Adam Smith

The importance of partnerships and our allies.

I guess, I--foremost is okay. Only, exclusively, while ignoring everything else, not okay.

We cannot do new starts, we cannot get into cyber protection, the very thing you hold dear, because we do not have the ability to do so under continuing resolutions, 9 out of the last 10 years.

You have got to agree, there are other things that are important than keeping the peace.

So to sit here and say, you know, we are going to stand up, spend all this money on defense because it would just be wrong to prioritize other things is patently absurd and insulting.

The Justice Department has played an enormous role in stopping terrorist attacks and also, you know, bringing to justice those who have committed them.

We are pulling back again. This budget that is being proposed guts development.

One of the biggest things China is doing is they are spending a ton of money all across the world to try to curry favor with countries and also build their own economic might.

We need allies. We need friends.

If we pass this budget that the Republicans want to put before us today, the State Department will continue to be destroyed.

Dialogue is incredibly important to deterrence.

Deterrence is also your diplomatic stance. Deterrence is dialogue.

I do not believe that great power rivalry equals endless arms race.

But that is never going to be more important than it is going forward, given the fiscal situation that we are in and given the threat environment that is as described.

If we are going to get to where we need to go, we need to hear where can we save money.

And I think we need to understand it in that context and push back comprehensively to try and create a world that is safe for freedom and democracy.

The immediate short-term impact of that is that we are going to hit the debt ceiling sooner than we had expected to because less revenue is coming into the Treasury.

We are $21 trillion in debt, and counting. The deficit last year was close to $700 billion, and it is going up, not down.

It is our paramount obligation to make sure that we fund that, that we do not have a situation where we give them so many tasks but not enough resources to train for them.

To say that it is not worth doing is like saying, hey, we have screwed it up so bad for so long...

I think the taxpayers deserve at least the same level of confidence as a shareholder in the use of their money.

I applaud your commitment to doing this, and stand ready to have the committee help you in any way we can.

This is enormously important. There are a lot of concerns at the Pentagon.

I too want to specifically thank Mr. Conaway for his great leadership on this issue.

How do we get to the point where we can reduce our commitment in Afghanistan so that it is not an open-ended commitment and a blank check?