deception, are actually linked to Islamic extremists – specifically, the Muslim Brotherhood – and that by doing these outreach programs – by the government doing these outreach programs, they’re actually legitimizing a potential domestic terrorist base in the U.S. This is a debate that’s ongoing, and it hasn’t been resolved, although Coughlin was eventually fired and those who advocated the outreach program remain in the driver’s seat on that issue. Yes? Q: When you speak of countering against China and their defensive buildup, do you – (inaudible) – the U.S. approach with an isolated type counter, as the U.S. did against Russia – (inaudible) – buildup, or are you advocating more of an engagement-type approach with China, say as security cooperation – (inaudible)? MR. GERTZ: Both, both. Yeah, we’ve definitely got to keep our powder dry and this is a challenge. Again, there’s limited resources when we’re waging a large, conventional-forces war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s pretty hard for the U.S.’s Pacific commander to go and say, listen, we’ve got to build up our forces. Under the Bush administration, they developed what became known, but not wildly reported, as the hedge strategy. This was – in Chinese terms – bet on both sides. And the argument there was, we don’t know how China is going to emerge when it reaches full-blown regional power or superpower status. It could be a benign power; then again, it could be a hostile power. Therefore, we need to take steps to be able to deal with both outcomes. And so they’ve developed a very – and it’s kind of – they kind of used the Chinese way about it in building up our forces – a lot of software things, we’ve moved a lot of forces around, we’ve shifted the carrier battle group numbers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we’re engaged in a major buildup on Guam, we’re developing greater alliances, specifically, with the Japanese and the Australians. And a lot of it, they’re using – they’re saying, well, we want to reposition our forces to be able to get to Iran quicker, but ultimately, they’re really focusing on China. Another is the issue of the long-range bomber. The Air Force is going to develop a long-range bomber, and one of its requirements would be to be able to strike targets deep within China, where China has many of its underground facilities. So those are the kinds of things that are being done. Yes? Anyone else? Okay. (Applause.) AMB. MIDDENDORF: Thanks so much, Bill. You kind of teed off our next – my next subject – you set it up, rather, and that is, our next forum is going to be on the 27th of February with Dr. Yang Jiang Li (ph), who will be discussing Charter 08, which you talked about, which is this remarkable document signed by 300 leading Chinese intellectuals, lawyers and journalists and has garnered support from thousands of Chinese citizens. Charter 08 calls for an end to the Communist Party rule in China, provides a roadmap to bring democracy and human rights to China. Dr. Yang will discuss what the Congress and the American people can do to support this historic document. Now, there’s an old – there’s a long record of our supporting dissidents in communist countries and what have you, and then they all kind of get their heads cut off, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen on this occasion. But we should give support, just as we’re doing to the dissidents in North Korea, under the leadership of our beloved president. We hope to see you on the 27th. I want to mention one other thing. Bill touched on Chinese naval threat, and the Chinese war against our computers and what have you, stealing everything we’ve got in sight – I spent a lot of time, myself, working on – and we’ve had a couple of sessions on this in the last year – on the EMP threat. And most of you have heard the story, but the Chinese have developed – are developing a tremendous capability for electro-magnetic pulse projection of power against our computer systems and all of our grids – electrical grids and what have you. One single nuclear explosion over the central part of American – Denver or Chicago – would take out most of our grids for – some of them, permanently – and would put us in binds, period, for quite a few months before we had the backup. So we’re extremely vulnerable – this country just lays naked, in a sense, to the EMP threat. We’ve worked hard on it in the Navy department. We set up these lightning rods on our ships so we can actually project the power down into the sea, but that’s not possible over the land. So I point that out as a threat. Secondly, most of you saw – have seen, recently, where Vietnam has recently cut back on the bloggers and the Internet communications within Vietnam, and are treating those that speak poorly of China as sedition and traitors and what have you. And the same thing is – but China has never been that open to Internet, so it’s a much more restrictive society. But I do have great hopes, in the future, for the Internet and bloggers. I didn’t like some of the bloggers in the last campaign, but god bless them if they can do a good job over there with those countries. So I look forward to seeing you all on the 27th, and thanks so much for coming today. And Bill, thank you so much. (Applause.) (END) |
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