Every time the Russian bear growls, we provide more to reassure Europe. They must not be so afraid if they are not willing to put up any of their money for this.

Unfortunately, it's just a fact of our life and necessary to defend America.

The choice right now is modernizing or losing deterrent capability in the 2020s and 2030s. That is the stark choice that we face.

We need to keep the pressure on Europe to do more financially. We are now at 75 percent paying the costs of NATO.

Would you agree that additional response options are needed?

Well, sometimes it has to be done, and it has to be spent, but--just briefly, again, so the 5.2 billion was not in the last year's FYDP.

Senator Graham is correctly challenging and asking some legitimate information.

Today, the United States lacks a sufficient range of response options to signal, compel, and defeat nuclear adversaries facing our allies and, by extension, to inspire confidence in the U.S. nuclear guarantees.

It would please me if Alabama came home.

If I were running the world, I'd say, 'I want to build bombs, and I don't want to build buildings.'

What I want you to know, Department of Energy, is that, for $1 billion, we can maintain 10,000 soldiers.

I just really feel like that.

The deal was, Senator Sullivan, that North Korea proposed a threat, and we decided to accelerate the process to actually get these things in the ground.

General Klotz, a modernized weapon would be more effective, more secure and safe.

I think our allies and our adversaries may get the wrong impression about the willingness and capability of the United States to respond.

I think maybe more so now in recent years than in the past, push to make sure that we do the things necessary for real defense capability.

If we do it in the right way, perhaps we can have congressional support for that.

we must have a realistic ability to respond, and our adversaries need to know it.

Your goal, our goal I think of the committee would be to create a competitive environment where two or more innovative, creative American-based companies are producing our essential launch systems.

I will acknowledge that I have been critical of the length of time, but as I have learned more about it, I realize you have a more complicated situation than most of us fully understand.

It would be fully American.

We don't need to blunder in short-term thinking and make some errors that might have ripple effects that we don't foresee today.

Russia represents the greatest threat, or the potential greatest threat, to the United States.

There is a growing unease that we are seeing, particularly in the latter days of this administration.

The Defense Department is the great Department of the United States Government.