John McCain

Secretary James, are you committed to ensuring that certification would occur prior to awarding any launches set aside as competitive opportunities?

The F-35 program suffered setbacks and was rebaselined after experiencing a breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act in 2012.

If for a period of time after 2019 the Russian RD-180 is not available, will you still have options from both SpaceX and United Launch Alliance to get you to space?

If you were asked to conduct an air campaign today of the same magnitude as Operation Desert Storm, could you do it?

General Welsh, the Air Force's fiscal year 2015 budget proposed retiring nearly half of your EC-130H COMPASS CALL fleet of electronic warfare aircraft in fiscal year 2016.

The elimination of the AFRC would not achieve either substantial savings or organizational efficiencies.

What are your views on how declining budgets and sequestration have affected the F-35A program to date?

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2015 included provisions which prohibited the use of Russian rocket engines past the current Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) block buy

I don't believe it makes any sense to cut military spending by a trillion dollars with the state of the world today.

General Welsh, will the reduced number of funded A-10 aircraft impact these fighter squadrons' ability to deploy to combat?

I was pleased to see the Air Force reversed its short-sighted decision to reduce the number of competitive opportunities from the budget last year.

The Air Force is able to execute the requirements of the current defense strategy, but only at significant risk.

I hope all of us will be committed to doing that because we all understand what the devastating consequences would be of having it kick back in for the next budget cycle.

If we continue to go down the road we are going, we will not have a trained and ready force prepared to meet the requirements of our national security strategy.

The vast majority of the continent, all the way down to Patagonia, as you say, they want to be best friends with the United States, they want to partner with us economically, socially.

With the amount of drugs and people that move across our southwest border, it doesn't seem all that secure to me.

I think that is our responsibility as Members of Congress to do what we can to address the results of sequestration.

Whenever we have this problem, it directly affects the soldiers, sailors, and marines, everyone who will be asked to do their job.

America's Air Force must be ready to engage anytime, anywhere, and across the full spectrum of warfare.

We are all Americans--North, Central, or South.

The southern border can be more secure, as can the Mexican border be more secure.

100 percent of the heroin that's consumed in the United States... is produced here in Latin America.

Colombia has shown us that the key to defeating terrorists in criminal groups is by upholding and defending the very values that these groups threaten: freedom, democracy, and the protection of human rights.

Production in fiscal year 2015 is focused on the AGM-154-C1 because of the low inventory.

The President's Budget for fiscal year 2016 includes procuring 100 Tomahawk missiles in fiscal year 2016 and proposes ending production thereafter.