"I agree with the chairman, that the cuts that we are facing in our Department of Defense budget do place national security issues at risk."
"I would strongly urge this Congress to pass appropriations bills so that we can fund our Government in a responsible and reasonable way."
"The U.S. military is the modern era's pillar of American strength and values."
"We need to make decisions. We need to put everything on the table and make a comprehensive decision for how to get the deficit under control long-term."
"Unless you want to cut entitlements by somewhere around a third, you have got to put revenue on the table."
"I think the importance of our national security needs is an argument for doing that."
"I hope our witnesses today can help us understand the lessons we learned 10 years ago and give us recommendations about how we might avoid repeating the same mistakes."
"It is imperative that we focus our fiscal restraint on the driver of the debt instead of the protector of our prosperity."
"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 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..."
"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."