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Transcript of interview with Sen. John McCain

Originally published Oct. 16, 2007

Sen. John McCain, the fourth-term Republican from Arizona and presumptive 2008 presidential nominee, met with Military Times reporters and editors in October 2007 for a wide-ranging, 75-minute discussion.

The transcript of the meeting:

McCain: I’m glad to see all of you. Thank you for inviting me.

Q: Before we get started on the serious questions, I’ve got to get this out of the way … you’ve been on the [Comedy Central] Daily Show 11 times.

McCain: More than — I think 12 — more than anybody, I think.

Q: And this is the first time you’ve been here.

McCain: Well, it shows I have my priorities straight. [Laughter.]

Q: Twelve times now.

McCain: I think 12. Yeah, it was on the bus.

Q: Does that count — the phoner?

McCain: I was on the bus the other day and we did it by phone. I told him he was too cheap to send a camera crew [laughter] to the thing and we got back from New Hampshire last night. We had a couple of town hall meetings and stuff up there. Things are going well up there. We’re starting to get the traction that we had in 2000. I’ve been back there a lot over the years so I know New Hampshire rather well, and a lot of our old friends are showing up. So things are better.

We’ve got a long way to go, but the latest polling shows us back up there and in South Carolina. Got a lot of work to do in Iowa, but it’s coming along fine.

Q: Well, welcome.

McCain: Thank you.

Q: If you become president, summarize for us your three priorities for defense, for the military. What makes you different?

McCain: What makes me different is my experience, my knowledge, my background, and my expertise, many years of service in the military and the [Senate] armed services committee and being involved in literally every major conflict issue concerning national security since the end of the Vietnam War.

So I would compare my credentials and my qualifications. I think my credentials and my qualifications and my judgment and my knowledge of national security issues in general, and the armed services credential, qualify me for the consideration of the voters. No one else running has those qualifications and credentials.

The greatest challenge to the president of the United States is to take on the struggle that will be with us for the rest of this century, and that’s radical Islamic extremism and all of its ramifications and permutations and combinations. And it is a military, intelligence, diplomatic and ideological struggle.

Our military has to be restructured to meet that challenge. In many ways, we are still acquiring weapon systems and using doctrine and tactics that were tailored for a conflict on the plains of Germany rather than the ideological struggle which we are facing at this time.

Osama bin Laden a couple of weeks ago was able to get a message out from somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan to billions of people, where he was able to motivate, instruct, and inspire his followers and others to follow his lead in this effort to spread the evil of radical Islamic extremism throughout the world, and that’s how you get doctors who are suicide bombers in Glasgow, Scotland. That’s why you have arrests in Denmark and Germany, and that’s why the head of the CIA recently said that al-Qaida is trying to establish cells in the United States of America.

And just because you arrest the leaders, as we have in many cases, it does not mean that this kind of amorphous evil can’t reconstitute itself rather rapidly. So that’s the first priority. They are winning — not winning — they are doing very well in cyberspace, and we are not doing as well as we should.

I saw an article just this morning about some young man, I think, in North Carolina, who puts up all this extremist stuff and instructions for suicide bombers, etc., on the Internet. There are Web sites now that can provide radical Islamic extremists with just about any tools and motivation necessary.

We won the Cold War, as I mentioned, not by open conflict, but because we prevailed in the ideological struggle. We’ll have to do that if we want to prevail against radical Islamic extremism.

There are many other factors in this struggle, but that’s one of the major ones. So that’s the first priority of the president of the United States.

The next is to have a military establishment that can respond most effectively to those challenges. Right now we still have intelligence — our human intelligence capability consists of people sitting inside embassies in the Middle East and waiting for someone to come in and give them information. We have consistently failed human intelligence-wise in our ability to anticipate or to even keep track of many of our enemies and their activities.

Technologically, we are doing just fine. Unfortunately, technological intelligence capabilities do not divine the motives of the enemy. It can only record their actions.

So we have to have a military establishment that is retooled to meet these challenges, and among these requirements, in my view, in the short term anyway, is something we should have done long ago. One of the many failures of the [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld era is that we need to expand the Army and the Marine Corps because we’re going to be in Afghanistan for a long time, and I do not know where other conflicts may break out because I don’t know what the United States will do.

If we do what the Democrats want to do, and that’s set a date for surrender, then I believe we’ll be fighting in a whole lot of places in the Middle East. And if people like [Venezuelan leader Hugo} Chavez and others have their way and spread their brand of radical socialism throughout our hemisphere, we’ll have challenges in our own hemisphere, and if the Chinese emerge in a far more aggressive fashion than I anticipate, we will have military challenges there, an argument, a strong argument for maintaining a military presence in Asia.

Another area that I would be heavily involved in is defense acquisition reform. It’s out of control. It’s what President Eisenhower warned us about, and when we have $160 million ships that end up costing $400 million, when a collusion between Boeing, the Air Force, and their supporters on the Hill want to rip off the taxpayer by some $2 billion, which because of the process they were going through to acquire the Air Force tanker, people ended up in jail … we have a serious problem with defense acquisition.

We simply can’t afford $400 million Littoral Combat Ships that then have to be scrapped, with, as far as I can tell, no penalty to the defense contractors.

I’ll get the smartest and brightest people in America who know how businesses are run, who know what meeting a budget means, what cost analysis means, and there will be no more cost-plus contracts.

That’s some of the things that I would do, and it all comes down to restoring trust and confidence on the part of the American people in Congress and in the presidency, which they no longer have. They’ve lost all confidence in their government, in their belief that we are not functioning on their behalf but on our own.

That’s how you get 11 percent approval ratings of Congress, and corruption and wasteful spending is a major contributor to that lack of trust and confidence on the part of the American people.

Q: Senator, how big should the Army and the Marine Corps be?

McCain: I don’t know an exact number, but a hell of a lot bigger than it is now. I recommended four years ago that we increase by some 90,000 Army and I think 30,000 Marines.

Q: But that order of magnitude?

McCain: Oh, yeah, sure. Look, I’m not a detail numbers person. I’m not. And I never will be. But I’ll consult with the smartest people that I know, and I know that it has to be dramatically increased. It’s one-third smaller. The Army and the Marine Corps are one-third smaller than they were at the time of the first Gulf War.

