Transcript of Newt's speech on National Security at the Heritage Foundation

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MR. GINGRICH: I want to thank all of you for that warm welcome, and I want to thank my good friend, Ed Feulner, who, truth be told, to whatever degree, I have lots of ideas, a substantial number of them have come from knowing Ed and knowing the folks here at Heritage and stealing them quite liberally, frankly, all the way back into the mid 1970s. So we have had a long and wonderful relationship talking about ideas and trying to apply those ideas to make things better, including, for example, welfare reform, about which we had many conversations in this institution before we passed it in 1996.

I also want to thank my good friend Jim Talent, who invited me to come and give this talk and who has been organizing this National Defense Month. I appreciate very much that you are reaching out and giving me this opportunity.

You know, I think our goals are pretty straightforward as a country, even though they get cluttered sometimes. Essentially, they come down to safety, prosperity, and freedom, and I think sometimes politicians like to avoid those because they are so clear that if you simply measure everything against are we safe, are we prosperous, and are we free, and does the next proposal make us more safe or less safe, more prosperous or less prosperous, more free or less free, that level of clarity often doesn't work to the advantage of politicians in Washington who would like to avoid investing in safety, would like to adopt tax increases that kill prosperity, and would like to centralize power and bureaucracy in a way which limits freedom.

So I think, in many ways, the conservative movement going back to Goldwater and Reagan and to Bill Buckley has had a pattern of really resonating with the average American beyond the politics of the day, and I think that is why the conservative movement has grown as much as it has, and if you noticed the last Gallup, the two Gallup polls in the last month, the first said this is a country which is essentially about 40 percent conservative, about 38 percent moderate, and about 21 percent liberal, not exactly the pattern you would find, say, in The New York Times editorial board, but, nonetheless, it has actually become slightly more conservative over the years.

The second survey that came out about ten days ago, partly in response to the economy and partly in response, I think, to the new administration and the new Congress, 40 percent of the American people indicated they have moved to the right in the last year. They are more conservative today than they were a year ago, and that included even in the Democratic Party, there were 38-percent who had moved towards the right and 22 who had moved towards the left. So you see this underlying pattern beginning to build. It is very interesting.

I should say, by the way, in the first Gallup poll on your self identity ideologically, the Democratic Party was 40 percent moderate, 38-percent liberal, and 22-percent conservative. So moderates and conservatives represent almost a 2:1 majority in the Democratic Party, which, if you ever get a moderate Democrat to run for President, will lead to very interesting and confusing primary results that will be astounding to the liberal establishment.

Now, in this broad sweeping country which does want, I think, safety, freedom, and prosperity, I think the first argument you have to win is about whether or not dangers are knowable.

I had worked on national security for a very long time, and nothing irritated me more immediately after 9/11 than the people who said, “Why didn't we think of this?”

Now, there had been a Tom Clancy best selling novel in which a Boeing 747 crashed into the Capitol, something you thought would have been of note to Members of Congress, and it did an immense amount of damage because a fully 747 in terms of jet fuel is an extraordinarily big weapon.

There had been a movie with Kurt Russell in which a commercial airliner was hijacked by terrorists who had snuck a chemical warfare weapon that would have been devastating, and they were trying to find a way to fly into Washington.

So you look at this novel, you look at them, these are both public, and so neither of these are secret. What you discover is it is not a failure of the potential to imagine. It is a failure of the ability to translate the imagination into public policy, and the reasons often are either bureaucratic timidity, budget timidity, or political timidity. And that is why you get these patterns, for example, in the '20s and '30s where, as the world grew steadily more dangerous, the democracies just hid from reality because they didn't want to have to confront the scale of the danger.

And it wasn't that the danger wasn't obvious. You know, virtually, everybody in the senior leadership knew the Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931. Virtually, everybody knew the Germans had reoccupied the Rhineland. Virtually, everybody knew the Germans had occupied Austria. I mean, none of these were secrets, but people didn't want to draw the consequences.

So let me start with why I believe national security is about to become a dramatically more important debate, and the only question is whether we have the debate before there is a disaster or afterwards.

I would argue that we are living at the edge of a catastrophe, and that we need to understand that that is exactly where we are. That what we are faced with is not simply a problem, it is potentially catastrophic.

