Sander Levin Quotes

We need to ensure our men and women in uniform are equipped with the very best money can buy. We also have to make sure critical military technologies are developed in America and that the U.S. defense manufacturing base remains healthy and strong.

You cannot be the arsenal of democracy if you don’t have an arsenal. We must build up our manufacturing base.

The defense industry understands that the military budgets will continue to be cut until a new threat comes along.

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

We need to stop spending money on those weapons systems that do not advance national security.

We must have a defense industry, we cannot depend on other countries for our defense. A defense industry in a small country like ours has to export to stay alive.

While our superpower military is stunningly effective, it is also stunningly expensive.

The military system is, to a substantial extent, a method whereby the population provides a subsidy to the high technology industry.

Mississippi is home to a significant level of national defense work, such as shipbuilding, aircraft manufacturing, and critical research.

I believe that the military-industrial complex is more important than ever. This is because the war in Kosovo gave fresh impetus not to the military-industrial complex but to the military-scientific complex. You can see this in China.

We need to just study what other countries have done. There are examples of a strong partnership between the defence establishment and the private industry.

Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.

I am not disputing the need for this money. What I am disputing and calling attention to is the fact that we are taking the tab for defense in our time against terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere and shoving this tab off onto our children.

Well, no American wants to in any way hurt our capabilities to national defense, but that doesn't mean an unlimited amount of money, and a blank check for anything they want at any time, for any purpose. Not at all.

India has the capability to create a fairly extensive defence manufacturing capability in many areas, and as a country and as an industry, we have matured in terms of technology and capability to make this happen.

Congress has a responsibility to make sure our taxpayer dollars are being spent responsibly and effectively, and at the same time, that our men and women in uniform have everything they need to carry out the War on Terror.

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex and the damage it could do to society.

The defense budget has become a jobs program.

We can always find money for what the military wants.

As a general rule, government manufactories ... are to be avoided. Gunmaking is the great exception to this rule. Such establishments are agreeable to the usual practice of Nations and that practice seems founded on sufficient reason. It makes little sense to leave these essential instruments of national defense to the casual speculations of individual adventure. Guns are not objects of ordinary and indispensable private consumption or use.

No group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point it could endanger our national security

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

The building of ships is antediluvian; the building of aircraft is of the 20th century, But there are similarities: both activities have to do with security as well as economy; almost everyone wants some capacity in the field, usually more than can be sustained by ordinary commerce.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more money. What it needs desperately is a functional procurement system …. The result [of not having one] is not just ordinary waste, fraud and abuse … but also deep and lasting damage to the country’s ability to project power and wage war.

We have been compelled to create an armaments industry of vast proportions.