At the end of the day, if you don't have end-strength reductions, you don't have any military savings,

While we listened carefully to the input from the local communities, military value was our top priority.

It's important for our nation that our military and our society be close together. That's important for democracy. And it's important for recruiting. It's important for retention. It's important for building support for our engagements overseas.

We know that the decisions we reach will have a profound impact on the communities hosting our military installations, and more importantly, on the people who bring those communities to life.

Today it is estimated we probably have about 25 percent excess capacity in our public shipyards,

Kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan . . . deserve to come back to 21st-century medical care, ... Whatever it costs, we need to incur that cost to provide that world-class care to an extraordinary group of men and women in harm's way.