The first potential catastrophe is nuclear, and we reported this in the Hart Rudman Commission in March 2001 where we said the greatest threat to the United States was a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city, and at the time, we called for a serious homeland security department, which we still don't have, because a serious homeland security department would be sized to be able to deal with three nuclear events simultaneously the same morning.

That would be a reasonable threat. We are not talking about a spasm nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but we are talking about circumstances where you could literally be faced with a catastrophic loss of life, and none of this is secret.

I mean, there are novels about it. There are reports about it. There are various studies about it. There was a RAND study three years ago about the impact of a nuclear event in Long Beach, California, and what it would do to the entire Los Angeles Basin and what the scale of dislocation would be. So these things are all knowable. We don't have the political will to act on it.

The second is electromagnetic pulse. My co author and good friend, Bill Forstchen, has written a remarkable novel, which I commend to all of you, called "One Second After," in which he takes a town in North Carolina and shows you what would happen with a successful electromagnetic pulse attack.

Electromagnetic pulse is essentially a peculiarly sized nuclear device that becomes a giant lightning strike. It doesn't kill by radiation or by the power of the shockwave, but it knocks out all of the electrical appliances, including the generating system that produces the electricity, including cars that have traditional electrical devices, all the telephones. And if you look at the size of the electrical generating system, it is not replaceable.

I mean, the length of time it takes to replace that, particularly in a society which has lost electricity, is staggering, and Forstchen accurately describes what would the catastrophic consequences be at a human level if you tried to live in a non electricity world, given the way we have built our civilization.

Now, he didn't do this out of whole cloth. He started with Congressman Roscoe Bartlett who commissioned seven nuclear physicists to study what the effect could be. These are all people that had come out of the cold war era. They had all worked for the Defense Department. They were all experts in nuclear weaponry, and they came back and said unanimously, this is a catastrophic threat waiting to happen, and that North Korea, China, and Russia all understand it and are all working on it, which is why I adopted the position towards North Korea that I would literally not allow them to fire any intercontinental range missile that we had not inspected. I would just take it out on the site.

And the reason is simple. One weapon of this kind that went off over Omaha would eliminate most of the electrical production in the United States, and we are not today hardened against this. It is an enormous catastrophic threat.

The third threat is biological weapons, actually, probably, the easiest threat to deal with if you watch the Centers for Disease Control when they react, but if you go back and look at the anthrax problem, a genuine serious biological attack, partly because of its psychological effect, is a very disruptive factor.

The fourth threat is cyber and the potential of a weapon of mass disruption, which, when you look at modern high civilization, could be about as destructive as a weapon of mass destruction, and there is zero doubt that Russia, China, even North Korea have cyber programs and routinely now wage cyber campaigns.

If you look at what happened to Estonia not very long ago where the Russians clearly got angry with them and launched an entire wave of cyber attacks, this is a continuing ongoing problem worldwide, and it is only going to get worse and more complicated.

The fifth challenge is in space when the Japanese decided in July, at least released a report on July 17th, that they are now going to militarize space, and the fact is as space becomes more important, it is exactly like aircraft were before World War I. The idea that we are going to be able to put huge assets for communications and intelligence in space leave, them unprotected, and rely on all of our competitors to be benign rejects every aspect of human history.

It is just utterly inconceivable that you would design a system this fragile, this lacking in redundancy, and this incapable of defending itself. And by the way, if we try to operate with none of our space assets, we degrade our military capability dramatically in the first minute.

The sixth challenge is national missile defense, and there, I think, the decisions of the administration so far have been remarkably destructive of our future. This is again a case exactly like what happened with 9/11 where one morning, if we get hit with a missile, people are going to look up and say, "But how could that have happened? How could politicians possibly have been that lacking in foresight and that lacking in seriousness?"

And I think you have to think about a defense in depth. I think you have to go back and look at the original design in the 1980s, and you have got to recognize that we have had a series of very budget constrained, very policy constrained efforts, which, if the alternative is to lose a city, the constraints are absolutely irrational. And the time to have that argument is now before the catastrophe occurs.

Finally, I think you have to worry about breakouts, and let me explain the concept of breakouts. Our estimate is that there will be four to seven times as much new science in the next 25 years as there was in the last 25 years.

Now, there is general agreement. I used to say four times as much, but I gave a talk to the National Academy of Sciences Working Group on Computation and Information, and afterwards, the chairman said four was too small, that it had to be closer to seven times as much new knowledge.

