Defense Priorities Quotes

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

It is not how much you spend on defense as much as how you spend it.

As a member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee during the 2000s, I met with civilian and military officials in Kurdistan, Libya, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Yemen. They shared many of the same international defense priorities as the United States. We acknowledged our differences, but we worked from where we found common ground.

In the light of the actual fighting that is now in progress, we have reached the point where the military considerations clearly outweigh the fiscal considerations.

At Concerned Veterans for America, we've made the case that the defense budget could be targeted for spending reform, but in a targeted fashion that genuinely changes unsustainable spending trajectories while preserving U.S. defense capacity.

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

The National Defense Strategy remains our guiding document, and everything we do should support its stated objectives.

We must have a Secretary of Defense who will manage, and not be managed, by the Pentagon.

I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State.

We made a clear commitment to NATO's two percent goal. I know that we can't get there from one day to the next, but I'm just as clear on the fact that we must get there in the end.

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.

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

Our most important job in Congress is to provide for our national defense, and therefore, every year, Congress allocates funds and determines defense priorities in a bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA.

All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military's interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant.

America has defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend its own.

The marshalling of those resources in order to obtain the maximum war effort for Australia, and a maximum degree of help and cooperation for Great Britain and the sister Dominions, is the primary objective of the new Department.

How much do we really need for the defense of the United States of America? Only the defense to defend its shores? Well I suppose that the maximum for the defense of our shores is one billion dollars. So the rest of our defense budget relates to what we regard as our responsibilities as a world power.

I spent 23 years in the military. I think I'm in a good position to make those judgments on what is necessary in the military and what is not necessary, without buying a lot of things that would not really add to our security.

The most important thing to the United States is not being able to attack our adversaries, the most important thing is to be able to defend ourselves. And we can't do that as long as we're subverting our own security standards for the sake of surveillance.

The good news is the Pentagon is going to make some significant budget cuts. The bad news is: They want to kill a plane that's built in your district.

America cannot afford to defend Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and many other places.

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.

President Obama's reckless defense cuts that are hanging over our cloud, hanging over the horizon could put almost 44,000 jobs at stake right here in Pennsylvania. we are not going to let that happen. You know why? Because No. 1, national defense is the first priority of the federal government.

The U.S. has a stronger military than Israel, but, but don't short-change Israel, either. Don't short-change them.