Thank you, Glenn, for the kind introduction. Thank you all for the warm welcome. It's a real pleasure to join you today, particularly as you honor Bob Litt with the Intelligence Under Law Award. Bob has dedicated much of his life to intelligence and the law, first at the Department of Justice and most recently at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I got to know Bob during my first couple years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he helped me get up to speed on the thorny legal questions many of you all face every day.
I know we have a lot of lawyers here today, though, I want to address you all as intelligence officers. Just as the Marines like to say every Marine a rifleman, so too is every intelligence lawyer an intelligence officer first. And the work you and your agencies do to help us understand the threats we face as a nation is essential.
Not that I have anything against intelligence lawyers as lawyers. In fact, I like them so much I married one.
Of course, as your spouses may tell you, it can be a little exasperating to be married to an intelligence lawyer, what with your obsessions about classified information. My wife was the deputy general counsel at the NRO during one of its satellite launches. I saw the launch patch online and asked her what the "L" in "NRO-L" stood for. She refused to tell me because it might be classified! So, I asked Lisa Miller, the former general counsel of the NRO. Lisa said, "Seriously, Anna, you won't tell him that? It stands for ‘launch'!"
Kidding aside, the obsession is probably well-placed.
Churchill famously said, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Of course, that would imply that things are different in peacetime. But maybe not.
In fact, one might question to what extent we ever enjoy peacetime. This was a foundational insight of Bill Rood, the famed professor of international relations who got his first exposure to the subject as a rifleman in Patton's Third Army.
Professor Rood liked to say there was no such thing as peacetime, only wartime and preparing for war. Thus, one of his most famous teachings: There's going to be a war, sooner or later, and probably sooner.
Why is that so? Does it have to be so? Many people have long predicted the end of war. But those who predict war-those who accept the lamentable fact that war is coming-have the whole weight of human experience behind them.
Thucydides said men go to war out of fear, interest, and honor. Are things any different today? Has human nature fundamentally changed in 2,500 years since the Athenians and Spartans fought the war he chronicled? Are we any less fearful and self-interested, any more honorable than they were?
What about physical nature? Another professor of international relations, Nicholas Spykman, wrote that, "Geography is the most fundamental factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent." And: "Geography does not argue. It simply is."
Is Afghanistan any less forbidding today than it was for the Russians, the British, and the Greeks? Is a hostile Korea, or Vietnam, or Burma on China's periphery any less of a risk to China than it was 50 or even 500 years ago?
But, but, but. Surely things have changed. Surely this old-fashioned way of thinking no longer holds in an age of nuclear weapons and the internet. Futurists and technologists predict such a thing. The world is getting flatter, borders are disappearing, and we're all becoming citizens of the world, right?
I have to confess: I have my doubts. And I would suggest anyone who holds this view take a quick look at the internet and explain exactly what wicked tendencies of human nature cannot be found there. If anything, it seems like an accelerant to those tendencies, not a restraint.
As Churchill said, even before the nuclear age, "Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination." Have we grown in virtue or wisdom in the century since?
To be fair, we haven't had a general war in 75 years. But 75 years is the blink of an eye in the span of human history. Besides, tell all the soldiers who fought in all the wars since World War Two about the difference between general and limited war and see what they think. For the men who fought, for instance, in the Battle of Mogadishu-and the families of those who died there-it was their Normandy and their Iwo Jima.
It seems, then, that war is a constant, it is always with us, and it always will be. War is not a brief and strange interlude to perpetual peace. And wars don't happen by accident or misunderstanding.
World War One didn't break out, for example, because of a system of interlocking alliances. Those alliances were merely symptoms of the conditions leading to war: the Eastern Question, the Franco-German rivalry, the rising power of Germany as against Great Britain, and colonial competition overseas, to name a few. Germany made a calculated decision to wage war at a time and in a manner best suited for its objectives as it understood them.
Which is usually the case: War is a deliberate instrument of policy, pursued for strategic reasons when best suited to achieve national objectives.
Things have not changed since the Great War. Who here thinks Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping is opposed to war in itself? These men are not saints; they lead regimes that use assassination and torture as tools of statecraft, after all. Such men are not opposed to war, they're only opposed to losing wars, or waging wars at too high a cost for the intended objective.
This is why, according to Rood, the beginning of strategic wisdom is the recognition that war is coming and defeat is possible. Hence his most famous saying: "You run the show or the show runs you."
That's what strategy is all about, achieving such a preponderance of force and superiority of strategic position that the enemy must submit to your will, preferably without fighting a war in the first place. So if you're not fighting a war, then you should be preparing for one. You can be sure our enemies are.
Of course, it often doesn't seem that way. Nations determined to reorder world affairs rarely do so at a stroke. They tend to undertake a series of discrete, incremental steps, designed to improve their strategic positions yet not to provoke armed resistance by their adversaries.
Weimar and Nazi Germany is the most famous case of strategic incrementalism. Some statesmen, most notably Churchill, discerned the pattern. Most did not.
Even a strategist as celebrated as George Kennan wrote from Prague in December 1938, "I have seen no indications of any desire on the part of Hitler to make Germans out of Czechs. And that was after the Anschluss and after Munich, with Czechoslovakia encircled and deprived of its border fortifications. Sadly but all too predictably, Hitler did indeed make Germans out of Czechs three months later.
When you take this strategic point of view, there aren't many surprises in international relations. Rood was fond of saying, "Nothing happens for no good reason." Or as we might put it in Arkansas, "A turtle on a fence post didn't get there by accident."
