Mr. President, today Congress returns from the August recess. Perhaps one of the most important issues of recent times affecting one-sixth of America… - John McCain

I say to my colleagues: This is an ambitious piece of legislation, and it is one that reflects the growing threats to our Nation. Everything about the NDAA is threat driven--everything, that is, but its top line of $602 billion. That is an arbitrary figure set by last year's budget agreement, having nothing to do with events in the world, and which itself was a product of 5 years of letting politics, not strategy, determine the level of funding for our national defense. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs GEN Martin Dempsey described last year's defense budget as "the lower ragged edge of manageable risks." Yet here we are 1 year later with defense spending arbitrarily capped at $17 billion below what our military needed and planned for last year. I don't know what lies beneath the lower ragged edge of manageable, but this is what I fear it means--that our military is becoming less and less able to deter conflict and that if, God forbid, deterrence does fail somewhere and we end up in conflict, our Nation will deploy young Americans into battle without sufficient training or equipment to fight a war that will take longer, be larger, cost more, and ultimately claim more American lives than it otherwise would have. That is the growing risk we face, and for the sake of the men and women serving in our military, we cannot change course soon enough. The Senate will have the opportunity to do just that when we consider my amendment to reverse the budget-driven cuts to the capabilities of our Armed Forces that are needed to defend the Nation. I hope we will seize this opportunity. We ask a lot of our men and women in uniform, and they never let us down. We must not let them down. As we move forward with consideration of the NDAA, I stand ready to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass this important legislation and give our military the resources they need and deserve.

We're no longer staring into the abyss of defeat and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success.

I'd like to say to Mr. and Mrs. Khan: thank you for immigrating to America. We're a better country because of you. And you are certainly right; your son was the best of America, and the memory of his sacrifice will make us a better nation -- and he will never be forgotten.