POLITICO Pro Q&A: Sen. Thom Tillis

Interview

Thom Tillis may be a freshman senator, but he's no rookie legislator.

The North Carolina Republican served in the state Legislature for eight years - the last four as House speaker - before he was elected to the U.S. Senate 2014.

In Washington, Tillis acknowledges the stakes are higher, but he sees the legislative process as "very similar," even if the Senate is more constrained.

In a wide-ranging interview in his Capitol Hill office, Tillis discussed his work as one of five freshmen on the Senate Armed Services Committee, set to mark up its version of the sweeping fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act next week.

And following a recent Senate trip to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and a refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border, Tillis also talked about the fight against the Islamic State, international reactions to the musings of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, his concerns about a smaller Army and more.

Here are edited excerpts:

What was the biggest takeaway from your trip?

The consistent message from the leaders that we met with is that America's failure to lead is at least a part of the problem, in terms of taking the fight to Daesh and to terrorist organizations. ... They were trying to do it in a very respectful way, but it was clear from them, we always talk about we need our Middle East partners to take the fight to terror, but we all know there has to be some assertive leadership not only to lead them to what they need to do, but to know we have their back.

Based on your conversations, do you feel there's a willingness among allied countries to ramp up their role the fight against the Islamic State?

I think that Saudi Arabia is prepared to play a stepped-up role. I think Turkey is prepared to play a role. They've got that added dimension of the situation with the Kurds. ... So much attention has been placed on some of the flow of refugees to Europe, and they forget how many are in country and how many Turkey are hosting within their borders.

Should the U.S. consider sending more troops to Libya?

In each of the countries we've visited, many of them view Libya as something that in a very short period of time could fall.

It's like any of these nations we're talking about, we have to go in there and build relationships with people on the ground in the country, who in the majority of them, I firmly believe are resisting the spread of Daesh and the spread of terrorist organizations. And we have to build those relationships, [but] they ultimately have to take the fight to them.

What did the leaders you met with tell you about presidential race? What did they think of Donald Trump?

Some of the stump rhetoric was not very well received out there, as you would expect. We tried to make it clear that we recognize the solution to the problem there is partnering with these countries. These are Muslim countries who are even more fearful of ISIS and terrorists than we are because they're taking over their country and distorting their religion and using that as a basis for going in and creating a caliphate.

So, I think, we have to be very careful. One thing you see over there is our words matter. When our candidates say what they say; when members say what they say.

I'm not necessarily known as being a politically correct kind of guy, but I do think that it's important to understand when you're in that country - and we had a couple of discussions about it - that what we say matters so much because they all view us as the leaders of the free world.

With the NDAA and the fight over the defense budget looming, do you think there's any way to break the budget logjam for a larger deal on defense spending?

I hope so. I think [Majority] Leader [Mitch] McConnell is trying to do his best by building consensus, by having this stream of appropriations bills where defense is probably third or fourth. And the stream of bills that would come before the committee or come to the floor after the NDAA is approved.

If we are able to take up and pass four appropriations bills, people will not understand how profoundly different that is from the last several years in Congress. I've only been here for 15 months and I can tell you, it's a movement in the right direction.

The defense bill is likely to be complicated yet again by the Overseas Contingency Operations budget, which has been used to boost base defense spending. What's going to be different this year?

If people understand we're in an area where the threats are continuing to go up, Libya is a classic example of that. ... The threat inventory is going up; the capabilities inventory is going down. Our military needs to do a better job. And through the Senate Armed Services Committee, we need to explain practical problems with the status quo.

We need to solve the problem. We need to get rid of OCO. We need to figure out how to cut and save money - but not through what I think anybody who has taken Finance 101 would know is a bad idea, and that's called sequestration.

Would you support another increase in defense spending if you couple it with an increase to non-defense spending?

I'd have to look at the circumstances. If you were talking about increasing funding for NIH, maybe. Some of the programs that they're talking about are very, very difficult for me to support, but I'd need to look at what they would offer. What I will tell you is when you go and hear some of the capabilities that will be taken out of that region as a result of the budget and funding, we're reaching, in my opinion, some dangerous levels of funding for our military and the armed services.

What do you plan to focus on during the NDAA process?

We need to continue to evolve the acquisition-procurement process. ... We always talk about things we want to do to reform Department of Defense acquisition. What we very seldom hear is there's a lot of these inefficiencies that we're dealing with, up to and including the 600 page RFP for the new handgun, which is being spearheaded by the Army. My guess is of the 600 pages of the RFP, two or three hundred of those pages are there because we told them they had to be there.

One big reform target is the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act. What do you think about changing the combatant-command structure?

I'm open to anything as long as it's not people in suits on this Hill making the decisions independent of what our men and women in uniform think are the best deployment and best structure of the military. ... We need to receive feedback. On the one hand, we're talking about reducing commands. On the other hand, we all recognize that we need a Cyber Command. We're kind of talking out of both sides of our mouth. ... Maybe the real question is: What's the optimal structure based on the threats and the requirements we have today?

So you'd support making Cyber Command a unified combatant command?

I think so. ... We need a command that recognizes unlike past military threats, the cyberthreat doesn't have a traditional battlefield. You don't have traditional military tactics. You're in a situation where a cyberattack will almost certainly include as much focus on private entities and private infrastructure. ... Cyber Command needs to transcend beyond people who are working for the DoD or people who are in uniform if we're going to be successful and really come up with a strategy that understands the nature of the threat.

Do you support reversing the proposed Army end strength cuts? And if so, how do you pay for that?

That will be a big part of the discussion when we get to the defense appropriations bill. We've cut too far. The other thing about sequestration that I keep coming back to - and I've asked many military leaders over the last 15 months in Armed Services Committee hearings - their main concern is the short-term nature of their planning cycles. There's no way for them to really make commitments, which are inefficient, very, very costly - and that's on us. That's not the military's fault; that's our fault for not actually taking a longer view.

Could we potentially reduce at levels equivalent to sequestration in the DoD? Maybe, if we remove all the inefficiencies and all the other things we've heaped on them that make it as costly as it is.

With the Pentagon's nuclear modernization bow wave looming, do you worry about the Army getting squeezed as a major bill-payer?

I always worry about how they treat our men and women in uniform, as the home state of the largest military facility in the free world [Fort Bragg].

Sadly, I'm convinced that while we may not be fighting a conventional war, with 100,000 troops deployed, we will be fighting a war with tens of thousands of Americans somewhere, helping partner countries fight this war on terror ... I definitely know the Iran deal is not going to bring peace to the Middle East. This president is tapped out in terms of good ideas to provide leadership to the Middle East. ... If you take a look at it, the Army is still going to play a very, very important role. The 82nd Airborne is going to be rotating through different places on the globe.

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