Political Quotes

“I rise to continue my discussion about the case for a bigger Navy, a bigger fleet, and to endorse the requirement of the experts in the Department of Defense that we move to a 355-ship Navy. When a crisis strikes around the world, the President asks his national security team: Where are the carriers? Where are the aircraft carriers? Each of our carriers is a 100,000-ton giant, accompanied by an entire carrier group that consists of mighty warships and aircraft. The carrier, itself, represents 4.5 acres of sovereign U.S. territory. In early January of this year--and Senators do not know this--a strange and profoundly disturbing thing happened. The answer to the Commander in Chief's question, had it been asked at that point--where are the carriers?--would have been that none of them had been deployed--not a single one. For the first time since World War II, the United States had no carriers deployed anywhere--not in the Persian Gulf, not in the Mediterranean, not in the Western Pacific. There is a gap in our global carrier presence, and there is a gap in our fleet. This comes from years of complacency. Also, it comes from a different set of facts that we are faced with and a different set of challenges that we are faced with in our quest to make our presence known and to protect our national security interests on the open seas. We have ignored the great naval competition that is taking place elsewhere--the fact that it is accelerating.…”