Michael D. Griffin

Everything about the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party suggests that they are their adversary, and they say so.

In my judgment, China--and I don't want to say China. I want to say the Chinese Communist Party, fully understands and frequently says that their goal is to be the world's great power.

For the United States and its partners not to be on the Moon when others are on the Moon is unacceptable.

Without it, we would be inundated with foreclosures where there is a possibility we are headed towards that and we certainly need to work together.

We cannot take comfort from parity. We cannot take comfort from the fact that in some areas we are ahead.

There is no finish line. It is a work in progress and always will be if we want to support peace and freedom in the world.

We have to change from being a technology inventor to a technology user.

We need to get the bureaucracy out of the way we do contracting and small business work and get moving.

China is the big problem. And I think we need to focus our efforts on first taking care of the big problems.

If we can restore that kind of thinking to a renewed global power competition, then we will actually never have to fight, because our adversaries will not want to take us on.

We cannot punish people who take risks and break something. We should reward them.

the recognition of the erosion of U.S. technological superiority, which was once unquestioned in the world, is what led the Congress to establish the position that I now hold, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

The way to get from experiments into procurement of real live weapons systems is to say that is what we are going to do, appoint people to run those programs, and hold them accountable for delivery.

The most expensive and time-consuming place to discover a mistake is after I have delivered a weapons system to the field.

I was once labeled by a political adversary as an unreconstructed cold warrior. I took that as a compliment, actually, though it was not meant that way.

Had I been given the orders that my successor was given, I would have resigned because I thought... we were on the right path.

We have a space debris challenge. We're not going to be able to do anything in space unless we have some sort of space debris program.

Let us again, as we did after the loss of Columbia, decide as a nation what we want to see accomplished in space.

If we treated the Air Force as we do the space program, we wouldn't have any flying aircraft.

I believe that if God had wanted us to go to Mars, he would have given us a moon to practice on.

I'd like to echo my support for Eileen's comment that we need to restore American access to space as soon as possible.

I am a free-market conservative. And if I thought that the market were such as to supply this item... then I would want the government to buy it off the market.

The larger rocket, the SLS, to which General Hyten referred, is intended for human exploration of the solar system, which I devoutly hope we will resume.

I think we depart from that at our peril.