Angus King

I would respectfully suggest, as I did for the CMO position and the sub-CMO positions, that you need statutory qualification requirements.

I was a staff member here in the Senate and was once called upon to set up a hearing.

The Congress oversees the branches--the Departments of the executive branch. But, it has no responsibility to oversee the coordination of them.

We need to be thinking about modularization and modernization as built into the concept because we are building a 35- or 40-year asset, and it is obsolete the day it is built.

I cannot help but believe that there is overlap having these multiple intelligence agencies essentially all watching what Assad is doing or what Putin is doing.

I think it is important to put into perspective the discussion about defense spending and domestic discretionary spending.

Trying to develop a weapon system that has everything for everybody at one time that will be fixed in time is just the wrong way to go.

When people know what the rules are, that is when you can avoid conflict.

I think a point you made that I had not really thought about was the idea of a joint private sector cybersecurity effort perhaps facilitated by the Government but not with Government involvement so we do not have the privacy issues.

It is the question of what is an act of war and when will we respond because if an act of war is not defined, your opponent has to know that you are going to consider it an act of war and that there will be a response.

The requirements proliferate because everybody wants their--it is the problem of a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

I think that is an issue that deserves some serious thought and discussion.

What should we be doing about it, if anything? What are our alternatives?

To me, the most serious threat is capability plus will. And what makes me lose sleep is North Korea.

We have to be able to field new technologies faster.

The national debt is a threat, not to define our defense budget.

I would suggest to the Senator that if you are in a fight and all you can do is defend and never punch, you are going to eventually lose that fight. I think this is an important area. The theory of deterrence, as distasteful as it might…

We need to recognize that in many instances we have lost the trust of the American people as an institution.

I would love to see that Maine Yankee site eliminated.

I consider the positions that you have been nominated to be incredibly important because of the underlying issue of trust of our democratic system.

The fact that outsiders are doing so well this year, it seems to me, is something we should think about in terms of the relationship of government to the American people.

There are a number of countries that I think I would like to see more positive on the human rights situation in North Korea.

I think it is just very difficult to speculate and calculate, assess what the post-Kim Jong-un political leadership may look like.

Putin wants Assad in more than we want him out.

How important is it for us to get rid of Assad? And is it worth risking a war?