What Our Leaders Are Saying

It is not unrealistic to foresee a day in which the U.S. defense industry no longer possesses the design or production capabilities for certain weapons systems,” Indeed, this has already happened to the United Kingdom in the case of nuclear attack submarines.

If we end up in this situation … exactly who are we going to go to? The Chinese? The Russians? You don’t want to end up here.

I believe in free enterprise, I believe in freedom, I believe in liberty, I believe in an opportunity society. And everything I do will be designed to strengthen the values of this country, to strengthen the families of this country, to strengthen our economy and to keep a military that is second to none in the world.

We’ll have those who attempt to exploit our vulnerabilities…We might lose our credibility in terms of our ability to deter.

Cuts of this magnitude would be catastrophic to the military…My assessment is that the nation would incur an unacceptable level of strategic and operational risk.

We elected to put ADS-B into the Gulf for a good reason. It’s a huge return; [operators] move 10,000 people a day in and out of those rigs in the Gulf. It’s phenomenal: the number of people we move every single day out there and the amount of traffic out there that is so much safer.

In my judgment, the Navy, with its capital-intensive shipbuilding, procurement and maintenance accounts, could be the service that would be most adversely affected.

We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future. For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable.

Even the most thoroughly deliberated strategy may not be able to overcome dire consequences.

Today, we are on a path of decay. We are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration. As unimaginable as it seems, we have now come full circle and ceded our leadership role in space back to the same country — albeit by a different name — that spurred our challenge five decades ago.

If the Congress is irresponsible enough to suddenly turn on this sequester idea because they failed to meet their responsibility, that would clearly damage our national defense.

I become more convinced than ever that as a nation, we can ill afford to lose our edge … Cut too deeply and we will burn the very blanket of protection we’ve been charged to provide our fellow citizens. Cut too deeply now and we will harm, perhaps irreparably, the industrial base from which we procure the materials of war.

Under current law, on January 1, 2013, there’s going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases,” Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee. “I hope that Congress will look at that and figure out ways to achieve the same long-run fiscal improvement without having it all happen at one date

Without a doubt, GPS, the satellite-based navigation system that has revolutionized travel by car and truck, even by foot, could do the same for commercial air traffic. … The system is expected to reduce delays by more than a third, saving billions of dollars for airline companies and for the traveling public. This would mean consuming less jet fuel, so carbon emissions would be lower, too.

The thing that worries me most is that people talk about the defense budget as though that’s where the deficits and the debt have incurred. You could wipe out the entire defense budget and not solve the debt problem.

People go away, skills go away and the enormity of the investment to bring it back if you’ve got that wrong, it’s not going to be there.

I believe there is a foundational level of space support that we must sustain to continue to enable to America’s military operations–across that entire spectrum of conflict. Cutting below this foundational level, the level I believe we’re already very close to, would likely have cascading effects across the entire DoD.

A Marine Corps below the end strength that’s necessary to support even one major contingency.

We are not going to solve the national debt challenge on the back of the military. There are whole host of other issues that have to be addressed in order to significantly reduce that debt.

(Cutting) in some kind of blind fashion that basically hits everything … is going to result in hollowing out the force. We cannot tolerate that. We still risk too many threats out there to weaken our defense.

The first responsibility of government is to protect the American people. It’s important to have priorities and a strategy and know what you would like to do and then fund against those priorities and those strategies.

A severe and irreversible impact on the Navy’s future.