Five years ago, six years ago, I said you’ve got to have a bigger Army and Marine Corps, and it’s got to not only be bigger in numbers, but as important are the missions, intelligence, civil affairs, military police, all of those things that — factors that go into successful counterinsurgency [operations].

I’ve never been and never will be good at specific numbers, but I can tell you the mission, what it’s got to be, and it’s got to be a lot better than it is today. We’re putting a strain on the Guard and Reserve that’s not sustainable.

Q: Are the Navy and the Air Force sized right or will they need to increase in proportion?

McCain: My priorities are to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps. I’m not as worried about the Navy and the Air Force. I’m worried about numbers of ships. When you can’t afford ships, we’re not going to build ships. So I’m worried about that, but the Army and the Marine Corps are right now bearing the brunt of the conflicts that we’re in, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Q: If you increase the Army and the Marine Corps, do you not need to increase the Air Force and Navy just to be able to deliver those people to the battlefield?

McCain: No, you don’t. We’ve got logistic supply capabilities. A lot of that is carried out by the Army and the Marine Corps themselves. Look, I’m not against increasing — here are my priorities — Army and Marine Corps. Navy and Air Force, I’m concerned about it, but my priorities are the strain on the National Guard and the Reserve, which is unsustainable, and the absolute requirement to increase the Army and Marine Corps in size, something I’ve been advocating for many years.

Q: Would you pay for that by reducing then the Navy and the Air Force?

McCain: I would pay for it by eliminating $400 million Littoral Combat Ships. I would pay for it by not having a Future Combat System that goes from $90 billion to $120 billion, and I haven’t checked lately, because I’ve been out campaigning, how much it’s gone up.

We’ve got plenty of money to pay for it. I’d eliminate all those pork barrel projects. I’d veto every single one of those pork barrel projects in the defense appropriations bill, and I’d do it in a New York minute.

Q: How would you —

McCain: Easy. You veto the bill and you make them famous, just like Ronald Reagan did. It’s not tough; it’s not rocket science. It’s telling the American people the truth. There’s no reason for us to be spending billions, 20, 30, I can’t even give you the number. I’ll do an analysis — we will, in time — of the money that’s wasted, just the money that’s spent on non-defense items.

Q: Is your problem with the cost of these ships and programs or is there of lack of requirement that you see?

McCain: Both, but primarily cost. If you decide to build them, then how can you justify … a cost-plus contract that goes from $160 million to $400 million? How in the world do you justify that to the American people? You think that they have confidence in the way we’re doing business when they see that? They don’t. They’re mad as hell. When I’m out doing town hall meetings, they got it figured out. Americans aren’t stupid. They’re well informed.

Q: What do you get when you ask the Navy those questions?

McCain: The same answer I get when I ask about any other cost overruns — they’re all justified, all necessary; the military asked for these changes and, by golly, we have to pay for them. Same answer I got when I attacked the Air Force tanker, same answer. This is all cost recovery.

Well, it turned out that they wanted to rip off the taxpayer an extra two billion, “B,” billion dollars, and it took me three years — it took me three years and having people go to jail before we finally scrapped it and now hopefully are going back to a reasonable proposal for an Air Force tanker.

We’re not talking about miscalculations; we’re talking about criminal activity. Darlene Druyun was in jail. An executive of Boeing Aircraft was in jail. We’re not talking about cost estimates and CBO and all that kind of stuff.

We’re talking about criminal activity that took place on the Air Force tanker, and I have severe questions — I’m not alleging corruption, but I certainly am alleging disrespect for the taxpayers’ dollars in these enormous cost overruns that are going on with virtually every new weapon system that we develop. The years of Ronald Reagan, we used to have fixed-cost contracts.

Q: You just said that the strain on the Guard and Reserve is unsustainable.

McCain: Yep.

Q: How much damage do you think that we’ve already done and how much damage have we done to the active forces because the strain on them, I think, although you didn’t use the word “unsustainable,” it has to be pretty close to that?

McCain: Well, it’s unsustainable because we just can’t keep that kind of strain on the military and their families. They’re brave, they’re courageous, they’re willing to serve. Some are back on their third and fourth tour. It’s incredible the dedication that they have displayed.

I was in Baghdad on the Fourth of July and was asked to speak at a ceremony where 688 young Americans reenlisted to stay over there and fight, and 128 people who were green-card holders were sworn in as citizens of this country. So they’re doing a magnificent job, but it can’t keep up forever.

Ask any military leader. Ask the head of the Guard in these various states. They’re proud, they’re brave, they’re wonderful, but they just can’t do it forever, and it’s just a fact.

Q: Has damage been done already to the force?

McCain: Oh, the equipment certainly, but what’s astonishing to me is how resilient and brave the men and women who are serving are. It’s amazing to me.

Q: Senator, what was your reaction to the [Marine Corps] Commandant’s plan to split the Marines and the Army between Afghanistan and Iraq? You mentioned being in Afghanistan for awhile.

McCain: I don’t — I don’t agree with it.

Q: No?

McCain: No.

Q: Why?

McCain: Iraq is the central battlefront. We have enormous challenges in Afghanistan, the Taliban, corruption, the poppies. We have a lot of problems there, but right now, the war in Iraq is the one, if we set a date for surrender, that we will be back, there will be chaos, genocide, and we’ll be back.

And also, Afghanistan will further deteriorate as well as Pakistan and other countries in the region if we fail. The central front, as General Patraeus said, is now the war in Iraq.

Q: So you think that we need to leave the Marines there versus sort of —

McCain: I think that as we gain control of the situation and as Iraqi military takes over more and more of our responsibilities, that Marines should be drawn down right along with the Army and everybody else who’s there, but to divvy up battlefields is something we have never done in our history. Somebody is going to have to make a convincing argument to me that this is the time to do it.

Q: The Second World War, the Marines took the lead in the Pacific theater.

McCain: They took the lead and they fought alongside Army units also. In fact, at the Battle of Peleliu, they were relieved by Army people. It’s not a historical comparison. I understand history very well, and they never said Marines are only going to do the Pacific and the Army the European theater.

Q: What if you were to take that concept and apply it here so that, the Marine Corps doesn’t take the entire Afghanistan campaign, but they may take — maybe the Marine Corps takes the lead and the Army takes the lead in Iraq. Is there an advantage to that or not?

