Before I ask my colleague to comment, there is a question about whether we can secure our borders. Of course, we can. We have seen in the Yuma sector… - John McCain

At the moment of conception.

We asked the witnesses before the Senate Armed Services Committee the following question: Is ISIS contained? It is not. ISIS is not contained, contrary to the statements--bizarrely--made by the President of the United States literally hours before the attack on San Bernardino. This year our Senate Armed Services Committee held several hearings specifically focused on the threat of ISIL, including three hearings specifically with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. We heard about nine lines of effort. We heard about three "arrrghs." We never heard a plausible theory of success, nor a strategy to achieve success. What do I mean by that? There is no time line on when Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, will be taken. There is no strategy to take Raqqa. Raqqa is the base of the caliphate. Raqqa is the place where the attacks are being planned and orchestrated. We have news reports that they are developing chemical weapons in Raqqa. This is the first time that a terrorist organization has had a base, a caliphate, from which to operate. What has happened? They are expanding globally.

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.