I think that Vladimir Putin is certainly getting a lot of publicity for what the Russians are doing. And I'm not sure that's unwelcome to him. I think this is a guy who saw the U.S. basically come out against him in his reelection campaign in 2012. He saw the U.S. being behind all of the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and in Georgia and Ukraine and so on. So his view is the West has been interfering in his politics for years.

It's a very broad and not very well-disguised effort of Russians to create questions about the legitimacy of these Western elections. And, I think, this is very K.G.B.

Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.

I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.

What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.

In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.