When people learn I'm on the Intelligence Committee, they often ask what's the most surprising thing I've learned. And the truth is, not much. I can't think of a time I've been surprised by the general course of events in the world. Sure, I may learn about some new terrorist technique or some new Russian or Chinese weapon, but there's very little surprising at a strategic level that's not widely known.
China isn't building those islands in the South China Sea for no reason. Russia didn't invade Crimea and annex it for no reason. North Korea isn't testing those missiles for no reason.
Nothing happens for no good reason.
Even some of the famous so-called surprise attacks weren't all that surprising. Pearl Harbor is held up as the classic example of a surprise attack and intelligence failure. Yet what was so surprising? Imperial Japan wanted to overthrow the international order in East Asia. It had taken a long series of actions demonstrating its intent to do so and tending in that direction. It couldn't achieve that goal, however, if the United States retained the Philippines and its Pacific islands, which the Pacific Fleet enabled us to do. Thus, the fleet had to be destroyed.
Or take the Yom Kippur War. After the Six Days War, Israel came to doubt that the Arab nations could competently wage war against it. But much had happened in the intervening six years.
Muammar Gaddafi seized power in Libya, depriving the United States of bases there and minimizing a key restraining threat to Egypt. Yugoslavia permitted Soviet overflight and refueling, becoming a de facto ally of Egypt. Egypt acquired advanced air-defense systems near the Suez and the Sinai. Only wishful thinking about these and other preparations for war could've obscured the conclusion that war was coming again.
In short, strategic surprise rarely happens unless the victim allows itself to be surprised. It's frequently said that leadership intentions and plans are the hardest intelligence to collect. And that's right. But I would suggest we seldom need spies and broken codes-valuable though they are-to figure out what our enemies are up to. They tell us with their words and actions, for all the world to see. We just need clear-eyed thinking about human nature and the inherent logic of events.
Yet, surprise seems to be a recurring theme for the United States and our allies. Rood referred to this blind spot as the "democratic strategic deficit." Democratic peoples have a dangerous inclination to believe that war is not possible. We organize our lives around negotiation, compromise, and consent. Violence is strictly controlled and aberrational in our societies. Commerce and other peaceful pursuits dominate our lives. There's a natural tendency among democratic peoples therefore to believe that these principles apply in international relations as well.
But they don't. The world is a struggle for mastery and dominance of the international order, in which you run the show or the show truly runs you. Dictators, who organize their domestic order with force and violence and who live in constant fear for their own lives and grasp on power, understand this all too well.
Because the United States dominates the world order today, we need to understand these things and overcome this strategic deficit even more than most. What revisionist powers want to revise, after all, is our role in the world. We're often slow to this realization. As Churchill said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing-after they've tried everything else."
This is just another way of acknowledging the democratic strategic deficit: against the risks of deterrence and the horrors of war, Americans are apt to conciliate an incremental aggressor, no less than any other democratic people. Unfortunately, this is not a strategic approach.
Nor does it yield sound strategic forecasts. Bob Gates testified to the Armed Services Committee a couple years ago: "Our record since Vietnam in predicting where and how we will be engaged militarily next-even a few months out-is perfect: we have never once gotten it right. We never expected to be engaged militarily in Grenada, Lebanon, Libya (twice), Iraq (now three times), Afghanistan, the Balkans, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, and, most recently, West Africa to combat Ebola." To which we must now add Syria, too.
America is a continental nation, full of riches, an ingenious people, and a fearsome military. We have a larger margin of error than small, weak, poor countries in Eurasia. But we cannot afford strategic mistakes indefinitely.
The answer to the democratic strategic deficit is better, far-sighted statesmanship from our elected leaders and military and intelligence professionals. It falls to us in the government, whether elected or career officials, to understand the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be, and to do what's necessary to protect our people against hostile powers bent on our destruction. It's what our citizens expect of us and it's the most fundamental reason they hire us in the first place.
We have some specific challenges ahead of us this year, whether it's adequately funding our military and intelligence agencies or reauthorizing Section 702. But an even bigger challenge is to think strategically, to question conventional wisdom-especially when it's comfortable and easy, when it suggests that war is not coming or our enemies will fight a fair war on the best possible terms for us.
I have this obligation as a senator. You have this obligation as an intelligence officer.
And for those of you who are also an intelligence lawyer, you have the additional responsibility to assure your fellow citizens that your agencies are acting in accordance with law as they conduct their missions. Otherwise, our citizens are apt to fall victim to another manifestation of the democratic strategic deficit: the belief that intelligence programs, especially those adopted since 9/11, are unnecessary or inconsistent with the Constitution.
Well-meaning but misguided zealots urge this view upon them, as do foreign intelligence services through disinformation and subversion campaigns. It's our responsibility to give these arguments no purchase in fact or logic, and to help our people see in a clear-eyed, hard-nosed fashion the very real threats to our survival.
Because these are such serious, weighty matters, let me close with a couple hopeful observations. First, the strategic mindset has a long pedigree in American statecraft, so it's something to recover, not something to introduce. The father of our country, our first president, proclaimed it when he said, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving the peace."
Not hoping for peace, not wishing for it, not entrusting it to other nations or international organizations-Washington knew none of those things preserve the peace. Only preparing for war does.
Second, being prepared for war is what allows the United States to defend the cause of justice. In his famous Melian Dialogue, Thucydides records a perverted view of justice that is all too often accurate across the ages: "the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must." But when the strong are also the just, then the weak need not fear them. Or as Bill Rood put it, "It is only the strong that can afford to be kind and only the strong that can protect the weak."
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
