John McCain

“ We have historically important choices to make, all of us, the American people, their President, and their Members of Congress. We must recognize that our enemies are in this fight to win, and so must we be. We must use our strengths, our resources, our inventiveness and our fortitude - qualities that have distinguished us through history and which have never failed us - to defeat our unpardonable foe. ”

“ It's an honor to appear at the Hudson Institute. Your work in promoting global security, prosperity, and freedom is well known. Your founder, Herman Kahn, virtually invented the modern field of strategic studies, and today Hudson scholars carry on his tradition of honest, original and far-sighted thinking about America's situation in the world, and the challenges and opportunities we find as we continue the work of preceding American generations to make this world less threatening to our security and more hospitable to our values. ”

“ Even as we increase our military capacity, we must also increase our civilian capacity so that an undue burden does not again fall on our soldiers as it has in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the civilian agencies of our government have too often been missing in action. ”

“ Prevailing in Iraq and Afghanistan are critical to defeating the threat posed by radical Islamic extremists, but are not the last battle in this global challenge. We are in a long war, a war I am afraid the US government is not adequately prepared to fight. The next president will need tested experience, political courage and strategic clarity to make sound and difficult decisions, even when those decisions are not, as few critical decisions ever are, immediately or decidedly popular. ”

“ But in a campaign season that has, regrettably, seen too many occasions when statesmanship has surrendered to pandering, leading Democrats and presidential candidates spurn a clear-eyed assessment of the opportunities and difficulties ahead and a strategic grasp of the consequences of an American defeat for whistling past the grave yard alternatives, which seldom rise above the level of soundbites and that lack, either by design or inexperience, even a crude understanding of the realities of our situation. ”

“ We must learn from them, as Americans have always learned from our mistakes, and fight smarter and harder. Though we mourn the losses we have already incurred in this war, we must not let our grief weary us so that we cannot do the work that is ours to do. ”

“ It is an honor to live in country so well defended by such brave patriots.
But Democrats who aspire to the office of commander in chief ought to be able to demonstrate that their positions on Iraq and the long war against Islamic extremists are the product of sober reasoning and their promise of more realistic statecraft is based on, well, reality. Instead, they argue we will mysteriously have MORE leverage to induce difficult political reforms in Iraq when we announce we are leaving. ”

“ We must act boldly and with confidence that history has not yet assigned us a challenge that we cannot meet successfully. Though we regret the mistakes we have made in this war, they must not cause us self doubt. ”

“ It is vitally important for the next president to issue a call to service, to summon the young men and women of America to defend their country and its noble ideals. I am confident that this generation will answer the summons just as so many of us did in previous generations.
Along with more personnel, the military will require additional equipment for the expanded force, to modernize for the future, and to make up for losses suffered in the current wars. ”

“ Tough talk or managerial successes in the private sector aren't adequate assurance that their authors have the experience or qualities necessary for such a singular responsibility. We have to make far-reaching reforms to our government to prepare for the long threat our enemies plan for us, and the cruel and desperate means they will employ to harm us. ”

“ To a large extent, our military is still configured to fight enemies that no longer exist. Our stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines may make the difference in a future conflict, but they do little to win our current struggles against terrorists from the Horn of Africa to the Hindu Kush.
What we need today are more soldiers and more civilians with the right kind of skills to fight a global counterinsurgency. The bulk of our effort must be directed toward helping friendly governments and their security forces to resist our common foes. ”

“ The nature of the threat confronting America changed radically between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, and yet our governmental structures have not kept pace.
No one who has visited our servicemen and women in Iraq or Afghanistan can doubt their skills, their bravery, or their dedication. ”

“ I fear for our future when terrorist leaders are welcome at our most prestigious centers of learning, universities conceived to strengthen and nurture the ideals of Western liberal political thought, and young men and women who volunteered to risk their lives to defend those ideals are not. ”

“ We also need to develop a deployable police presence to, when necessary, help maintain law and order where it is lacking, and to train foreign police forces to counter Islamic extremism and other threats. In the end, dollars, experts, and police must work together to address the interrelated issues of political freedom, good governance, and economic development. ”

“ We need to launch a crash program in both civilian and military schools to increase the number of experts in strategic languages such as Arabic and Pashto. We need to require students at our service academies to spend time studying abroad. And we need to enhance the Foreign Area career field within the military while creating a new field in strategic interrogation. ”

“ The State Department and other agencies need to enhance their ability to send more experts to rebuild war-torn lands - or, better still, bolster peaceful development to reduce the chances of war breaking out in the first place. ”

“ It could take risks that our bureaucracies today are afraid to take - risks such as infiltrating agents who lack diplomatic cover into terrorist organizations. It could even lead in the front-line efforts to rebuild failed states. A cadre of such undercover operatives would allow us to gain the intelligence on terrorist activities that we don't get today from our high-tech surveillance systems and from a CIA clandestine service that works almost entirely out of our embassies abroad. ”

“ It is an even greater credit to the men and women he has the honor to command, who have bid good-bye again to their families, while no doubt directing some well-deserved abuse at those of us who have put them in this situation, and then shouldered a rifle and risked everything - everything - for our sake. ”

“ But we can also afford to spend more on our defense. Our defense budget currently consumes less than 4 cents of every dollar that our booming economy generates - far less than we spent during the Cold War. ”

“ These are the decisions confronting American voters in this election, and they will confront the person you elect President. In November, 2008 the American people will decide with their votes how and where this war will be fought or if it will be fought at all. ”

“ They are silent about Syria's export of suicide bombers, and Iran's exports of training, weapons and equipment that is being used to kill and maim American soldiers. They offer nothing other than generalities based on a withdrawal that amounts to defeat. ”