Adam Smith

The U.S. military is the modern era's pillar of American strength and values.

It is imperative that we focus our fiscal restraint on the driver of the debt, instead of the protector of our prosperity.

But all this talk about dollars doesn't translate well into actual impacts on the force and risk to our Nation.

I remain concerned that our Nation is slipping back into the false confidence of a September 10th mindset.

Our budget is 40 percent out of whack. You know, the amount of money we raise is 40 percent less than the amount of money we spend.

I think the points you gentlemen make about the challenges to the Department of Defense budget and the missions we have asked our uniformed military to perform is correct, but there is also a big huge budget challenge.

The proposed cuts in the defense budget are a big risk, particularly if we do not make the cuts necessary to prevent sequestration.

I did not support the debt ceiling agreement in large part because all of the cuts were lumped on to the non-entitlement portion of the budget.

If you accept for the moment that we need to balance that budget and that we are not going to bring in any new revenue and we can't touch defense, basically what you would have to do is you would have to cut everything else in the budget…

The unintended consequence is the signal that you send to our adversaries because they measure some of our actions as our resolve, our national resolve.

If we are going to be able to transition our troops home we need to make sure that there is a reliable security force left behind

I share with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle the concern that large, immediate, across-the-board cuts to the defense budget may well do damage to our national security.

I hope the witnesses here today and at future hearings can help us think through our national security strategy and potential changes.

But, I do believe that we can rationally evaluate our national security strategy, our defense expenditures, and the current set of missions we ask the military to undertake and come up with a strategy that requires less funding.

Let me tell you, everywhere in the budget, every little piece of it, the people who advocate for that piece of it have an outstanding argument for why their piece of it isn't the problem.

If we face a trillion dollars in cuts, if we face the loss of 30 percent of our defense budget over the next decade, we are not going to have the capacity to back up our commitments.

The primary role of those forces is not anymore defending the Germans or Italians; it is simply a way that we can be forward-deployed in the areas where our troops are most likely to see combat in the future.

After World War II, our Armed Forces shrank from 12 million men in 1945 to 1.4 million in 1950.

After World War I, our Armed Forces shrank from 2.9 million men to 250,000 in 1928.

If there is one iron law of American history, it is that those cuts have made future wars more likely.

I look forward to this discussion. I think it is the most important thing we are doing right now because it will form our national security policy in the years and decades to follow.

So if you don't deal with those other issues, as I have said repeatedly, you wind up being the person last in line at a buffet where the food is running out.

I think it is very important that we do that, that we make it clear the impact that these cuts will have on our ability to protect this Nation.

If we feel very, very strongly that those proposed cuts are going to do irreparable harm to our national security strategy, that they should not be made, then we also have an obligation to come up with the money so that we don't make them.

I think it is one of the most important challenges that we face on the Armed Services Committee and certainly in our national security Department of Defense strategy, to figure out how we deal with the budget deficit we face pending cuts.