William M. ``Mac'' Thornberry: “I have always found it rather odd that some of our most difficult battles in the area of national security are…”

“I have always found it rather odd that some of our most difficult battles in the area of national security are preventing our own people by limiting our options and tying our hands behind our back. There are some military capabilities that we may decide are not worth the time to pursue, and there are some capabilities that in the priority of things we may want to leave behind. But I find it very troubling that some people do not even want us to explore options which could be critical for our future national security. Frankly, I am skeptical that any Member of this body can know for certain all of the circumstances that any President in the future will face in a world full of chemical and biological and radiological and nuclear weapons, and we want to say we are not even going to consider those options to deal with all of those things. I think that would be a mistake. To have a credible deterrent, that means political adversaries, and even friends have to believe in that deterrent. If we say up front, if you burrow down in the ground we cannot touch you because our conventional capabilities have obvious limitations, and so if we say we are not even going to consider going after buried targets in any other way, then we are simply saying, 'Go to it. We'll leave you alone.' We are encouraging people to bury their communication, their factories, their silos, and we will not be able to do anything about it.”