McCain: I am satisfied with the progress that the Army and the Marine Corps are making. Anbar Province is a classic example. It was an Army colonel who started out the deal with the Sunni sheiks. Marines assisted. Petraeus was able to send 4,000 Marines in because of the surge into Anbar Province.

It was an Army operation as well as Marine Corps. In the Battle of Fallujah, Marines were the hammer; the Army was the anvil. And that’s the way, that’s the thing we have encouraged throughout, ever since Goldwater-Nichols — jointness in operating and fighting together. I don’t see the logic in separating the two.

Q: What’s your view about military leaders today?

McCain: I think General Petraeus is one of the finest military leaders this nation has ever produced. I have equally high opinion of [Lt. Gen. Raymond] Odierno. One of the great — if there is anything good about conflicts, and there’s damn little, one of them is that over time great leaders surface. Every conflict we’ve ever been in from at the beginning, you have to weed out the peacetime guys who have risen to the top by virtue of talents that have very little to do with battlefield leadership.

I opposed General Casey being chief of staff of the Army, not because I didn’t honor his service to the country, but because he had supported and advocated a failed strategy. When people do that, they should not be rewarded. I didn’t think that General Westmoreland should be made chief of staff of the Army back during the Vietnam War. Sometimes history repeats itself.

I met personally with General [Ricardo] Sanchez and [Ambassador] Paul Bremer in Baghdad early on, very early on, and I said you don’t have enough troops here. This strategy is going to fail. You have the looting that’s going on; you’ve got to de-Baathificate. You’ve got to do all these things.

Why did I know that so well? Because that’s what I was hearing from the sergeants major and the colonels and everybody else including my own background and knowledge, and General Sanchez said I support what we’re doing; we’re doing the right thing. We’re going to succeed. I wish he had realized those things back then that he has stated in the last couple of days. I respect and honor his service to the country. I just think he was wrong, and I think General Casey was wrong.

But I think we are now bringing forward a generation of Army leaders ranging from junior officers and middle-grade officers to generals that are probably as good or better than this country has ever been blessed with, and I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting them and seeing them, and watching the way they lead and inspire the young men and women who serve under them.

Q: Do you think the Joint Chiefs are giving good advice?

McCain: They certainly weren’t for a long time, going along with that strategy. I still think that there’s people in the Pentagon that are not sold on the surge, which continues to astonish me. There’s certainly people in the [Senate] Intelligence Committee because I have unclassified versions of the CIA and estimates as short a time as several, a couple months ago, saying the surge was failing. I think events on the ground clearly indicate that’s not the case.

Q: As the surge winds down, what happens if you, in fact, need that surge to sustain a successful operation?

McCain: The American people are out of patience. We all know that. For nearly four years, they were frustrated by the “stuff happens,” “few dead-enders,” “last throes.” That’s why I was a little disturbed at the article in the [Washington] Post this morning claiming victory. I think we don’t want to go that route again.

And so all I can say is I think that we’re in our last chance in Iraq. In other words, this strategy, which is succeeding, the surge — actually it’s a tactic, if we want to be technical — is succeeding.

Now we need the government to be more effective. Now we need to clean up the national police and we need to have oil revenue-sharing. We need to have elections in the provinces. We need to do the de-Baathification. At this point, it’s not the military situation that’s disappointing. It is the political situation that continues to flounder on Shia, Sunni, Kurd priorities, which are very disappointing.

I’ve had several meetings with [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki, with others, and it’s all very frustrating. How long do we wait? We’re not going to wait forever. I know we’re not going to wait forever.

Q: Along those lines, what did you make of the recent comments by some of the political leaders over there that even they don’t think political reconciliation is possible, and where does that leave the U.S. in terms of its strategy?

McCain: It leaves us in conditions where we have to try to have another government. They’re a parliamentary government and they elect their leaders. There’s no good option. There’s no good [alternative] to them acting. But I sure as heck am pleased to have this challenge [rather] than the one we had eight months ago, which was the military situation collapsing.

We got a new strategy. It’s succeeding militarily. Now, we have this challenge. I think we can meet it and I think we can succeed. Just as people are predicting that there will be no progress politically, they’re the same people that seven or eight months ago saying that we lost militarily.

Q: If you were president today, and you were satisfied with the success of the surge, what would you do, what would you be willing to do to sustain that surge or would you say no, we’re out of troops, and we can’t sustain it?

McCain: Let me also comment, on the ground locally, there’s a lot of political progress. In fact, I was glad to see that [Shia leader Abdul Aziz] al-Hakim went to the Sunni areas yesterday or the day before to foster a better relationship.

If I were president today, I would be very reliant on and confident about the classic counterinsurgency strategy — it wasn’t invented by Petraeus or anybody else; it’s the classic counterinsurgency strategy —continuing to succeed. Continue to succeed means the Iraqi military takes over more and more of the responsibilities. Areas become more and more secure.

Ramadi used to be free fire zone. It used to be Fort Apache. Now, it’s a very … a relatively calm and peaceful area. The counterinsurgency strategy is that the Iraqis take over more and more of the responsibilities, we gradually withdraw to support roles, and then gradually leave. That’s what happens when you succeed in a counterinsurgency.

Q: Would you extend deployments? Would you be willing to call Guard troops back up?

McCain: I would do whatever is necessary. I would do whatever is necessary to succeed. The consequences of failure are chaos and genocide. When we talk about the unsavory options for success, we cannot ignore the catastrophic consequences of failure, and that is, as I said, well, the president of Iran said it best — he said when the United States leaves, there will be a vacuum and a void in Iraq and we will fill it. You don’t have to go any further than that to see what would happen if we set a date for surrender.

Q: If the American [public is] out of patience, how do you succeed?

McCain: If the American people are out of patience, then we will have to take the consequences. But my job is to tell them what the consequences are. It’s my job to do whatever I can to beat back the assertions such as made by the Majority Leader of the United States Senate [Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.] last April that the war is lost.

It’s my job to beat back the assertions that were made as short a time as a month ago if you read the Washington Post editorial yesterday, which turned out to be false, that we were losing and that the casualties were up, etc., etc. Those assertions on the floor of the Senate turned out to be false.

