Dany: It's not just the Democrats who cut defense budgets.
Cheney: Right.
Dany: Republicans and Democrats came together.
We've lost a trillion dollars over 10 years in defense spending.
Why?
Cheney: Well, because Congress couldn't get its act together back in, what was it, 2011.
Passed the Budget Control Act in 2011.
But that basically imposed and set up a mechanism through sequestration that in effect says
if Congress doesn't get budgets passed and adopted, then the meat axe falls.
The sequester takes place.
And what's happened now is instead of the traditional way of doing business in the Defense
Department...
where you look at the world, identify threats, figure out what we need in order to counter
those threats or to cope with them and then ask for the amount of money that's involved...
we don't do that anymore.
Now what happens is the inability to come to an agreement has led to the frequent use
of the sequester.
The Defense Department makes up about 17% of the budget.
It takes 50% of the cuts because a lot of the domestic programs have been exempted from
sequester.
So the bottom line is that Congress...
and some of it on a partisan basis, some of it on a bipartisan basis, there is no question
that there was Republican support for this particular solution...
but what it's done over time is, this is four or five years now since we put defense budgets
together the way they ought to be put together, in relation to the threat.
We're now in a situation where our capabilities are significantly diminished.
Ray Odierno, when he stepped down as the Army chief last fall, said that the United States
Army is less ready today than any time in its history.
That goes back over 200 years.
It's a very, very dangerous situation in the sense that we've conveyed to our friends that
we don't want to act on their behalf.
We conveyed to others, including some of our adversaries, that we don't have the capability
to act effectively.
We've changed.
If you look at the strategic concept that always drove our planning in the past while
I was there...of course that was a long time ago...
but that we believed we needed to have the capacity to fight two wars simultaneously
and enough left over to deal with other things on the side.
That's gone.
Our forces are so much lower, so much less ready.
Other things that are problems, we're not investing as much as we need to in order to
counter the capabilities that are developed by the Chinese and the Russians.
The Russians are modernizing their strategic forces.
The Chinese are as well.
The Chinese have developed the capability to take down satellites.
They've got a ballistic missile that will take out an aircraft carrier with a conventional
warhead.
They've taken the Sai Islands in the South China Sea, built military bases there.
The Russians now are flying provocative missions over parts of NATO territory and along borders
with NATO.
There's a major shift in the sense, in terms of how they look at the United States.
They don't fear us any more.
And I think that leads them probably to underestimate or perhaps overestimate how far they can go,
but underestimate what's sensitive for us.
The world was very safe and stable when the U.S. was the principal power, when we had
the military capability to deal with any contingency and we were prepared to use it when we felt
the need.
I don't think that's the case anymore.
Another point that's crucial is our military advantage for a long time really since the
end of World War II has been based on our technological edge.
We were the first ones with stealth, we were the first ones with precision guided munitions,
we had...remember Desert Storm and the tremendous capabilities we demonstrated.
Nobody could match that.
That day's passed.
The Chinese are moving aggressively to close some of those gaps.
The Russians are, too.
Or find ways around it so they come up with countermeasures that are effective against
our armed forces.
The whole area of cyber-warfare's enormously important.
And I worry that we're not doing enough there and the Chinese have gotten very good at it.
So have the Russians.
Perhaps Al Qaeda or ISIS.
And that capacity to hack into our system.
They've demonstrated it by taking the personnel records of those of us who worked for the
federal government.
I mean, it's not personal.
Dany: Right.
Cheney: But they've done it.
And when you think about the vulnerability of our system, our reliance on technology,
the extent to which they could hack into our power grid or other key elements of our infrastructure
is very real.
And we are not doing what we need to be doing because of budget cuts in order to maintain
our advantage and guarantee our safety.
Dany: You just in 30 seconds laid out an enormously compelling case that the United States needs
to show leadership, that the United States needs to reinvest, not for offense but for
deterrence.
What's happened to Congress?
What's happened to the Republican Party?
Cheney: Well, I don't want to blame everybody in the Republican Party obviously.
A lot of it is you haven't had any presidential leadership in this area.
He's been going the other way.
He loves the sequester that frees up resources that he can use for his domestic programs.
As I say, a lot of the domestic programs have been exempted from the sequester.
The whole process of putting together budgets has broken down and I think one of the keys
for us has to be...and I've argued this with my friends periodically, they ask me to come
up and chat on different matters, which I'm always happy to do...
but we have to recognize that our number one priority as a nation, as a government, has
to be defense.
That's more important than anything else.
If you can build nice highways, that's fine.
You've got infrastructure you've got to worry about.
We've got a lot of things the government does and that we want to have done, but nothing's
more important than the safety and security of the American people.
And right now that's being short-changed.