I had a great time getting to know the students and administrators at the YTI Career Institute in Lancaster, PA. These students reminded me so much of my sailors -- they will be the artisans of the future. Was even able to help one of them -- a mother of two returned from Iraq -- be accepted into the new G.I. Bill program. President Franklin Roosevelt once said, "the G.I. Bill gives emphatic notice to the men and women of our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down." The new G.I. Bill is a renewal of that commitment, and provides us a model of which we can build a better America. The more rungs and ladders of opportunity, the more people can climb and contribute to our nation.

1. SOPA saves jobs.
2. SOPA will not affect American websites.

1. The non-partisan Government Accounting Office, in a 32-page report, reveals that the claim that any number of jobs lost in industries such as entertainment/media due to online piracy “cannot be substantiated.” In fact, those industries such as entertainment/media that rely on copyright are growing 1% above the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, the entertainment/media industry receives a heft of its profits from overseas, where piracy is much more rampant than in the U.S.
2. SOPA will not only affect American websites, but could result in many of them being shut down. Let’s be real why - the most widely used sites around the world are American: Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and SOPA places all of the liability of pirated content on the owner of the website. So, American companies would be forced to use their own resources to actively police for linked pirated content on their foreign pages (e.g. Google.co.uk) – resources that smaller companies, like Reddit, don’t have, possibly resulting in their closure. SOPA might be directed at foreign sites like The Pirate Bay, but will have devastating, yet unintended, consequences on our sites at home.

• Pushing the issues, talking about everything from the economy and small business to defense and foreign policy
• Education visits – elementary through college – and projects for at-risk youth
• Chambers of Commerce and businesses and workforce training efforts
• Forums on energy and the environment, including on the Marcellus Shale, and health care reform
• And veterans…before speaking this Veterans Day in Johnstown, PA, I will visit a maximum security prison as I did last year to also thank our veterans there; how well we work to prevent more from incarceration or homelessness with proper treatment and assistance also remains my focus

My perspective on the events in the Middle East and North Africa is shaped by my experience both as a warrior and policy adviser.  However, by viewing them through the political lens of my most recent experience running for the U.S. Senate against the desires of my party’s establishment, it may help provide a perspective for America about its leaders, who have something to learn from the today’s revolutionary fervor.

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America’s character is based on an alliance of rugged individualism and common enterprise  – a fair individual opportunity and the commonwealth of our country.  Shared opportunity is shared prosperity, and common wealth is common strength.  As predictable as our revolution was against England’s rulers more than two hundred years ago, so were the ones in the Middle East and North Africa in these last several months.  Predictable simply because what was good for the powerful and well connected was not good for the rest of the citizenry. There emerged competing realities:  the reality that the powerful pursued and the reality within which people actually lived. Simply put, the leaders pursued their own interests without thinking about the interests of their people; they thus lost the support of the people.  In my 31 years of naval service across the globe, I came to understand that while many in the world may respect the power of America’s military and the strength of its economy, they admire the power of our ideals – it’s why the young Egyptian officer commented as he did, and why the uprisings were inevitable.  And it is why my political experience convinces me that the reason the people revolted is a lesson that applies not only to leaders overseas, but also to our own leaders here at home.

Americans are certainly faced with challenging times. We are concerned for our future and there is a lot of justified outrage -- just as in Egypt and Tunisia -- when the nation’s institutions seem to be incapable of positive change.  But beyond this, I think there is a deeper uneasiness in America today.  People feel that the American Dream – the idea that our children, based on their efforts, will have the opportunity to do even better than we have done – is broken.  In fact, we know it’s broken. The collaboration of a group of researchers from across the political spectrum demonstrated that, for the first time in our history, Americans in their 30s are earning less than their parents did at that age a generation ago.  And this study was conducted a year before the recession that decimated the stock market, cost nearly 10 million American jobs, and wiped out $14 trillion in household wealth.

The American people see major challenges on every front and are afraid no one really has a plan to deal with any of them.  Instead, what the people see are leaders who have made the “politics of survival” the determining factor of what they do.  This practice of survival politics has caused leaders to adhere to a “political” reality that is different from that in which most of us actually live.  As a consequence, people feel that leaders no longer are willing to use – or even capable of using – their power within an institution in order to change actual conditions outside the institution.  Moreover, the political establishment’s requirement for near-unanimous adherence to its view of reality is increasingly producing outsiders rather than those who are willing to change the system from the inside – just as was the case from Bahrain and Yemen to Libya.  This failure of our traditional political institutions to change from within provides impetus to outside forces -- such as our own “revolutionary” faction, the tea party – much as political institutional failure has done in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.