And it’s my job to do what I think Petraeus was successful in doing, and that is he was able to, by his appearance before Congress — convince Americans to have a little more patience so that this thing can go forward, and I think that’s why you saw the Democrat [sic] candidates for president going from calling for immediate withdrawal to saying that we might be there as long as 2013. I don’t think they found themselves on the “Road to Damascus.” So —

Q: If you — let me go back to the question.

McCain: Yes.

Q: If you were president, would you have said, as President Bush did, well, we’ve now reached a point where we can begin to draw down in Iraq, based largely on the fact that troop rotations couldn’t support the surge, or would you have found a way to maintain —

McCain: I would have done it based on the recommendations of General Petraeus and General Odierno and others whom I trust there as to what the security situation was.

Q: Was that then in your estimation the correct decision?

McCain: I trust General Petraeus and General Odierno’s decision. I was told personally by both of them that they made that decision on the basis of the facts on the ground and that was the primary factor in their decision-making. Now, were they affected by the political environment? I don’t know. I know these are honest and fine and decent men who were attacked in the most obscene fashion by MoveOn.org.

Q: Would you support using the military draft to grow the force?

McCain: No, God, no. Why should we go back to a draft when by all accounts and by every outside expert opinion we have the best equipped, best trained, most professional, bravest military in history? And we want to go back to the draft? Before I would even have the remote consideration of it, somebody is going to have to tell me how rich people are forced to serve along with poor people. Rich people always can find a doctor to say they have a bad knee.

Q: Army personnel specialists tell us that to expand the Army in the near term by anything more than about 30,000 equals a draft, that they don’t believe they could increase the Army by 90,000 without drafting people.

McCain: Well, how in the world did we have an all-volunteer force at the time of the first Gulf War where the Army and the Marine Corps were a third larger? What miracle did we perform that we were able to do it then?

Q: We weren’t killing people everyday in combat.

McCain: Well, you and I have a different view of the patriotism and willingness to serve of the American young men and women.

Q: [The services] are having trouble meeting their numbers now.

McCain: They met their numbers and they are meeting them, and they will continue to meet them. It’s a marketplace.

Q: By throwing a lot of money at it.

McCain: Of course. It costs money. It costs money. An all- volunteer force costs money. It’s a marketplace out there. In the marketplace, you get a certain number of young people who are just motivated to serve because they want to serve their country, and then you have other young people who say, OK, what are my options here? What’s the best deal for me? And we’re going to have to up the ante. But to think out of a country out of 300 million people, that we’re not able to recruit 90,000 more people, I think borders on ludicrous.

Q: But, Senator, somebody that we both respect, [former Georgia Democratic Sen.] Sam Nunn, was very concerned about using big bonuses to maintain an Army.

McCain: Well, Sam Nunn may be concerned. He never served. I’m not. I’m not concerned at all. And to go back to the draft … again, throughout history, every time there’s been a draft, whether it be the Civil War or any other war when we’ve had a draft, it’s been totally unfair and unequal. You had three Harvard graduates in three years that accepted the draft in the Vietnam War.

So you can call it a lottery. You can call it a banana. Rich people get out of the draft and I’m not ready to go back to a totally unfair system where we ask the poorest people in this country to serve.

Q: Do you believe you can maintain the quality of the force?

McCain: I know we can. I know we can.

Q: And increase the numbers?

McCain: I know we can. Again, there’s historical precedent for it. Back in ‘91, we had an Army and Marine Corps that were one-third larger. If America can’t, out of 300 million people, recruit a military that size, I just … I’m convinced that we can, and they need people to inspire them to serve.

Q: Can we talk briefly about the Bush administration’s record on pay and benefits? Because they’ve taken a couple of unusual positions for a time of war. We had that situation in the first term where the administration tried to cut pay of people in the combat zone, and now we have the administration persisting on arguing that 3.5 percent raise is just too generous and that we need to reduce it by a half-percentage point.

I recall your record when you were a freshman senator and your own push to increase pay and benefits, and I think that you probably would not agree with the administration.

McCain: No, and I’m glad we disregarded their opinion with our 3.5 percent pay raise in this authorization bill.

Q: What about their larger —

McCain: I’m respectful of your views, and I apologize if I don’t appear to, but we really have to, we must do this, we must increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. We just can’t otherwise not, in my view, because of the contingencies that we may face throughout the world, as I’ve talked about earlier. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Q: One of the things that the administration has been saying is that it can’t afford retirement benefits and it can’t afford this and it can’t afford that because the cost of people are making it impossible to modernize at the same time. Do you think that that’s true? Is there some truth to what they say?

McCain: It’s just another area where I was in profound disagreement with Secretary Rumsfeld. I think Secretary [of Defense Robert] Gates has a far more realistic awareness of the needs of the all-volunteer force than Rumsfeld did. I know that Secretary Gates may not have done everything that we want him to do, but the tone of the leadership is obviously, as we all know, dramatically different and I think a dramatic improvement … beginning with the fact that he sits down with the uniformed military leadership and listens to them.

Q: You were talking about contracting reform earlier. What about outsourcing of the federal government? How much should the federal government grow or shrink the number of employees it competitively outsources and which agencies, if any should be subject to that, beyond the military, just in general?

McCain: All of them. All of them should be subject to it, and we should outsource as much as we can within reason. The fundamental principle I believe in strongly, I would hire smart people who would decide exactly what and where that would happen.

I’m not worried about the fact that some of our materials are acquired overseas. I’m not worried about the fact that some of the traditional government functions can be performed more efficiently and at less cost by outsourcing. But I can’t tell you exactly which branch of government and which branch of service.

I think we did the smart thing by putting civilian guards on the gates to military bases. That’s “duh.” Then we get into some other much more complex areas.

Q: Are there jobs that should not be outsourced?

McCain: Oh, I’m sure that any classified work and highly sensitive work, we should think about very carefully. Although, as we know, they’re not government agencies that build our weapon systems, there’s always that aspect of it, and intellectual property rights and dual-use technologies complicate this issue dramatically, as we all know, as we become more and more high-tech. But classified work and classified information, for example, our labs at Sandia and other places probably should continue to be government-run.

Q: Some intelligence work has been outsourced as well as a lot of security work, specifically the State Department security in Iraq. Is that appropriate use of outsourcing?

McCain: It was brought about, again, because of not enough troops on the ground. So they hired these so-called contract workers. If we’d had more men and women in the military to do these jobs, we’d have never had the Blackwater situation. I’m telling you, when you start out with false principles and false practices, you pay a heavy price for a long time.

