Dan Coats: “this evening I should like to take just a very few moments to report, along with my colleague from Connecticut, Senator…”

“this evening I should like to take just a very few moments to report, along with my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Lieberman, on the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review. It was released today by the Secretary of Defense. It is the culmination of a very extensive process at the Department of Defense over the shape and makeup, the characterization and the implementation of our Armed Forces for the next several years. We are at a unique point in our history, particularly as it relates to defense issues. We have come through a period of time when our strategy was primarily based on the threat from another superpower--the Soviet Union--a nuclear threat that required an extraordinary commitment of resources, of manpower, of effort to try to contain and to try to nullify that threat. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the fall of the Soviet Union, with the realignment that has taken place with the United States emerging as the one superpower in the world, we may have the luxury of looking at our defense structure, of making decisions and beginning a process of fashioning our defense forces for the threats of the future and not the threats of the past. It is important to recognize, as Secretary Cohen has and as acknowledged in this Quadrennial Defense Review which was just released today, this is not a status quo situation.…”