I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed "the long war."
Senator Jeff Sessions is reportedly on the [Donald] Trump shortlist to be either the next Secretary of Defense or the next Attorney General of the United States.
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn ran the defense intelligence agency from 2012 to 2014. He served as a top national intelligence adviser to General Stanley McChrystal in Iraq.
Michael Flynn not exactly cut from that cloth. Someone who has very strong views about almost everything in the realm of national security and defense.
To get some of the substance of why [Michael] Flynn [is Defense Adviser] is so controversial.
With the war in Iraq, I had the cooperation of the Department of Defense. Kuwait was pretty eager to get American journalists in there, to show us what a wonderful place they are, and what great allies they are to America, even though they didn't actually fight in the war.
Those of us who believe in human rights and the truth - particularly the journalists and the media - should stand in defense of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. We owe them a lot for telling us the truth of what is happening in our world, and that is why I would continue to support them.
I believe in limited government and the right of the individual to make choices and in a strong national defense and in freedom and liberty as being the right of every person on the face of the Earth.
I've just been flooded with emails of people just giving testimonies of their lives, saying exactly this. I got an email from a guy who works for some sort of defense contractor, some lower-level job, served in the military. And he said, look, I served in the military with black and Latino soldiers. My supervisor is a young black woman who's smart as a whip, and I admire her, and we get along great.
We've learned something about President-elect [Donald] Trump's choice for secretary of defense. Lawmakers in Congress intend to proper debate over whether retired General James Mattis meets a requirement for civilian control of the military.
When the Defense Department was established after World War II, a law said that any defense secretary with military experience must have been out of the military at least seven years. General [James] Mattis doesn't meet that.
Certainly, we shouldn't go about making a habit of taking generals and making them secretary of defense.
Michele Flournoy, by the way, is not just a talented and bright person. She was Hillary Clinton's secretary of defense in-waiting. So for her to give General [James] Mattis her support, that says something significant.
If you let someone know you appreciate him or her, especially when you're going to disagree, it gets that person's defenses down.
My peers are all in sensitive jobs - at the C.I.A., the National Security Council, working for the Department of Defense. They can't stand up for me in public.
I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and believe that law-abiding Americans have the right to self-defense.
No one wants to be a polarizer, but on the other hand, if you think you're doing right and you believe the decisions you make will lead to a better tomorrow, then they're worthy of defense.
There tends to be this comfortable assumption that nuclear weapons won't be used, but I don't think that's warranted, and I think we should seize the opportunity of this time of stability and cooperation and move towards global elimination of nuclear weapons as indeed people like Henry Kissinger, and William Perry, former Secretary of Defense under Clinton, and Sam Nunn, former Senator, and George Schultz, former Undersecretary of State for Ronald Reagan. All of them recently called for achievement of a nuclear weapon-free world.
I think teams win. I don't think offense wins. I don't think defense wins. I don't think special teams - teams win.
[I have ] two boys. One, Nicholas, is a criminal defense attorney in Phoenix in which he - gets into - a lot of very controversial cases. He has sued Sheriff Arpaio, the famous sheriff who keeps people in tents, gives them green bologna and the like. My other son Tom is with Williams & Connolly in Washington, where he does intellectual property defamation cases.
Of course, we [ with Edward Herman] have a purpose: namely, to encourage readers to undertake what might be called "a course in intellectual self-defense," and to suggest ways to proceed; in other words, to help people undermine the dedicated efforts to "manufacture consent" and to turn them into passive objects rather than agents who control their own fate.
What would you do differently as defense secretary to compensate for this record in which the greatest military in the world, as we are constantly told, doesn't get the job done?
I find it disturbing that no member of the Senate Armed Services Committee is willing to acknowledge that record of failure and to ask our next secretary of defense what he proposes to do to amend that sorry record.
I think that the only time we will really know what then-President Trump is going to do about the set of challenges that confront him is after he has sat down with his advisers as the commander in chief, when he's looking at the threats and the intelligence from the standpoint of being the number one decider, when he's hearing from his secretary of defense, his chairman, who was the same chairman President Obama had, Chairman Joe Dunford, who is an outstanding public servant, who has led our anti-ISIL effort, on which we're making great progress.
The chairs [in Congress] are part of the "Gang of Eight." They get briefed on every covert-action program and everything like that. They know where all the bodies are buried. At the same time, they get far more campaign donations than anybody else from defense contractors, from intelligence corporations, from private military companies.
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