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I think cutting our defense capacity not only demonstrably diminishes our national security, but it has a tremendous negative impact in the long run on our economy because we end up having to fight wars and clean up after terrorist disasters.

We cannot allow anything that's called 'national defense' to justify any and all spending. We need to be very, very careful that we don't overspend and say, 'Oh, that's defense,' when perhaps it isn't.

We would take a little bit of money out of a huge increase in ballistic missile defense and put it in a place where it will do a lot of good, namely, in targeted pay increases to our enlisted personnel, particularly our NCOs and our junior warrant officers.

Our national-security strategy must drive our military budget, rather than the budget setting our strategy.

Nothing could do more harm to America's national security than a carbon-restricted, depressed economy that would make funding our military impossible.

Today, the US spends less on defense as a percentage of our economy than we did at any time since he Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the world's only superpower, that is an invitation to very serious trouble.

We need a defense budget that's big enough to sustain an increase in the size of the Army.

The bottom line, addressing defense spending cuts with a meat ax like sequestration will damage defense readiness for decades to come.

If our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'