I then went to Michael Novacek, who is the chief scientist at one of my favorite institutions, the American Museum of Natural History, and I asked what his estimate was. He said he thought it actually would be a ten fold increase of new knowledge, but after I thought about it for a while, Novacek is a vertebrate paleontologist, and it is an under-invested area. So they are, to some extent, playing catch up. So I think seven is probably a reasonable top line.

But let me describe it in simple terms. Four to seven times as much new knowledge, there are more scientists alive than all of previous human history. They get better computers and better instruments every year. They get connectivity by e mail and cell phone. They then get connected to the marketplace by licensing, royalties, and venture capital. The result is you are talking about a system which is generating waves of new knowledge.

If you are trying to plan out 25 years, which I think is the right time horizon if you are trying to compete, for example, with China, then, if you ask what will the world be like in 2034, if we get four times as much change, it is the equivalent of a committee in 1880 trying to understand today. Now, 1880 is pre automobile, pre truck, pre airplane, pre long distance telephone, pre electric light, pre motion picture, pre computer. How would you explain the modern world?

But if it is seven times as much new knowledge, then you are like somebody working with Sir Isaac Newton in 1660 trying to discover calculus.

Now, the only answer, if this is even close to correct, the only correct strategic analysis is to assume that there will be breakouts we don't know about and that we don't understand because 65-percent of all the scientists in the world will be non American, and therefore, you have to and they are smart too, and they are working hard too, and you have to assume they are going to do clever things.

If that is true, one of the things we need to build is a method for the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to have very dramatic capacity to reach out and to literally create a counter breakthrough capability.

So, if a breakthrough occurred this morning, they would need to have contracting authority and organizational authority and budget authority by this evening to be actually operating a real time response because, if it is the wrong kind of breakout, an example, Chinese tactical EMP capability that disables a nuclear powered aircraft carrier battle group, with no particular loss of life, it is just the battle group can't function; the ability to use nanoscale science and technology, the launching of a new generation of robotic capabilities.

We don't know any more than our you know, none of our competitors in 1980 would have projected Predators. None of them would have designed system after system that we now use routinely. None of our competitors were capable of developing theater wide air warfare based on satellites and on AWACS. Yet, we made it normal. You literally couldn't compete with us without that capability. And so you have to ask yourself, “What happens the morning one of our competitors has a breakout we are not ready for?”

Bill and I wrote a novel on Pearl Harbor in which we basically tried to show the impact of air power in Japanese thinking and the ability to actually launch the Pearl Harbor campaign because it is useful to think about what are the breakthroughs that enable people to do things you don't expect, and my argument is you are not going to be able to anticipate everything. So what you have to do instead is you have to develop a capability to respond with extraordinary speed, once somebody else has made a breakthrough.

Now, it is also important let me just put this in context seven years after 9/11, we have not won. I hope this is a reasonably safe general description.

You know, people or the President of the United States said we are at war. The Congress basically said do whatever it takes. They later on began to think they didn't mean it, but even President Obama has said pretty clearly he has shifted the site of the war from Iraq to Afghanistan, but he hasn't said we could get out of the war.

Now, I find it very disturbing that nobody is demanding a fundamental reexamination of the war strategy and where we are now. I am not talking about the argument between Bush and Obama. I am not talking about Iraq versus Afghanistan. I am suggesting something much more fundamental.

We won the Civil War in four years. We won the Second World War in three years and eight months. It is one of the most amazing achievements in history, from Pearl Harbor on December 7th of 1941 to victory over Japan in August of 1945. It's 44 months. We mobilized the nation, built a two ocean navy, built the B 24, B 17, B 29, mobilized 15 1/2 million people. We launched American power across North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, liberated Germany. At the same time, simultaneously, we went across the Pacific, and the Japanese surrendered in August of 1945, three years and eight months.

It recently took us 23 years to add a fifth runway to the Atlanta Airport. I mean, we have no and, frankly, the big troubling thing about Secretary Gates' budget decisions are that given the cycle time of the current over regulated, over red tape, over bureaucratic defense structure, we are making decisions today that will unilaterally disarm us around 2025 or 2030 because, unless you imagine very dramatic reform of the system, it is incapable of launching new systems of weapons and new systems of capability on a large scale in a short period of time. It is a huge problem.

