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John McCain: 'Have No Doubt: ISIS Is Winning'
Wednesday, February 4, 2015 11:02 AM
By: David Lerman
President Barack Obama’s nominee for defense secretary pledged to stop cost overruns and other wasteful spending, even as he pleaded for relief from automatic budget cuts that will resume in October.
“The taxpayer cannot comprehend, let alone support, the defense budget when they read of cost overruns, lack of accounting and accountability, needless overhead, and the like,” Ashton Carter said Wednesday in prepared testimony for the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This must stop.”
While Carter’s nomination has won support from lawmakers of both political parties, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, the committee chairman, has said he will use a daylong confirmation hearing to grill him on Obama’s foreign policy, including the president’s strategy for combating Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria and the war in Afghanistan.
“Have no doubt: ISIS is winning,” McCain said Wednesday on CNN, using an acronym for Islamic State, which occupies parts of Iraq and Syria and declared a self-styled caliphate.
Carter, a former deputy defense secretary who would succeed the departing Chuck Hagel, said in written responses to questions the committee submitted that the U.S. “is at the beginning of what could be a long campaign to degrade and inflict a lasting defeat” on Islamic State forces.
When asked what the defeat of Islamic State would look like, Carter said the group “must no longer be a threat to Iraq, the region, the United States and our partners.”
In opening remarks, McCain said Carter will face a difficult challenge because previous defense secretaries under Obama have complained of micromanagement by White House aides.
Panetta, Gates
Carter, 60, spent more than two years as the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian official under former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and then Hagel. He also served under Obama’s first Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, as the military’s top weapons buyer.
McCain, a frequent critic of Pentagon procurement strategies, cited soaring costs for weapons, in some cases for systems that were canceled after billions of dollars were spent.
Cost estimates for the $398.6 billion F-35 fighter jet, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., have climbed about 71 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since the Pentagon signed an initial contract in 2001.
“Every company, state and city in the country has had to lean itself out in recent years, and it should be no different for the Pentagon,” Carter said in his remarks.
He also echoed Obama’s call to end the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration, which he said “introduces turbulence and uncertainty that are wasteful” and “conveys a misleadingly diminished picture of our power in the eyes of friends and foes alike.”
