Thank you, Mr. Chair.

One of the things I appreciate being ranking member of this subcommittee, as the chair led off with, it is about the personnel, and that has been his attitude and it is certainly mine.

Your report indicates that you reached out to the Marines, and they indicated that it would not be either sort of practically effective or cost effective for them to send personnel at such distance.

Am I right that before the State Department and GSA chose Fort Pickett ultimately, they looked at about 70 different sites prior to landing on Fort Pickett. Is that correct?

And then with respect to the capital costs--there is a cost differential in terms of the FLETC proposal and the number for FASTC.

So if the idea is that State has is to do nighttime operations that would involve simulated nighttime attacks or things, that could be done at Townsend.

If there is, in fact, the need for classified activity, is FLETC currently constituted to handle that?

The Marines have all these different units, but the Marine Security Guard program... is at Quantico.

There is a capacity. There is a willingness. There are resources to act when they want to.

A lot of these refugees, they are Sunni refugees fleeing the Shia-allied Assad atrocities in Syria, but I am just not seeing a lot of activity.

the ultimate solution is not a military solution.

I have not been impressed with the efforts of the GCC nations against ISIL. Do I see it wrong?

So we should not have a position in a theological or sectarian debate?

Do you worry about that instability down the road?

I think their worry about the Shia is very legitimate. I think their indifference to some of the Sunni extremism is incredibly troubling.

We should not take positions that would be viewed even unwittingly as expressing a preference in a theological debate. Would you agree with me?

if the estimates in the beginning had been more realistic, there would be no overrun.

It's okay to take a risk, and here's how we're going to do it.

let's take more risks in science and technology before we get into acquisition.

The only way we're going to protect our future is to invest and protect that core capability.

I'm proud to represent the thousands of shipbuilders who manufacture the largest and most complicated items on the Planet Earth.

I love the 'try it and buy it.' For some weapon systems, that's really what you do.

I think it's important that we do it.

I agree that there's very systemic issues that are demonstrated that we need to tackle them.

we're essentially building prototypes.