But I am also suggesting something much more profound. We need a pretty large national debate about the nature of the war we are in and what we are doing about it because we have been sending our young men and women to risk their lives, and we have been spending a lot of money, spread across the entire planet. I support it, I am for it, but I find it very troubling that we are drifting into a belief that this is just a condition we live in, rather than a war to be won, and I think that is very dangerous because it gives your opponents a lot of time to organize against you, a lot of time to think through what you do well, and a lot of time to develop countervailing strategies.

So I would simply posit everything I am about to say about where we are from the standpoint that we have now been in a war, depending on when you want to start you can start in the '80s in Lebanon. You can start, as Mark Bowden does in his Book Bowden wrote Black Hawk Down. He recently wrote a book called Guests of the Ayatollah. He argues that 1979 seizing of the American embassy was the first shot in Iran's war against America. So, in the Bowden model, we have been at war with Iran for 30 years. It is just they knew it and we didn't.

You can go back and say that is too far back, that doesn't count. We don't want to count Lebanon in the '80s which was almost certainly an Iranian funded attack, so let's just start in the' 90s, World Trade Center bombing in New York, Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, two American embassies bombed in East Africa, an American ship bombed in Yemen, the Cole. So would the '90s count? Are those acts of war, or are they just random moments of violence on a planet where sometimes people are unhappy?

Well, they all have the same thread, and so you could argue at one level, let's just start with the World Trade Center bombing, which was on our soil, partly organized by a sheikh who was in Attica prison, which is why this whole argument of where you incarcerate terrorists is important, and then you have to say to yourself, all right, so that means we have now been at war for 16 years?

Well, is anybody really comfortable with our current strategy and our current understanding of victory? I'm not. I think we grossly underestimate how hard this is, and this is why Secretary Gates has a huge problem. On the one hand, he has a worldwide set of commitments he cannot get out of that involve people who want to kill us tomorrow morning.

On the other hand, he has emerging complex competitors of increasing capability, and he has decided in order to meet a totally artificial budget number that we will not prepare for the future in order to try to focus our resources in the present, which may be a legitimate strategy if you believe you are not going to live more than five years and you have no children and grandchildren and you don't care about the future of the country, but it is an extraordinarily dangerous strategy, which is why I am so strongly supportive of the petition that Heritage has launched, and I so deeply agree with the premise that we have to set a safety oriented national security budget, not a budget director oriented national security budget.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH: Let me just say that I think that the challenge is very, very real. I believe that there are a number of very serious reforms we need. I am not going to go into them in detail today, but let me say I think there are seven that would change our entire way of thinking about national security.

The first is to go back and pick up what we did before World War II and create a rainbow planning process; that is, recognize the world is complex. You have to be simultaneously aware, for example, that the cocaine dealers in Colombia now build submarines to deliver the cocaine, that that is how big the gray world of organized international crime has become.

Imagine that, that in the jungles of Colombia, there are shipyards that build submarines that bring so much cocaine, they can drop they can leave the submarine as a trivial cost. That is a sophisticated opponent.

Look at the current war underway in Mexico against the gray world of drug dealers in Mexico. Look at the problems of organized crime in Europe. Look at the problems of organized crime in the United States where we just at the Center for Health Transformation released a book called Stop Paying the Crooks, which Jim Frogue edited, which points out that there is between 70 and $120 billion a year of fraud in Medicaid and Medicare 70 to $120 billion a year, a good bit of it actually organized crime, such as the five pizza parlors in South Florida that filed as HIV/AIDS transfusion centers and got paid because the Federal Government is such an incompetent administrator.

So, when you look at these sort of things, you have that zone to think about. You have the high end of war to think about, the catastrophes I described earlier. You had the policing process to think about, and one of our challenges, we have no mechanism today to force the Congress and the President to recognize that unless you have a full service national security system, you are creating zones of vulnerability for your enemies to exploit. And that is precisely where we are today.

Because we have decided to have a very limited peacetime budget, because you have an administration and a Congress that do not want to take seriously safety for Americans, we are drifting in a world where we are going to end up running very significant calculated risks, which is a terrific model until the calculations fail, and when the calculations fail, you pay in blood. And that is what happened on 9/11, and that is what happened on December 7th, 1941, and I think we have to take very seriously a rainbow planning process.

