Ash Carter: “We need our partners in the Middle East to step up and do more.”

China has and shares important responsibility for this development and has an important responsibility to reverse it.

It absolutely is. That's why we quadrupled the European Reassurance Initiative.

We need Congress to come together around providing normal, stable, responsible budgets, because the lack of stability represents one of the single biggest strategic risks to our enterprise at DOD.

"Up-or-out" isn't broken--in fact, it's an essential and highly successful system--but it's also not perfect.