Q: Should the State Department officials in Iraq be guarded then by U.S. military if they —

McCain: I’d like it, but we don’t have enough. Yes, and I’d love to see pigs fly, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Q: One aspect of outsourcing has been to create a competitive marketplace for federal employees who in the past didn’t have an alternative source of employment. If you eliminated certain categories of that outsourcing, you might stop the brain drain that we’ve suffered in Special Forces and in a lot of areas such as acquisition that have cost the government quite a bit since that began. That’s really the root question here. Should some areas be cordoned off?

McCain: I’m sure they can be, but because we didn’t have enough troops on the ground, we had to hire the contract guys, and when we had to hire the contract guys, then it became an attractive option for men and women who are incredibly talented, Special Forces, SEALS, etc. Problems lead to problems.

So I would have cured the problem by not having a requirement for those contract people. Therefore, they wouldn’t have sucked them out of the military. So that’s the cause of the problem. And when, I mean it’s well chronicled in “Fiasco,” “Cobra II” — every American should read those two books. Certainly ever member of Congress should, because that’s the only way we’re going to learn from the mistakes.

When we didn’t have enough boots on the ground, when Rumsfeld disrupted the train of how the deployment would be made, when we messed up the Turkish situation so that we couldn’t go through — again, it’s not me that’s figured this out. A whole lot of other people have.

So your concern about the contract workers — we should have had more people in the military.

Q: What about stateside? What about the civilian federal workforce?

McCain: What about them?

Q: Do we cordon off certain jobs from that, specifically federal?

McCain: We do whatever we can to reduce costs to the taxpayers. And if there are functions that can be outsourced, we ought to do them. If there are others that lend [themselves] only to military functions and duties that can only be performed by military personnel, then those should not be.

I remember the big flap when we took security from the base and did it through contracts. It was going to be the end of Western civilization as we know it. Somehow it’s turned out OK.

Q: Senator, what about the outsourcing of the federal acquisition corps? For example, in future combat systems, you’ve got Boeing and SAIC playing the role of lead systems integrator there.

McCain: I think one of the, among other mistakes that we made, was this consolidation, encouragement of a consolidation of defense industries, which then has given us almost a unique, unfortunate situation, an unregulated monopoly situation where the major contractors monitor each other. And I think that whole situation of defense acquisition has to be revised and fixed, and I would start with abolishing cost-plus contracts.

Q: What else would you do?

McCain: Oh, we would have an overall strategic assessment of the priorities for what our needs are to meet the challenge of radical Islamic extremism, and where the emphasis should be. Should it be on future generations of manned aircraft or should it be on unmanned surveillance and quick strike aircraft?

Should it be on Crusader mortars or should it be on night vision capabilities that would allow us to detect activity to fight in the night as well as the day? I mean, you shape the equipment to the mission, not the mission to the equipment.

Q: How would you impose that on the Pentagon?

McCain: Get smart people.

Q: The Pentagon came up with the Quadrennial Review and —

McCain: Veto, veto. Get a secretary of defense that enforces your policies and get the smartest people in America to serve. Business, corporations, FedEx does very well. So does Cisco. So does all the other major technology corporations in America that are dedicated to work on a fixed-cost basis. They don’t have any cost-plus contracts. And I’d get the people in America that are the smartest on how to make businesses run and get them in there. The last guy to do that was John F. Kennedy.

Q: How about {Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara? That was his mantra.

McCain: Yep. He and Rumsfeld have a special place. [Laughter.]

Q: Speaking of technology, Senator, how do you retool the way the U.S. military fights? How do you make it more nimble? You hear talk about how we’re sitting around trying to come up with ops orders that have to get approved up three or four chains of command and get stamped off, and by the time we react, the enemy has already come up with a solution on the back of a napkin. How do you do that with the way that you say that the defense establishment is structured right now?

McCain: I think Petraeus and Odierno are a good example of how you can improve that process. They now have very quick reaction forces. They have a much more nimble military on the battlefield, and we ought to look at the way they have streamlined the way they’re doing business, and we should apply that in other areas, and again get civilian leaders in who can …

FedEx knows and so does UPS where every package is at every moment that it’s within their cargo holds or warehouses or wherever they are. FEMA {Federal Emergency Management Agency] sent truckloads of ice to Maine. Now what’s the difference there? The difference is, is good solid use of technology, business practice, profit-oriented kinds of ways of doing business, and you need smart people —

Q: And maps. New maps too help. Knowing which way you’re going. [Laughter.]

McCain: Yes, exactly. And, frankly, not hiring a guy who is an expert on Arabian horses to run the organization.

Q: Does it say something though about the culture of people in the military today? Military officers? That maybe we’ve built a culture where they’re more afraid of making a decision without getting somebody higher up to nod their head yes?

McCain: Look, if you call for an additional 100,000 or whatever it is, the total of 300,000 troops, and you get fired, of course the word gets out, that nobody wants to get “Shinsekied.” So, of course, there was a culture in the Pentagon that you didn’t cross or express your views most candidly.

Now, again, look, I’m not sure that Secretary Gates is a perfect secretary of defense, but I know this, that he listens and pays attention to and respects the uniformed military and their opinions while keeping the final policy decisions in the hands of the secretary of defense, which is the way that our democracy runs, and that’s civilian policymaking but with the input and the advice and recommendation and experience of the military leaders in this country.

So, no, you can’t intimidate military leaders and threaten them — or let it be known that disagreement does not lead to success.

Q: Senator, how big a threat is Iran?

McCain: Huge. It’s a huge threat. It’s another reason why we, I think why we need to have increased military capability. The Iranians in the view of many are two years away from a tipping point on the acquisition of nuclear weapons … that it will be inexorable that they have sufficient fissile material and centrifuges and all those kinds of things that they would [use in] building a nuclear weapon.

My fear is not that the Iranians put it on a missile. My fear and that of every expert I know is that they give it to a terrorist organization with which they have close ties, and there are many. We need to get a league of democracies, countries that share our views and principles and ideas and our economic strength — and I’m glad to see that the new president of France, [Nicolas] Sarkozy, is talking about this — and impose meaningful, punishing sanctions on Iran.