Second, I think we have to do far more red teaming of the other side than we do today. There is this assumption that, well, if we decide X, it will happen. No.

I remember being briefed in the last administration by a very senior State Department official who said, "Well, we are going to just do what we want to, and Kosovo and the Russians have to live with it." Well, the Russians proved in Georgia, they didn't have to live with it, and there is a direct tie, in my judgment, between what they did in Georgia and what we did in Kosovo.

We can make decisions about what we think is going to happen next. That doesn't mean the Iranians are going to make the same decision, and you need a lot more thinking about "and then what happens" and a lot more planning for a complex world. And I think, presently, we are like a country which plays Tic Tac Toe in a world where what you need is an ability to play four dimensional chess. It is a very serious problem because we consistently underestimate our competitors who have every right in history to be clever, determined, and tenacious.

Third, I think we have to get much better at setting the context for what we are doing and explaining what we are doing. The objective fact is that we are dealing in a world in which if you don't dominate the 24 hour news flow, you don't dominate Facebook and Twitter, you don't dominate the flow of e mail, your blogs aren't as good as their blogs, you are eventually going to lose, and when you lose public opinion worldwide, you will start losing the capacity to do things.

We have been successful since 1945 because we have been able to build a worldwide coalition of extraordinary capability. No society in history has had the capacity to recruit and organize allies on the scale that we have routinely done, and I kept trying to get the last administration to understand it and to explain it.

We could not have done what we did in Iraq without the active help of Kuwait, of Bahrain, without being able to use the airfields in Saudi Arabia, without being able to transit Jordan.

Just go back and look at all the different countries that took the risk of deciding to be with America. We couldn't physically get to Afghanistan today. It would be literally, physically impossible if other countries weren't willing to help us.

And, historically, we have, since 1945, sustained the world market, sustained the world flow of commerce, sustained a growing prosperity for the whole planet, and a growing freedom for the whole planet in a way that nobody ever dreamed was possible in the past.

All that required American leadership, but it also required lots of other people voluntarily cooperating. And if you don't win the argument, if you don't win what some people have called the struggle over the narrative, you are in deep trouble, and, all too often, we only pay lip service to it, and we need to fundamentally rethink how we win that.

Fourth, I think we have to budget, and, here, I want to just say clearly I am very much for what Heritage is doing. I would be for more. They are a little open ended in what they are for, but I would be for more. More is better, and there is a practical reason.

The budget for your safety should start with meeting threats, not with meeting expectations. You have to look around the planet and say, “What threatens Americans and what threatens America?” What would it take to overmatch us, not to equal them? Because you don't want to live in a world where you are just barely equalling your opponents.

Our security has been based on the fact that, since 1945, we have had overwhelming capability, and the result has been that we have been dramatically safer than any people in history.

I want my grandchildren, who are today seven and nine, to grow up and live their lives out in the safest country in the world, and that requires a national security budget and a homeland security budget driven by meeting the capabilities of our opponents, not by meeting their intentions, and we are today running very big risks in the name of saving a few billion dollars that may end up killing several million Americans. And the time to fix that is before the disaster happens.

Fifth, even if we get a very big budget, I think that we need to fundamentally overhaul the national security system. Our combat arms are very agile. They operate inside an OODA loop of observe, orient, decide, and act. They have a capacity to orchestrate power.

The second you leave the field forces and get into the bureaucracy, even in the Defense Department, it is a mess. We have no capacity to procure that matches our ability to operate in the field. We should take exactly the same standards we set in the field and apply them across the entire national security system, which includes the State Department, includes intelligence, includes some elements of Treasury.

I mean, it is extraordinary today, the difference between the capabilities of a young 18 , 19 , or 20 year old in the uniformed services in the field and the lack of ability to act decisively on the part of a two star officer in the Pentagon or a senior officer in the State Department or a senior officer in intelligence or an Assistant Secretary of Treasury.

I mean, the gap is just almost unbelievable, and we need to be so this is more than a budget issue because, even if we tripled the defense budget, if you don't fix the slow, cumbersome, bureaucratic decision making process, you are not going to be able to move at the speed of the modern world, and you are not going to sustain our defense system. This is a very hard problem, which we have consistently failed to meet.

