Tom Cotton
Against the wishes of my family, I gave up my legal career, and I volunteered for the Army. I became an infantryman. I went to Iraq and Afghanistan.Collection: Legal
Early on, when my wife and I were dating, we went to the grocery store, and I told her that sometimes I just buy birthday cakes, and I eat them. And she said: 'Really? I do, too.'Collection: Birthday
If men have easy access to divorce, many will choose it thoughtlessly. They may not gain true happiness with their new trophy wives, but they certainly will not slide into the material indigence and emotional misery that awaits most divorced women.Collection: Women
Police officers put the badge on every morning, not knowing for sure if they'll come home at night to take it off.Collection: Morning
Guantanamo Bay can be and has been visited repeatedly by the International Red Cross and other human-rights groups for observation in an open, regular, and transparent manner. Detainees receive the same medical care as the guard force and are able to participate in their daily prayer sessions.Collection: Medical
The use of encrypted communication and data storage to shield terrorist coordination from intelligence and law-enforcement authorities is known as 'going dark.'Collection: Communication
Our enemies and allies alike must know that aggressors will pay an unspeakable price for challenging the United States. The best way to impose that price is global military dominance.
Trying to balance the budget through defense cuts is both counterproductive and impossible.
In our globalized world, our domestic prosperity depends heavily on the world economy, which, of course, requires stability and order. Who provides that stability and order? The U.S. military.
The claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed.
The truth is you cannot decrease the severity and certainty of sentences without increasing crime. It's simply impossible.
Terrorists need no excuse to attack us here. They've shown that for decades and decades. We should be proud for the way we treated these savages at Guantanamo Bay and the way our soldiers conduct themselves all around the world to include the people doing the very hard work at Guantanamo Bay.
America does not torture. We never have, and we never will.
Our national-security strategy must drive our military budget, rather than the budget setting our strategy.
The military budget must reflect the threats we face, rather than the budget defining those threats.
Feminists say no-fault divorce was a large hurdle on the path to female liberation. They apparently don't consult the deepest hopes or greatest fears of young women.
The purpose of our common defense, after all, is to protect our people so that we can enjoy the blessings of peace, faith, freedom, family, prosperity.
Our warriors and their families don't ask for much. But there are a few things we'd like. A commander-in-chief who speaks of winning wars and not merely ending wars, calls the enemy by its name, and draws red lines carefully but enforces them ruthlessly.
No man wants more war if he's planned memorial services for fallen comrades, carried their flag-draped caskets off a plane, and buried them at Arlington National Cemetery.
The problem of end-to-end encryption isn't just a terrorism issue.
President Obama likes to say Guantanamo Bay is a terrorist recruiting tool, and while that may be an easy excuse, it's simply not true. The reality is the motivations of radical Islamic jihadism existed before Guantanamo Bay. The ideology is premised on a narrative of conquest, in the spiritual as well as the earthly world.
In my opinion the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe.
Are we fighting too many wars? And I would say no. We're fighting one war. And it's a war against radical Islamic Jihad.
If the Islamic State is losing, if they are defeated in Iraq and Syria, or in Libya, which is maybe their most dangerous and most well-developed cell today, then they won't inspire nearly so many attacks.
We're not responsible for the domestic security of every one of our allies.
I and many other senators, Republican and Democrat, have expressed our sincere and long-held intent that Congress must approve any nuclear deal with Iran for months.
If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.
Law and order in our communities doesn't arise spontaneously.
No officer wants to be involved in a justified use of force proven unnecessary after the fact, any more than soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan wanted to make what proved to be the wrong decision in a shoot-don't-shoot situation. Those decisions, even if justified, live with you forever, believe me.
The IAEA should be worried, as I am worried about it, because North Korea is now a nuclear power state with a ballistic missile program.
There's nothing good about Russia's activity in Syria.
The president has largely taken a hands-off approach in Syria and granted it as a legitimate sphere of interest to countries like Iran and like Russia. This is very bad policy, and it's going to lead to very dangerous consequences for our partners in the region, which is why so many of them are so opposed to U.S. policies.
The acronym ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. But increasingly, we see that it's not limited there. We see it in Egypt. We see it in Libya. We see it in Afghanistan.
There's been a lot of disappointments with the Iraqi army, no doubt about that. Some units have performed well, especially their special operations units. But a lot of their units have not.
What I believe is that a lot of the NSA's telephone metadata program is the result of misinformation spread by a traitor, Edward Snowden.
What you did do with your grocery card, discount card is much more invasive to your privacy than what the NSA does.
What the United States needs to do at this point is reaffirm our commitment that Assad must go and that Iran and Russia cannot be granted a sphere of influence in Syria, and that we will not sit down at the negotiating table to help broker Assad's victory in this fight.
There are still plenty of fighting forces inside of Syria who want to see Assad go. We should have been helping them from the very beginning.
If Iran wants their money back and wants to be treated like a normal nation, they need to act like a normal nation.
Unless we get serious about addressing Iran's regional ambitions in places like Syria, then our allies are never going to be confident that we have a strategy for the region.
I spent several months patrolling Al Dora district in Baghdad in 2006 with the 101st Airborne. It's a tough neighborhood. There's a lot of militias operating there, including a lot of Shiite militias, which are backed by Iran.
We have taught Iran's leaders and the world a very bad lesson: that there is a price on the head of Americans to be held hostage.
My heart goes out, as does every American, when I see the videotape of Jason Rezaian and Amir Hekmati and Saeed Abedini coming back to their families.
Roadside bombs that Iran sent to Iraq to blow up over 500 American soldiers cost a lot less than $1.7 billion.
It's clearly the intent of the Islamic State to strike us here in the United States. And that's why we have to go on offense in the war against the Islamic State to fight them where they are before they fight us here in the United States.
We need to significantly increase the number of bombing runs we're conducting in Iraq and Syria.
We should have imposed new sanctions in 2013 and maintained the strength of our negotiating position, which is what brought Iran to the table in the first place.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is a core part of our strategic position in the Middle East.
Obviously, the United States military can destroy any of Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
I have spoken to Donald Trump about this. He understands the dramatic budget cuts our military has faced.