Anything that would diminish that status is something we have to guard against.

We are at our best, we are at our strongest when we draw from all over the country.

We have, on the one hand, I think, become a much more unilateral guarantor among the NATO countries for security issues.

I have some real concerns about what has happened to the NATO Alliance, not with respect to Afghanistan, but I guess the only phrase you can really use is international sprawl.

I really mean that. You did mention other notable Americans who died of friendly-fire incidents on the battlefield.

I regretfully say I think that the Army really failed the Tillman family.

They really don't add, quite frankly, to the security of the United States to have them as members of NATO.

Do you have an idea about how these monies are going to be paid to this national army?

I wrote and introduced my first day in office, that 75 percent of the soldiers in the Army leave the military on or before the end of their first enlistment.

You have written in the past, that you believe that there should be a residual force in Iraq of approximately 60,000 American military, do you still believe that?

I'm here to tell you, we have a stewardship toward these people and if we, the civilian leadership, don't articulate this stewardship, in a lot of cases it's not going to happen.

I would just like to reiterate a few points that I made on this before, that it is properly before the OSD...

I think the key thing is to implement the SOFA, and to reduce our role and our numbers there.

I would hope that we could proceed forward in a very careful way, in terms of making any more mandatory obligations as to where our military would be used.

NATO expansion originally started out as being very much about creating a Europe that's whole and free.

I would hope that in this process, we can end up with a clearly articulated end-point.

You don't see--and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth--from what I'm hearing, you would not analogize the situation in Iraq to, for instance, the basing system that we have in Korea.

Why, 6 years then after September 11, were we asking civilian contractors to teach our military people how to perform military functions?