Today there are European institutions extending unlimited lines of credit to the Iranians. Today, the Chinese and the Russians block any real meaningful action on the part of the [United Nations] Security Council. So we should get together like-minded countries, like-motivated countries with a goal of not having an Iranian nuclear-weaponized nation, and exercise those options.

I think they can be effective. The Iranian economy is very weak. They’re now rationing gas, as you know, and we could have a significant effect on them. At the end of the day, there’s only one thing worse than military action against Iran, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran.

Q: So you would take military action to prevent them from acquiring that weapon?

McCain: I am saying, and I will not change, I am saying there is only one thing worse than a military action against Iran and that’s a nuclear-armed Iran, and I’m saying there are many options that we have not pursued with enough vigor and with enough effect before we would reach a decision of that nature.

I think the Israelis may have just sent a signal in the region with the now well-publicized, by the New York Times, attack on a facility in Syria.

Q: You would have supported that had you been briefed on that in advance?

McCain: I don’t know because I was not in on the discussions, and I don’t know enough about the details of the operation to make that judgment. I don’t have access to the classified information. All I know is what I read in the depictions that were in the media, and I’m sure there are other things that weren’t … aspects of this that we don’t know yet.

Q: Does the U.S. have any options with regard to al-Qaida and reputed al-Qaida strongholds in the federally unregulated areas in Pakistan? Other than what seems to be sort of a status quo of waiting for them to come over the border, the Pakistani Army occasionally launching a strike to — well, it’s hard to say for what end because they don’t seem to be sustained efforts. What are the U.S. options there?

McCain: I think they’re very difficult options. I think that if we knew of al-Qaida — more specifically Taliban, it’s mainly Taliban that are operating in these places — that we have to do what’s necessary. We don’t have to advertise it. We don’t have to embarrass or humiliate the Pakistani government.

The larger problem right now that will affect that situation is the future of Pakistan itself, in general, and [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf in particular. It’s certainly not clear as to what events are going to transpire now and the next few months in Pakistan. If the Supreme Court of Pakistan rules, which I think is very likely, that he can’t be both president and head of the armed forces, it’s going to cause some interesting events, and I can’t predict the outcome.

I know that the negotiations have gone with [former Pakistani President] Benazir Bhutto, and there may be some accommodation there, but you and I also know that in the middle ranks of the Pakistani Army today, there’s a very strong Islamic influence, and part of that had to do with idiotic Pressler Amendment which kept us from having the kinds of military exchanges that are so valuable in not just helping relations with the military of foreign countries but teaching them about the rule of law, the way governments and military relationships are, etc., etc., which have paid untold dividends throughout the years in many parts of the world.

So it’s a very dicey proposition as to what’s going to happen in Pakistan in the next few months, and that will have a direct result not only on the Waziristan situation, but also on events in Afghanistan itself, which has the problems of the poppies, which has the problems of corruption.

You look at Afghanistan’s listing that is made about governments that are corrupt, they’re way down there, and will [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai be a more assertive and effective president than he is today? These are all very tough calls, and in summary I think that what happens in Waziristan will be dictated by events in Islamabad, but I also think that we, where necessary, without in any way embarrassing our friends, can have a lot of options.

Q: So if you were president and you knew that bin Laden were over there, you had a target spotting, you could nail him, you’d go get him?

McCain: Sure. Sure. We have to, and I’m sure that after the initial flurry, that whoever our friends are, wherever he is, would be relieved because, as I mentioned to you before, he’s still very effective in the world, very, very effective. We see his tapes come out and they motivate and they inspire and they recruit and they instruct radical Islamic extremists and that’s, I think —

Q: How do you think he’s been able to elude us so far?

McCain: As you know, we’ve made mistakes along the way, the Tora Bora thing. Whoever the member of Congress was that revealed that we were monitoring their phone conversations is remarkable. And I think it’s also, you almost have to see that country to understand how difficult it is. No one in history has ever — no entity in history has ever controlled that area, not even the Alexander the Great.

The British, their annual spring exercise was to go out and fight and kill a few of them, and it was good training for their officers and good sport, as they viewed it, but they never controlled it either, and so it’s rugged territory and it’s populated by tribal entities and with no allegiance to anybody else.

So it’s a difficult situation. It really is, and all of us have been told he has literally circles and circles of people around that quickly relay the information if there’s any suspicious activity headed in his direction, and he buys them. He buys their allegiance. They’ve always been for sale or for rent.

Q: Senator, if we were to ask about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which has gone on for several years now, and I don’t know what you think about its effectiveness, but if you were commander in chief —

McCain: Which one?

Q: “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy on gays.

McCain: Yeah.

Q: What do you think about it?

McCain: Again, I rely on the judgment of our military leaders, and every time I ask them, they tell me that it’s effective and they don’t want to abandon it. We give these military leaders the responsibility for leading, training and equipping. It seems to me that we should rely on their judgment in an area like this.

I think when General Colin Powell makes the statements that he makes, then I have to respect that, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reevaluating that policy from time to time or any other personnel policy, but I certainly feel that there’s no reason to change it at this time.

Q: Are there homosexuals serving today in the military, do you believe?

McCain: Sure. That’s why we have “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Q: Can they serve honorably?

McCain: I see no reason why they can’t. I’ve met people who have alternate lifestyles who served in the military and said they served honorably and effectively, who are now out of the military.

Q: [Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Marine Gen. Peter] Pace, prior to his retirement, discussed the idea that he thought it was immoral, wrong, for —

McCain: Something like immoral or something like that, I think …

Q: — for homosexuals, and he also said for unmarried people, to have sexual relations.

McCain: I don’t get into that. I’m not, I’m not that kind of a, I write laws. I’m sorry. I — that’s not —

Q: But as president, you’ll have to make policy in addition to writing laws.

McCain: I have to make policy and I have to encourage people to lead good lives, and I strongly support the institution of marriage and family, and I think that the family remains the pillar of our society, but I will try to lead and inspire people to do good things, and I say that as a person who is flawed and made many mistakes in my life. That’s what I view my role as, to inspire people to serve the country and causes greater than themselves.

Q: We talked a little about the tankers a couple times. The Air Force is set to make a decision in the next few months on that program.

McCain: Yep. And several times we have had to go to the Air Force on the contracts they are writing and say, wait a minute, you’re not writing it right, and then they fix it, then we go back, and then we fix it again, but —

Q: Are we ready now to make a decision?