This understandable lack of faith in our government and its leaders has ravaged not only our democratic process, but ultimately undermines our sense of national unity—what we stand for and what we are capable of.  It is not just politics.  The trust of Americans has been devastated by fraud and failure in virtually every area of public life.  People have been let down and led astray – to disastrous consequences – by government and politicians, corporations and titans of business, civic leaders and experts of all stripes.  Unbelievable lapses of oversight and foresight have occurred across administrations and on the watch of both parties. The government of the people has rarely been held in such low regard by the people; and when the body created by and for the people does not enjoy the public trust, it must be viewed as nothing short of a crisis.  We are arguably in no less a crisis than are the governments that have lost the support of their people in North Africa and the Middle East.  We must restore trust in our leaders.

The impact of this lack of public trust can be seen in the Obama Administration’s decision regarding Libya’s uprising. For the first time, a President has taken the nation to war with less than a majority of Americans supportive of his decision.

We are the only nation that was first founded on an idea, not on power.  Competing views of how to continue achieving the progress of that idea is part of the ongoing American conversation about who we are as a nation, who we aspire to be, and the role we seek in the world.  And if our leaders restore the people’s trust with a commitment to accountability, we will be able to address the range of security challenges of this century with a renewed strength built upon our most precious resource: our people and an alliance of a fair individual opportunity with the common good.  It is what the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa are about.

As a young Navy Captain, I was asked by the Admiral I worked for what I thought of DADT when it became official policy during the Clinton Administration. I now think ruefully about my reply: that I soon expected DADT to be overturned by the Supreme Court on the basis of discrimination. Over the years, I remember a number of instances when a young sailor would approach me to let me know he was gay, intent upon no longer living a lie, and wishing I could say, “Please don’t tell me, you’re too good and I don’t want to lose you”.

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I had been to war for our nation with such sailors; how could I come home and not believe they deserved equal rights from the country for which they had fought with the same common purpose as their shipmates? But that wasn’t the only reason I co-sponsored the legislation to repeal DADT when I later became a Congressman from Pennsylvania. I also did it for the betterment of our military.

I came to understand in the Navy that the best part of our nation’s character is that America has always been driven by an alliance of rugged individualism and common enterprise; by people striving for their individual achievement, but never measuring it apart from the greater effort. Ours is the first nation founded on principle, not power. But our nation is built upon the belief that individual principles -- freedom, suffrage, civil rights, equality -- are not attained until they extend to all. It is the success of this long struggle to embody the vision set by our founders for everyone that makes our nation – our military – so powerful. It is the recognition that a fair opportunity for all ensures even greater service to our common effort, our common purpose.

Shortly after arriving in the Indian Ocean during the war in Afghanistan, I launched attack planes from the aircraft carrier of my battle group, one of which had a young woman pilot. Over Afghanistan that night, she disregarded a standing order not to dive low without permission. U.S. Special Forces had been ambushed by the Taliban; four were dead and she felt there was no time to ask permission to save the rest. She immediately dove and strafed the enemy, and in her covering fire, the remaining men extracted their dead and themselves.

When I joined up during the Vietnam era, there were no women on aircraft carriers, never mind flying attack aircraft off them. Because woman were later given an individual opportunity to achieve all they might desire in our Navy, our common mission that night in Afghanistan was better and saved U.S. soldiers.

My belief in the repeal of DADT is based upon my experience of the conviction that the more people given a fair opportunity for their own achievement means a greater effort for the common purpose of America. I saw during my 31 years in the Navy that America’s success is born out of the basic idea that everyone should contribute to their fullest and should be given the tools and opportunity to do so. This simple notion has been the bedrock of our achievement, where shared opportunity is shared attainment.

This is why September 20 is important: once again we’ve looked into the national mirror and said “we are better than that.” And it is why no one should ever sell short the character of Americans, with our enormous capacity to change and grow for the better. Our courage to face the truth about the need to live up to our best ideals is why America will – despite any challenge -- always grow stronger and move forward as one, united nation.

Secretary Panetta must justify his "can't cut" assertion as part of the debt deduction debate. 

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Three defense issues have implications for both savings and investments in the debt reduction debate:

1. what size does our future military need to be;
2. why do we still measure military power by numbers of ships or brigades rather than the capability to rapidly acquire the knowledge to win; and
3. how do we achieve savings through transparency and accountability in the acquisition system?