Sixth, we have to develop what I described earlier as a counter breakout system. We are going to get surprised. It is going to happen. It is virtually inevitable. There are too many smart peoples in too many countries, all of them independently trying to figure out how to surprise us, and only one of them has to succeed. And the idea that we are somehow impervious to that, that we are going to out think them, out prepare them is nonsense.

Sooner or later, there will be a major breakthrough, and the speed with which we can move to analyze and react to that will be a matter potentially of life and death for the country, not just for the troops in the field, for the country, because you could get rolled up with the for example, with a cyber attack, you could get rolled up in a way that the whole country was suddenly defeated, and we should not operate on some assumption that we can be soft in our thinking and strong in our defense. It is not possible, and so we need to actively think through what would a counter breakout system be like, and how could you trigger it, so it could move in virtually real time.

Lastly and maybe my most optimistic or, as some of you would think, fantasy view, I think we ought to have a robust and continuing war gaming process at the National Defense University for the Congress.

Under our Constitution, we have to develop better techniques for educating our elected officials, and you are not going to educate them with briefings. The best way to educate them is to put them in problems where they suddenly have to face reality. Give them the problem of a Pakistan that suddenly had a huge problem, and there are 30 nukes missing. Give them the problem of an Iran that acquired an atomic weapon and decided to dominate the Persian Gulf. Give them the problem of thinking through challenges in Mexico. The process of thinking that through, working it out, could, in fact, educate a generation of politicians.

The people who built the system that won the cold war had been educated the hard way in World War I, had had 20 years to think about it, and had been educated the hard way in World War II. And by the time they got around to dealing with the cold war, they were tougher, mentally prepared, and massively experienced.

We do not have that kind of elected leadership today in either party. It is hard business to learn how to defend a nation, and if we don't invest in that among our elected officials, they will not be able to make sophisticated decisions, and if they don't, we will pay for it.

I will just close with a reference to Washington. We have a novel coming out in October, To Try Men’s Souls, about Washington crossing the Delaware in 1776.

One of the major reasons that the American Revolution was such a difficult war was because the Continental Congress was so incompetent, and if you go back and you read Washington's relation with the Continental Congress, it is enough to make you want to cry.

Well, we have no excuse today for the level of relative ignorance that our elected officials manage to retain through an entire career, but that is a systems problem. They are busy, and we have no mechanisms today for them to learn in the process of their career.

And I think it is a very serious problem because, ultimately, the reason I got engaged in this business, literally in August of 1958 my dad was serving in France and then Germany is I came to the conclusion that after visiting Verdun and staying with a friend of my father's who had been drafted in 1941, sent to the Philippines and served in the Bataan Death March. And we looked at a battlefield in which 600,000 men were killed in a nine month period, and then, in the evenings, we talked about the price of defeat in a Japanese prison camp.

And I came to the conclusion as we watched the French Fourth Republic die, as we lived in Orléans, this is all real. We have been the most fortunate generation in history. We are the richest, freest people. Despite all of our current economic problems, we are still today the richest, freest, and safest people in the history of the world.

That will only remain true if we have the courage, the discipline, and the foresight to insist on the kind of changes we need in order to maintain safety as the highest single value of the American people, a base in which you can then build prosperity and freedom.

Thank you very much for letting me share these ideas with you.

[Applause.]

DR. FEULNER: Wonderful. Thank you, Newt, very, very much.

Will you take a few questions?

MR. GINGRICH: Sure.

DR. FEULNER: Great. Who's first? Right here.

ATTENDEE: Hello. Alexandra Ulmer from the Financial Times.

In light of the recent crisis in China with the Uyghurs, what is your position on the Uyghurs detainees in Guantanamo?

MR. GINGRICH: Same as it always has been. I mean, we are either against terrorism, or we are not against terrorism.

I am against Chinese oppression, whether it is the Uyghurs or Tibetans or if Han Chinese, for that matter, because they actually have oppressed most of the Han Chinese. So I am against Chinese oppression.

I am also against terrorists, and the Uyghurs were, in fact, picked up while they were being trained by a camp led by al Qaeda, and they were being trained as terrorists. They have since then spent years in association with other Muslim groups that are associated with terrorism, and I am not particularly willing to believe that they would not, in fact, reengage in terrorism.