McCain: I think so. I think we are. I think they are ready.

Q: Neither one of these airplanes as advertised has actually flown and demonstrated an ability to do the job it would be purchased to do. That’s not our typical acquisition strategy. Does that make sense at this time?

McCain: I think that it does in this respect, and that is being a tanker is not that complicated. I mean the parameters for its performance and all those things are complicated, but the mission itself frankly is a flying gas station. That’s what tankers are. And so it does lend itself to a easier assessment of capabilities, and it’s not new technology that we are looking at. It’s a new and better and more capable way of performing a mission which is not that complicated.

But I promise you we will be keeping an eye on all of it as long as I am in a position to have some oversight on it.

Q: Do you trust the Air Force?

McCain: I have to go back to Ronald Reagan: trust but verify. I cannot tell you the deep disappointment I had in Air Force generals coming over and testifying before the armed services committee gratuitously talking about how they needed this specific tanker. That was a great disappointment to me.

Q: What do you mean by gratuitously? You mean bringing it up —

McCain: Yes, without being asked.

Q: — in inappropriate situations?

McCain: Without being asked. Yes.

Q: Like when the personnel chief mentioned it because it was his —

McCain: Actually I think the present chief of staff of the Air Force [Gen. T. Michael Moseley] was one, but I just, it’s just not right to have that kind of behavior. And, by the way, the Air Force and the Pentagon and Secretary Rumsfeld and the Secretary of the Air Force and all the others stonewalled us at every turn, at every turn.

Q: So, in your view, has the Air Force overcome that or do you —

McCain: Yes. And I think Boeing has too. I really do. I’m very impressed with the new chief executive officer, and I think they put in some real — took some real strong measures to change the culture there, and I think that they have done a good job at it.

I don’t hold grudges for these things as long as they fix it and I think the Air Force has done the same. But it’s our job to oversight. We’re not a rubber stamp. And I think there are times when we haven’t done as good a job as we should have, so I put a lot of the blame on the oversight of Congress, which is our responsibility.

Q: But the enterprise is so huge and the oversight responsibility is so vast, you can’t see everything. You talked about Ike and you talked about the military-industrial complex, people are talking about trying to reform this thing for more than 50 years now. How do you get at it?

McCain: Because I know how it works, and I know — nobody ever thought I’d stop the tanker. Nobody ever thought that. They said the tracks were greased, but I know how it works. I have 40 some years of experience, and I know how to do it. I know how it works, and I know — more importantly, I have people who I know I would hire who know how it works, and so it’s — and it’s gotten worse. It’s not been like that for all these years.

In fact, during the Reagan era, we got pretty good return on our defense dollar investment. It’s only been, frankly since, oh, I don’t know, in recent years, that we’ve seen this dramatic escalation in cost overruns.

Q: Cost overruns, though, are not a 1990s phenomenon.

McCain: No, but if you got a fixed-cost contract, it sure stops a lot of it.

Q: But cost overruns were happening during the Reagan era on aircraft carriers tremendously, is my memory. I mean it was huge.

McCain: The Reagan administration was not perfect and I don’t say that it’s going to be perfect, but I think most objective observers would say it was one heck of a lot better. One thing we did was clean up this submarine situation, which was, as you know, dramatically out of control.

Q: But aren’t some technologies so revolutionary that the price is really a moving target? If you look at the Osprey, you know, that’s a revolutionary technology whose price has gone way through the —

McCain: When a major corporation enters into a contract with Cisco, I know for a fact Cisco says here’s how much it’s going to cost you, and if it costs more than that, we’ll eat the additional cost, and they do, and somehow private enterprise is able to have people enter into contracts, they fulfill a contract, and they still seem to be making huge amounts of money. Why is it that we can’t have that same system in defense procurement? One reason is because the folks know that if Cisco can’t do the job, maybe Oracle can, maybe IBM can or maybe somebody else can. So they’re all competing out there.

Q: But if Cisco makes the—develops that product and maybe takes a loss for this customer, they can sell it to 45 other customers. A little more difficult to do when you’re talking about a submarine that you may not be able to sell to anybody else.

McCain: Well, I think that’s one way of looking at it. I think another way of looking at it is that if you gave them a cost plus contract, they might have cost overruns. [Laughter.]

Q: Isn’t the real trouble Congress, that even if you had a fixed contract, they’d go to Congress and somebody would slip in extra money for them? Isn’t that really where the —

McCain: Oh, yeah. I really — I mean look at how many of the, quote, “defense dollars” are not spent on anything that has to do with defense. Look at the stuff that’s being crowbarred into the defense appropriations bill as we speak, C-17s, you know, and the Defense Department says we don’t need anymore. They’re going to put in how many — I’ve forgotten — 12, something like that.

Q: At this moment, yeah, but —

McCain: You never know what happens.

Q: They could be increasing as we speak.

McCain: Yeah. Oh, listen, Congress is very complicit, but one thing about Congress, too, is that at least they have to go to the voter, and if some of this stuff is exposed, then, you know — and there are watchdog organizations which I think do a pretty good of exposing a lot of this stuff that goes on and I appreciate that including some of the work that’s done here.

Q: But if you expose it to my constituents, I may well be reelected because they like the fact that I’m bringing jobs home to Georgia or … I was trying to think of an example of a member of Congress defeated because he put in an earmark for a defense project.

McCain: Well, I can tell you that people were defeated because there is perception of corruption which it has bred. In fact, there are people in jail, and a number of the people, Republicans who were defeated in the last election, in my view, the major reason why we lost control of Congress was because spending was out of control and our Republican base became completely alienated and just took a hike, and I hear that from — well, I don’t hear it, but I see it in the polls, or Republican base is dispirited because of overspending and they’re sick of us. And when you ask them what’s the major reason why you have such a low approval rating of Congress, it’s one, they don’t do anything for us; two, out-of-control spending and corruption.

So from a macro standpoint, I can’t name you a single [defeat] that was specifically for a pork barrel project, but any political observer will tell you the reason why Republicans lost control of Congress was not because of the war in Iraq; it was because of overspending and corruption.

And still to this day, if you look at the favorables of one party over another, they’ll say — why is it that you prefer Democrats to Republicans by a substantial number, they’ll say spending, corruption, and our base, our base, the ones we ask to go out and register voters, the ones that we ask to get people to the polls, the ones that do the hard work, they just said, “We’ve had enough.” The “bridge to nowhere” was the tipping point. The “bridge to nowhere.” Everybody in the town hall meetings knows about the “bridge to nowhere.”

