Angus King

The reality is defense spending as a percentage of GDP is the lowest today that it has been in 70 years.

I just heard on the way over that the Navy has made a decision to name the DDG-120 the Senator Carl Levin, which I compliment.

There is a bill, S. 119, that I am a co-sponsor of, the Wounded Veterans Recreation Act.

This is something we have to work on and try to get clarified.

I want to complement you and your Department on the work on the app for the passes.

A new motto, Mr. Chairman. Support our warriors. Hire the spouse.

The Guard rests to some extent on the good will and support of employers, and I am hearing resistance from employers.

In his 50 years of Government service, he has never seen a more complex, dangerous, and growing threat environment than what we are facing today.

We have got to build in flexibility for the family when the duty station changes but the school is still not done.

The other thing I would like for the record-- I had a conversation this morning with the Admiral, that 84 percent of his incoming recruits are from military families.

I would just like your thoughts on how that looks now from the field.

We are doing these drawdowns based upon decisions about budgets made in 2011 before ISIS, before Syria, before North Korea nuclear, before the South China Sea, before the Ukraine.

The retention is so important because if we could move the average retention out a year, that would be a significant savings across the board because of the training costs.

The largest question before this committee is, are we recruiting and retaining the people that we need?

I think we need to balance the things we ask of our services to do and especially in uncertain times like we have today.

Certainly we cannot avoid--or should we avoid budgetary considerations? We all have to live within budgets.

The cessation of hostilities is certainly better than the all-out war we were seeing before.

We need to send a very strong message to the Russians.

We have got to get back into the business of communications, it seems to me.

We cannot keep going for these very perfect weapon systems that everybody has a piece of.

It strikes me it underlines the foolishness of continuing to be governed by budget decisions made six years ago.

But, I take it you agree that we should move--Cyber Command should be its own combatant command.

It's not deterrence if it's not articulated.

So, I would urge you, with counsels of the administration, to push for a sense of urgency on this question.

When are we going to have a well-developed and articulated cyberdeterrence strategy?