We must take all that territory away from ISIS.

The homegrown terrorists are the most significant because any fighter returning from Syria to the United States would likely be identified and detected by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Cyberespionage and cyberattack is exploding from our adversaries inside our country. We don't seem capable of stopping it.

Rebuilding the military is something Putin will pay attention to.

I have lots of concerns at working with Russia going against ISIS until we have agreements in terms of what Russia's behavior is going to be.

Radical Islam, it has grown into a global jihad.

I watched the Bush administration overreact to the Clinton administration, who believed they did too much nation building, sustaining other countries, and that's why we never put the commitment on Afghanistan and Iraq that should have been in there under their policy leadership.

One of the banners I would put up in front of any American president and new administration is 'Do not overreact to your predecessors' policies.'

ISIS itself, it draws its central belief system from the Koran and from the writings of the Prophet Muhammad. That is undeniable. And it's a medieval interpretation of it. It is a literal interpretation of it.

To get an Army that's already fighting a war to change in stride to a total different military strategy on the ground - and to get everybody on the same page - was accomplished by the sheer force of Dave Petraeus' will.

Al Qaeda has overplayed their hand. What the al Qaeda do when they go into a town or village or a neighborhood inside a major city is they get a stranglehold on the people themselves. They force the men to wear beards and the women to be properly costumed and essentially completely covered up.

By the end of 2008, clearly, the al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated. They actually said that in many of their transmissions that we were able to pick up. And the Shia militia, largely those trained by the Iranians in Basra and also in Sadr City, had been defeated.

The issue with Syria, I think for many of us, has always been about Iran. This is an anchor point for them in terms of regional domination. It means a lot to them. They are all in here.

Here's the problem the Free Syrian Army has. They really want to topple the regime in Damascus, and this is where most of the fight takes place, between Aleppo and Damascus for the Free Syrian Army.

Putin has put Russia on a path to be a world power with global influence.

When you had thugs and bullies and killers imposing their will on their own people or other people - if you don't respond to it, it just keeps coming because they're encouraged by their own success.

Frankly, our adversaries are emboldened by the lack of American leadership in the world, and our friends and our allies, they have lost trust in us.

The military executes policy decisions.

Actually if you were to buy a bag of dried lentils it would cost you a couple of quid. Some people don't have that to spend in the first place. And not everyone wants to eat lentils.

Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.

We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods such as tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.

Food is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.

Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education.

Not all Tories are atrocious heartless fiends, I concede. But those who wield hunger as a weapon while claiming their own meals on expenses, are beyond satire.

I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.

I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.

Even in my genre, cookery, just look who gets on the television. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater. All very nice men. All white middleflclass men.

But I know that trying to black out my past with oblivion will just damage my future. I made the decision to stop running from my fears, and to walk slowly and deliberately towards self-nurture, self-respect, and better mental and physical health.

Cheese is one of the world's great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own.

I'm not organised, and I don't cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I'm chaotic. Always have been.

Poverty took me from being the girl who was always the lead in the school play, to a woman who can't open her own front door.

We need to aim to get rid of food banks altogether, and replace charitable intervention with a fairer, more equal society.

I spent 18 months with the furniture parked in front of the radiators, cooking as quickly as I possibly could to use the least amount of gas and electricity. I unscrewed the lightbulbs in the hallway, unplugged everything at the wall so not even the LCD display was blinking away on the oven.

Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.

A startling confession for a food writer: all through high school, I struggled with a severe eating disorder.

Until people realise benefits doesn't mean scrounger, and austerity isn't a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there's still a lot of work to do.

The thing with my recipes is, I don't have hours to faff about in the kitchen. My recipes are all 15, 20 minute, chop it up and stick it in the oven.

It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator.

I'm not the spring chicken everyone wants. I've got a debilitating illness. The brave face is 'I'm busy with work' but I've sort of chucked myself on the scrapheap. That's why I'm single. I've resigned myself to being a difficult woman.

People nag me about my weight, my cooking, my tattoos, my hair, my sexuality, everything. I can deal with all that because I'm still doing my job and I kind of like myself.

In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.

But it's a disgrace that food banks are needed in the first place, patching up the holes left by an inefficient and downright barbaric attack on the meagre safety net of what remains of a notion of 'social security'.

There's all kinds of research that shows children operate best if they start the day with some proper food inside them - it's a no-brainer.

Working 90 hours a week is easily racked up when you're self-employed and rely on portable tech to do your work; your train journeys, toilet breaks, leisurely walks, bedtime, can all become 'working hours'. Reclaim them.

It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.

I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.

My pregnancy changed my relationship with my body because I went from despising it to marvelling at what it can do.

Working behind the cocktail bar was a different kind of escapism, a creative outlet with a newfound respect for alcohol. I didn't drink as I was also working day shifts in a coffee shop and, later, the fire service, and needed my wits about me to pull off my 60-hour working weeks.

Learning to cook at school gave me the confidence to experiment in the kitchen when I left home in my late teens - I wasn't intimidated by it.

Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans, lentils, are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of surprising meals.