I have never sought nor obtained a single pork barrel project for my state, not a single earmark, not a one, and somehow the people of Arizona have survived and done pretty well, since I represent the fastest growing state in America. It has substantial defense installations, which have — I’ve forgotten how many — thousands of employees at Intel and every high tech organization in America, and I’ve never done a thing for any of them, and somehow they have not only survived, but they’ve thrived.

Q: Another reason sometimes blamed for the rising cost of defense bills is the uncertainty created by an annual budget process, probably better described as a perpetual budget process that never quite stops and everything is always in flux and no decision isn’t revisited at least three more times.

What could you do as president to restructure that? To impose some discipline on the process and predictability?

McCain: I think one of the ways is to make the future years, the fit-up, far more effective, to try to make it not what it is today, a grab bag of things that were not asked for in the budget, but something that’s really meaningful, and you say, look, here’s our future-year defense plans and not —

Q: Not a wish list.

McCain: Yeah, yeah. Just lay it out very specifically, and frankly, if Congress varied from those, then start the debate and the discussion, and if they couldn’t make the argument that this was really something that was needed, then veto.

The veto pen is something that, combined with a president’s high approval ratings — you’ve got to have high approval ratings — but a veto the way Ronald Reagan used to exercise it and a high approval rating can really have a great effect, in my view.

Yeah, they’ve never heard of some of these systems, but they haven’t heard of them because we haven’t talked about them that much, you know. We just sort of … it just goes on.

Q: Would you favor creating a chief financial officer for the Pentagon or do you think that’s a deputy defense secretary’s job?

McCain: I think that Gordon England is doing a good job under the circumstances, and I think he’s got the — I just have great respect for him, but what I would really like to see for every major bureaucracy in government is a chief operating officer that will lay out the budget of that bureaucracy for the year, what it plans to do, what it’s going to achieve, and at the end of the year, there will be required reporting of what they did, what they achieved, how much money they spent, etc., and then if they don’t meet what they said they were going to do, try to put them out of business.

Q: Should that be a political job or a career civilian job?

McCain: I would probably, in an administration that I would have, I would make it a political appointment because I think that’s the only way you get the —and I’d ask these people to do it for a dollar a year. They’re rich. They can —

Q: Shouldn’t the cabinet be doing exactly that now?

McCain: There are lots of things the cabinet should be doing now, but they don’t, unfortunately.

Q: You seem to think that Secretary Gates is doing a good job. Would you keep him on if you were elected?

McCain: You know, I’d have to evaluate that at the time, but I really do respect the job that he’s doing in many ways. I think he has restored relations with Congress to a great degree. I think he’s had a degree of candor that’s been important. I think he has respected people in uniform and yet maintained his proper place as the policymaker.

I’ve disagreed with him on some of the decisions that he’s made, but I have great respect for the decisions and the way that he’s gone about it. [That] job, as you know, wears people out. It really does wear people out. I’m not sure that, frankly, he would want it, but I think it would, given the job he’s done, it would be certainly something that I think would be a part of the decision-making process.

Q: Where have you disagreed with him, Senator?

McCain: A couple of the comments that he made about Iraq where, you know, he was a little bit too optimistic, in my view. We’ve had decisions, some of the things that, procurement decisions or lack of decisions, we’ve had some question about, but overall I’ve haven’t had real strong disagreement.

Q: There are several thousand political appointee jobs among the federal bureaucracy. The last two incoming administrations have struggled mightily and, in fact, arguably failed to fill those jobs in a timely way so that real and necessary work and decisions could be made. What could you do in anticipation of that to avoid that problem?

McCain: It’s really got to do with the environment now in Washington that is so partisan. You know, for years and years elections had consequences. The president appointed the people he wanted and we would always approve because that’s the result of elections.

Now, more and more, there’s blocking of nominees. There’s bitter partisanship. Look, I didn’t agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be a member of the United States Supreme Court because I didn’t agree with her philosophically. Fine person, and I voted for her even though I didn’t think she was a good selection of the Supreme Court because of our philosophical differences, but I wasn’t about to vote against her because elections have consequences, and I feel that the president has the right, unless there’s an overriding reason, and it has to be an overriding reason, to appoint his or her own team — you notice I said “or her” own team.

I think it’s important to try to get back to this idea that [you] don’t block these nominees. A lot of these nominees are blocked, as you know, or not named because of the huge fight that they know they’re going to go through, so they’d rather either recess appoint, which is being abused, or just leave vacant, and that’s not good or healthy for America.

Harry Reid and I came to the House together in 1982. I know Harry Reid very well. I can drive up and go into his office and say, Harry, come on, let’s work these things out. The other thing you want to do is share credit for success. Share credit for success. Or give credit to somebody else. Unfortunately, we are as bitterly divided in the Senate today as I have ever seen it, and it seems to deteriorate.

Q: Senators [Joseph] Lieberman [I-Conn.] and [Susan] Collins [R-Maine] seem to think that you can eliminate a lot of this problem by reducing the number of political appointees by a third as well as the number of Senate confirmable political appointees by a third. Do you agree with that? That takes away power from the president and the Senate at the same time.

McCain: I’m sure that some of the political appointees can be eliminated, and I think some of the confirmables don’t have to take up the time. I know when I was chairman of the [Senate] commerce committee, I was surprised at some of the appointments that were, quote, “required confirmation,” and frankly, so did every other senator. So it was just a pro forma kind of exercise.

Q: If elected president, would you be willing to take that step to clear out that top group?

McCain: Sure, I would consider that. I would certainly support measures that would go in that direction, yeah. I’m not as sure as far as they do, and it’s not just the numbers. It’s the positions themselves.

Could I say I thank you for the great job you do of keeping the men and women and their families informed and your advocacy for them? It’s been unstinting and important. I read a lot of the things that you do, particularly your editorials, and I thank you for your advocacy and the unique role you play for the men and women and their families who are serving in the military and your education and information you provide to the public in general.

Q: Thank you for coming by.

McCain: Thanks. Great to see you.

Q: Eleven more appearances here. [Laughter.]

McCain’s message: What do you think?