I think we have to decide: Are we for a selective opposition of terrorism, or are we opposed to terrorism?

ATTENDEE: What about the trend to go towards a nuclear free world that has been in the press lately?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I mean, the President has an idea which actually is not radically different from what Reagan was. I mean, Reagan had always said he would like to get rid of all nuclear weapons.

The problem is how do you monitor that kind of world when, in fact, in a world with zero nuclear weapons, now that you know how to build them, you would have created an extraordinarily high advantage for a country that broke out.

So any country which was able to develop a very small number of nuclear weapons would have such a massive advantage over its competitors, that you would really have it is pretty hard to imagine the system you would given our ability in Iraq, our inability in Iran, our inability in Pakistan to know what is being done, where it is being done, et cetera, I don't see any evidence of a regime you could rely on that would enable you to detect somebody with a high enough level of certainty, and if you did detect them, what were you going to do about it?

There's no evidence today. The world can't even stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons when there is a general consensus that they shouldn't, and there is a general consensus that the dictatorship is dangerous.

Now, if that's true, the world can't figure out how to get North Korea, which is one of the weakest countries in the world economically they can't figure out how to get the North Koreans to not have nuclear weapons.

So the idea that we are somehow going to build off of this wonderful example of international competence and create a magic system that works, I think is exactly backwards.

If the President could get North Korea and Iran out of the nuclear business, I might consider seriously some of these ideas, but if he can't take the two most obvious cases and stop them from getting weapons, why would you take seriously some fantasy idea that is largely an excuse for diplomats to talk to each other, so they don't have to deal with the real problem?

ATTENDEE: How do you entice China to be tougher on North Korea, especially as it seems like it's a matter of pride for them?

MR. GINGRICH: I think, sooner or later, you begin to look at helping the Japanese acquire the capability necessary to counter North Korea, and, at that point, the Chinese have to decide: Do they think that they are safer in a world in which the Japanese are their peers because they have given them no alternative? I think you are going to see a sophisticated Japanese ballistic missile defense system, whatever we do, and I think the Chinese are in grave danger of forcing the Japanese to decide to go nuclear and have a nuclear armed Japan.

If I were the Chinese, I would think long and hard, given their past history, about whether or not I was safer propping up North Korea and, as a result, getting a nuclear armed Japan, or I was safer coercing North Korea in return for Japan not going nuclear, not developing nuclear capability.

But, by the way, I don't think you convince countries right off than do anything. I think you try to figure out what their interest is and help them understand their interest, and the Chinese up to now have concluded that they have a bigger interest in keeping Korea split and a bigger interest in keeping North Korea irritating us than they have had in helping solve the problem.

ATTENDEE: Could you tell us on your national service, broad scope of national security service, where you place EMP, the electromagnetic pulse attack?

MR. GINGRICH: I think it is the greatest threat in potential catastrophic consequence because, in our current lack of having hardened the civilian capabilities, you knock out the civilization with very few weapons, which is why a country like North Korea that only has one or two or three weapons, if they are designed correctly and used correctly, they are horrendously dangerous.

I don't think it is the most likely threat. I think that a regular nuclear attack is a more likely threat, but the longer time goes on, the more smart scientists there are on the planet, the greater their ability to look at what the capability is, I think the greater the threat of EMP is.

And, by the way, Congressman Bartlett and Congressman Bennie Thompson, who is the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, have been actually working to try to get the government both to reestablish an electromagnetic pulse or EMP commission and to start looking at what hardening would cost.

And I would say as a very small first step, all future electric generating capability should be built with hardened capacity, and we ought to look at whether or not it is cost prohibitive to go back and begin to systematically harden the current system because the consequence I mean, if you ever go through as I said earlier, with Bill Forstchen’s book, One Second After, if you ever go through the consequences with any good physicist of a post EMP world, it is much broader scale damage than a regular nuclear attack.

ATTENDEE: Thank you.

Prosperity and safety are very much interdependent, and our prosperity is being questioned more in recent times. Where do you feel we stand in the global economy? Where is our position, and what do you see that how do you see that developing?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think that unless we have a very fundamental rethinking of the American government and the American delivery systems, that it is inconceivable 30 years from now that we will be the leading country in the world.

