Political Quotes

“Thank you for those most appropriate comments, Roscoe. The second gentleman that I think we need to recognize, Under Secretary Stackley, has really helped tremendously with his level of detailed knowledge about how you work these contracts. And he got the contracts, as Chairman Taylor mentioned, reorganized to some degree a couple of years ago, and now we have two excellent bids before us. Now, one of the things that people know that have been around Congress a little bit is Congress has trouble making decisions rapidly or even wisely sometimes. I don't think that's the case today. Today, Secretary Stackley came to a number of us and said, look, there's two different ways we could go, the way we were planning to go, which is we down select, buy 10 ships, and then we resubmit bids to a number of different vendors. He said the other alternative, which is very interesting, is that we just go with both contractors and buy the 20 ships right off the bat. And so as we had a chance to ask some questions, though not to the degree that many of us would have felt comfortable with, it became apparent that we would save money for the Navy and we could project more seapower more rapidly by going with both contractors, buy 10 from each side.”