The President could not have chosen a better person to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It would be very, I think, immoral to put someone in that position knowing that is coming their way with some capability to defend themselves.

I think if not the proximate cause of the ISIL movement, certainly one of the primary drivers of the ISIL movement was the abuses of the Assad regime.

I think they want to hit us.

Everything they have said they would do, they have done.

My assessment is we would have a significant degradation of our counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan, were we to do that.

The reason I want to continue to invest in Afghanistan... is because they are trying to hit us.

How in the world are we going to dislodge ISIL from Syria without a ground component?

Now, if those numbers hold, I will have to ask myself why would I stop a choice that 80 percent seem to want?

Well, do you agree with me that the reason there are fewer providers in the TRICARE network is that we are paying below Medicare reimbursement rates?

I don't know of any system in the world that 5 percent is the number, so we are going to have to adjust that number.

We have to fix sequestration, because Senator King has raised a great point. How do you retain people?

Because you have a situation where you have to deal with retiree health care at the expense of readiness to fight the war of today and tomorrow, and that is a choice we don't want to make.

I don't want to lose ground on the major functions.

If it is below 20 percent cost share, it will be because I think you have earned a discount when it comes to health care.

At the end of the day, your recommendations on health care are driven by the fact that we think we can provide better choice, more efficient for the patient, more efficient for DOD, and actually get more choice and better coverage.

You just don't want to have too much so that it loses the whole advantage of being able to get more people to participate.

But we are not going to play the demagoguery game, because change is afoot, and it is necessary.

So no one is being required to give up the current system?

I think this modernization effort of a blended plan will serve the country well.

I think he asked a really good question about retention.

It seems to me that the person who's going to pay the most is the retiree, no matter what you do.

When it comes to percent of Active Duty servicemembers who prefer the current or proposed compensation system, if that chart is remotely right, 80 percent prefer the new proposed system when they are told how to compare the two?

It is not fair to kick somebody out at 12 at no fault of their own, because we are reducing the force.

Every retiree, they are going to keep what they have, right?