Since Gen. Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1990s, the United States has sized its military principally based upon a strategy of being able to win two large wars simultaneously. During his tenure, the two most stressing -- and likely -- wars were chosen: defending South Korea and a conflict with Iraq. These requirements have largely justified today's force levels.

One of those two wars began in 2002, and over time defense officials acknowledged that the Army's continuing commitment in Iraq prevented it from fulfilling its requirements for the defense of South Korea. Senior military leaders characterized this as an "acceptable risk," emphasizing that the Navy and Air Force's new technology was capable of "filling in" for Army units.

The defense budget has also increased 40 percent since 9/11, not including the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those two conflicts were funded by "emergency" supplementals, containing significant spending that was neither "emergency" nor needed for these two conflicts. The Navy funded submarine-hunting helicopters, the Air Force bought the future "Joint Strike Fighter," and the Army purchased more new equipment in the 2008 "emergency" supplemental than was in that year's normal defense budget.

Despite this large increase in funding, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently stated that defense cannot be part of further debt reduction. After 31 years in the U.S. Navy, I strongly support a military always capable of defending us and winning. But the super-committee on debt reduction should ask Secretary Panetta: What is the metric-based justification for your assertion?

One of the two force-sizing wars of our past national strategy is ending (Iraq); the second, Korea, hasn't had large numbers of Army units able to support it for a decade -- at "acceptable risk." What, then, should be the basis for the size of the Armed Forces now? What is the national strategy -- and the related force-sizing metrics -- that justifies how many future forces we need? What has replaced Gen. Powell's two war strategy to objectively determine the size of our military force?

For far too long we have continued to benchmark our military prowess to the size of our forces: believing that numbers of ships, airwings, and brigades is what matters -- just like during the Cold War. The right metric is now knowledge gained by sensors and our capability to quickly turn this gained information into swift action -- from the strike on Osama bin Laden to Korea's defense, where aircraft technologically connected to exact targeting information can replace large Army units.

In 2005, the Navy sent Congress a ship-building plan that sought to improve its capability to win a future conflict by investing in knowledge and speed, not in more costly force size. For instance, rather than buying more submarines at $2 billion each, the plan proposed a netted sensor information system to track Chinese underwater movements, and then direct an aircraft to drop a torpedo for the "kill."

The plan never advanced beyond Congress, not only because of internal Navy, Defense and industry resistance. There was also inevitable Congressional opposition to reducing a program that meant jobs for representatives' districts -- whether these programs are the ones best needed for our military or not.

Now the Navy can afford even fewer submarines than in 2005, yet it has no plans for any netted tracking system. We risk having a less effective military today both by retaining size-driven metrics and by not investing in less-expensive capabilities that make the number of planes or ships less relevant to our ability to win.

Along with changing the metric for sizing our force, Secretary Panetta should pursue real savings from an accountable acquisition system. In heading the Navy's $70 billion warfare requirements directorate, I was struck by what the Defense Department does not tell Congress, who approves its funding. And when I was in Congress, I was taken by Congress' failure to be accountable for the funds provided for our country's defense.

"Unanticipated" growth in defense costs -- $300 billion for programs in 2008 -- could be checked if Defense Department were to reveal to Congress its "confidence level" (the probability that the price is right) in originally pricing its programs.

For instance, when Congress approved the new nuclear aircraft carrier (CVN 78), the internal Defense confidence level was less than 50 percent for its $11 billion cost. Nor was Congress informed of the same low chance of achieving the estimated cost of $2 billion for a Virginia-class submarine. In 2006-2007 alone, 30 major warfare programs ran 15 to 25 plus percent over cost estimates. And while Nunn-McCurdy legislation mandates a report to Congress of cost breaches, there is no follow-on enforcement of accountability for these frequent cost overruns.

Congress should pass legislation mandating:

1. The Defense Department provide Congress its confidence level for the cost of a program, with Congressional approval requiring an 80 percent confidence factor; and
2. if a Nunn-McCurdy breach then occurred, continued program approval would be contingent upon the Defense Department providing other programs to offset the breach. Otherwise, the "tyranny of optimism" that pervades industry, Congress and the Defense Department about unrequited funding is a detriment to military readiness -- and accountability.

These changes can contribute not only to debt reduction; acquisition changes are essential for accountability so we can afford the best and most of what our warriors need. Measuring what it takes to win our conflicts also requires leadership that shifts the benchmark away from capacity in numbers, to capability in knowledge. Secretary Panetta's role is to be accountable only to the young men and women who serve us, not to the defense complex.