I mean, for any of you who and I regard, for example, education as a national security issue, and that's why in the Hart Rudman commission, after we said that the greatest threat was a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city, probably from a terrorist group, we said the second greatest threat to the United States is the failure of math and science education and the failure to invest in science and technology. And we went on to say it is a greater threat than any conceivable conventional war, and I think that is absolutely accurate.

So I would start and say if you look at Bob Compton's movie, Two Million Minutes, which you can go to 2mminutes.com, two million minutes is four years of high school. Compton is a very successful health entrepreneur who studied two Chinese high school students, two Indian high school students, and two American high school students, and at the end of that movie, you realize we are a country aggressively preparing for the 1956 Olympics.

[Laughter.]

MR. GINGRICH: That we have zero likelihood in our current system of being able to compete successfully a quarter century from now without fundamental overhaul.

That is why I helped found American Solutions because I think the scale of reform we need is so great, and on the national security side, I would argue that the Industrial College of the Armed Forces should be given an explicitly new mandate to look at the requirements of being the leading economy in the world in order to be the leading national security power in the world because, if you are not the most productive and creative country in the world, you are not going to sustain the most productive military.

So I think ICAF ought to be given a new mission to very fundamentally look at the scale of the challenge we face in the next quarter century.

DR. FEULNER: One more. Last question.

ATTENDEE: Can I try this? I have got the mic, Ed Feulner. Frank Gaffney right here. You cannot see me, but I am over here.

MR. GINGRICH: I think I see you, Frank.

DR. FEULNER: Oh, we see you, Frank.

ATTENDED: Thank you.

Newt, thank you for what can only be described as a tour de force presentation and covering really so many issues on so many topics in such a comprehensive and effective way. I don't think I disagree with anything you said.

The only thing I wonder that you didn't specifically address and I wonder if you might is Sharia, the program that seems, when you reduce it down, to animate most of the problems that you identified in those attacks, that justifies Jihad of both the violent and the stealthy kind, and what you would suggest we be doing to counter Sharia.

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I have done a lot of work and a lot of talking about what I would describe as the irreconcilable wing of Islam, and I draw a sharp distinction between Muslims who are part of the modern world and Muslims who are committed to a world view so fundamentally different that it is literally irreconcilable with modernity.

And I think that this is part of why I said a while ago, I think if you look at whether you want to start in '79 or '83 or '93 or 9/11, we have now been engaged in, if you go back to '83, the longest war in American history, and we still haven't we still don't have the intellectual tools to discuss it honestly, and I think this is a very significant challenge, and it also is a huge lost opportunity.

I think if we had made women's rights in the most basic sense of decency one of the key provisions of what we were doing, for example, just the act of saying honor killings are illegal, it is a fundamental conflict with Sharia, which allows honor killings, in which husbands can kill their wife or daughter, brothers can kill their sister or mother.

Well, I think, you know, 90 percent of the world, 94 percent of the world, that is not an acceptable behavior, and it shouldn't be that hard.

Shooting teachers at girls schools, which is what is going on in Afghanistan, shouldn't be that hard for us to condemn, but it does mean that you don't bow to the Saudi king, and you don't tolerate the Saudis lying about who they are, and you take this issue head on.

But I wouldn't you know, Sharia is a piece of it, but I think all you have to do is describe in a positive sense, the world we hope to create, and the folks who believe passionately in Sharia are almost automatically in a mortal struggle with you because it is literally antithetical to their world view, and I think this is at the heart of why we have had a hard time dealing with this because we keep underestimating how fundamental the problem is, and so we keep bouncing off of it.

Let me just close and say I am really delighted with The Heritage Foundation program on Four Percent for Freedom. I hope everybody will sign the petition here at Heritage. I think it is a very powerful concept, and I think that developing a nationwide dialogue about the requirements of national security is exactly in the tradition of The Heritage Foundation, which played such a key role in the Carter years in helping us remember why it is that it was important to elect conservatives and why it is it was important for us to have conservative ideas in the political dialogue.

I think Heritage is, once again, carrying out that mission. Thank you very, very much.

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By LadyOrf @ Monday, July 27, 2009 7:53 AM

This gives excellent and sobering food for thought. Newt's "what if's" are very real and very believable. And it's quite eye opening as to how totally unprepared we really are! Our current administration is on the wrong track with National Defense. We all need to urge Congress and our president and his team to rethink our strategy. We need to be prepared for every surprise!

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