[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 205 (Wednesday, December 20, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2430-E2431]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 RETIREMENT OF JOHN M. COLLINS FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE

                                 ______


                            HON. IKE SKELTON

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 20, 1995

  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to salute a distinguished 
servant of the Congress and the Nation in the area of national defense 
and national security. On Wednesday, January 3, 1996, John M. Collins 
will retire after 22\1/2\ years as the Senior Specialist in National 
Defense of the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. 
Since 1972, Mr. Collins has provided authoritative, in-depth, and 
profound analysis and advice to the Congress on a range of national 
defense issues unparalleled in its breadth and scope.
  Mr. Collins' retirement closes a lifetime of Government service which 
mirrors the tumultuous history of the past 50-odd years. A native, I am 
proud to say, of my State of Missouri, he began his public service with 
his enlistment in the U.S. Army in May 1942--after being rejected by 
the Marine Corps, a fact he reiterates with great delight and good 
humor to numerous Marines and friends over the years. As a young 
enlisted soldier he came ashore over the Normandy beaches a few days 
after D-day, in 1944. As a captain he served in the Korean war. As a 
colonel he served as Chief of the Campaign Planning Group in General 
Westmoreland's headquarters in Vietnam during 1967-68--managing to get 
involved in, and survive as the winner, a point-blank shootout with a 
North Vietnamese soldier in the ruins of Hue City in early 1968.
  In between these wartime duties he served in intelligence and 
contingency planning posts in Japan and the Middle East; training 
assignments in the United States; commanded a battalion in the 82d 
Airborne Division; was one of the principal planners for the possible 
invasion of Cuba which, fortunately, never had to take place during the 
fateful days of the Cuban missile crisis in October-November 1962; and 
graduated from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He closed 
his 30-year Army career as a faculty member and chief of the strategic 
studies group at the National War College during 1968-72.
  Immediately upon retirement from the Army, Colonel Collins joined the 
Congressional Research Service as Senior Specialist in National 
Defense. From the beginning of his CRS career he showed a willingness 
to examine fundamental assumptions. One of his first CRS reports 
examined whether the strategic nuclear triad of bombers, ground-based 
ICBM's, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles had been arrived at 
rationally, and whether it was in fact the only possible method of 
constructing U.S. strategic nuclear forces. At the height of the first 
Arab oil embargo, in 1975, he and a CRS coauthor, Clyde Mark, poured 
cold water on the idea that seizing Arab oil fields by military force 
would be an easy task. He 

[[Page E2431]]
wrote a book-length examination of overall U.S. defense planning 
processes, and how they might be improved.
  John Collins' single greatest service to the Congress and the Nation, 
however, was provided in the form of a series of book-length reports, 
beginning in 1976 and running through 1985, which meticulously 
documented the relentless military buildup and geostrategic expansion 
of the Soviet Union and its client states in almost every category of 
military power and area of the world. His comparisons of United States 
Soviet military forces, together with the respective allies of both 
countries, demonstrated with clarity and precision how American 
military capabilities, relative to our interests, were 
steadily declining, and those of the Soviet Union were increasing. 
Widely read, quoted, and debated, John Collins' works on the United 
States-Soviet military balance unquestionably played a role in 
persuading the American people and their elected representatives that, 
by the early 1980's, major increases in United States military forces 
and defense spending were required to restore our national credibility 
and deter and prevent Soviet expansionism. This was not an easy time 
for John Collins. Some were not happy with what he had to say about the 
shifting balance of military power in favor of the Soviet Union, and he 
had to withstand considerable bureaucratic and political pressure to 
continue to do his job. However, those who exerted such pressure 
against him are gone. He and his works remain.

  By helping alert the country to the growing menace of Soviet military 
power in the late 1970's and early 1980's, Mr. Collins can also said to 
have played a role in the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union and the 
Warsaw Pact. Without the American military resurgence of the 1980's, it 
is difficult to see how the Soviet military-political juggernaut of the 
mid and late 1970's could have been halted, turned inward, and forced 
to collapse of its own internal strains. Indeed, in October 1985, only 
a few months after Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union, he 
presciently suggested that ``the whole Soviet security apparatus in 
Central Europe is coming unraveled.''\1\
     \1\ Collins, John M. What Have We Got for $1 Trillion? The 
     Washington Quarterly, Spring 1986: 49, based on testimony 
     before the Defense Policy Panel, House Armed Services 
     Committee, October 9, 1985.
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  The thawing of the cold war and the eventual demise of the Soviet 
Union and the Warsaw Pact in no way lessened Mr. Collins' output. He 
produced authoritative studies of military space forces, United States 
and Soviet special operations forces, lessons learned from America's 
small wars, and a host of other reports and analyses. During the 
Persian Gulf war, he was frequently interviewed on national and 
international radio and television, and wrote numerous short analyses 
of possible issues and problems related to war with Iraq. At one point, 
well over a hundred congressional staffers gathered to listen with rapt 
attention to this veteran of three wars outline not the possible nature 
of a ground war with Iraq--not just in academic, and analytical terms, 
but how ground combat was ``close up, and personal, and dirty.'' Within 
the past few years, his talents have turned to as diverse a set of 
subjects as counterproliferation, U.S. prepositioned military 
equipment, nonlethal weapons, and criteria for U.S. military 
intervention overseas. His last CRS report, finished just days ago, 
deals with the military aspects of NATO enlargement.
  Mr. Speaker, although John Collins is completing almost 54 years of 
total Federal service when he retires from CRS, he has no intention of 
remaining inactive. General Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 
of Staff, has had the eminent good sense to agree to provide Mr. 
Collins with some office and study space at the National Defense 
University at Fort McNair. With the time he now will have, plus the 
assistance from DOD, Mr. Collins intends to write books on military 
geography and military strategy. He will have more time to spend with 
his wife Gloria, to whom he has dedicated many of his books; his son 
Sean, holder of a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical 
engineering from MIT, and a contributor to national defense and 
security in his own right in the field of ballistic missile defense; 
and his grandchildren.
  Few people have devoted so much of a long life to the service of the 
United States as has John Collins. I wish him well as he enters yet 
another stage of that service.

                          ____________________