Political Quotes

“Madam President, we have been moving very steadily through this authorization bill. I once again commend the leadership of Chairman McCain. It really began months ago when the Chairman decided that he was going to do an indepth analysis of the Department of Defense, calling upon experts from an extraordinary range of academic, military, and diplomatic leaders. As a result, we became much more knowledgeable than we were previously about things within the Department that we should very carefully review and perhaps change. In fact, because of his leadership, this is the most fundamental revision of the Goldwater-Nichols procedures that were adopted three decades ago. We have spent a lot of time discussing important issues, but I don't think we have given quite enough credit to the work that the Chairman and our colleagues have done with respect to some of these important reforms. One area that we worked on together is developing statutory authority for cross-functional teams within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. One of the challenges that Goldwater-Nichols faced, and faced successfully, was to try to integrate operational units. They came up with the concept of jointness, which now we assume has always been there, but that was not the case 30 or 40 years ago.…”