[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 135 (Friday, September 23, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
     TIME FOR A RATIONAL, RESPONSIBLE POLICY IN TRAINING AMERICA'S 
                               RESERVISTS

  (Mr. SAXTON asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Speaker, on Wednesday the Navy was forced to cancel 
all the reserve drills for the remainder of this fiscal year, affecting 
the drill for over 20,000 Navy reservists. We called the Navy this 
morning to ask them why, and they gave us two reasons:
  One, this House appropriated, this year, $160 million less than we 
appropriated last year, and two, they said:

       We have been asked to go to Rwanda and we went. We have 
     been asked to go to Bosnia and we went. We have been asked to 
     go to Somalia and we went. Now we have been asked to go to 
     Haiti, and we are there, too.

  Mr. Speaker, the question is not, perhaps, whether those places are 
places for our reserves to be. The question is are we going to let our 
forces go there undertrained. We did that once before. It was in the 
late 1970's, when we had a hollow force. Today's Washington Post points 
out once again that we are not even able to train our forces to do the 
jobs that we ask them to do at this level of training.
  Mr. Speaker, it is time for this House to look at a rational, 
responsible policy toward training of our reservists.

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