And the Welcome to Conversations, I'm Bill Crystal and I'm very pleased to be joined today by

my good friends Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmidt who have had distinguished careers here in Washington and government

and outside, think tanks and other notorious institutions that we've worked together on a little

bit, but who are now co-directors of the Maryland Ware Center for Security Studies here at the American Enterprise Institute.

So thank you for joining me.

Yeah, glad to be here.

And you've issued a very important new report.

Let's just begin with that.

To rebuild America's military. Does it really need to be rebuilt? It's so much bigger than everyone else is. Isn't this what

people in the defense and foreign policy world always say? What do you argue here?

Well, I mean, the U.S. military has a job to do and it has to be

adequate to the task it's been reduced in size its equipment has gotten older by every measure. It's not what it used to be and the

world is getting nasty or uglier and more violent and America's interests

remain the same.

So just simply in order to build a military that can do what American presidents have always asked it to do

is a task that really needs to be taken care of shortly.

And how big is the task?

Is it, I mean, are you talking about some incremental fixes?

It's significant.

One of the things I think that's not really fully appreciated is that we've really

been not re-modernizing and recapitalizing the military since the end of the Cold War.

We've left, we've been left with the kind of Reagan buildup.

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