[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 61 (Monday, May 12, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2477-H2481]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             SPECIAL ORDERS
                    THE FUTURE OF THE U.S. MILITARY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Young of Florida). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. 
Skelton] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, Gen. George Patton, as vigorous a proponent 
of advanced military technology as ever served in the U.S. Armed 
Forces, once said, ``Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won 
by people.''
  Today, in the last of three speeches I am making on the future of the 
U.S. military, I want to talk about the most important resource that 
the Nation has in protecting its security: Our people, the men and 
women who serve in the Armed Forces and the civilians who support them.
  As I have emphasized in each of my previous speeches, under the 
Constitution it is Congress' responsibility to ensure that U.S. forces 
are able to carry out their duties. Article 1, section 8 of the 
Constitution gives Congress the power to raise and support armies; to 
provide and maintain a Navy; and to make rules for the Government and 
regulation of the land and naval forces.
  Unfortunately, Congress has not always fulfilled its responsibility 
to provide for the common defense. Too often in the past, indeed 
perhaps most often in this century, the United States has been 
unprepared for the military challenges it has faced. As George C. 
Marshall lamented in a 1923 speech that I quoted earlier, immediately 
following a war, Congress and the public remember the terrible price 
paid by young Americans at the start of a war for which we were 
unprepared. But very soon thereafter, under the weight of the public 
debt, the costs of war are forgotten and military strength is allowed 
to erode.
  In earlier speeches, I discussed military strategy and defense 
budgets. In those statements, I said, first, that the strategy which 
appears to be emerging from the Quadrennial Defense Review or QDR that 
is now underway in the Pentagon appears to be correct and appropriately 
broad and demanding.
  I said, second, however, that the resources that the QDR anticipates 
to be available appear inadequate to support the strategy. I am 
concerned especially that the QDR will require reductions in active 
duty troop levels, and I do not feel that any reductions are warranted 
in view of the demands on the force. I am even more concerned that this 
round of force cuts will be followed by a perpetual cycle of budget 
shortfalls and additional cuts in the future, unless defense budgets 
grow modestly over time.
  Those are critically important issues, in large part because of how 
they bear on the matters I will discuss today. An ambitious strategy 
accompanied by inadequate resources is a prescription for placing 
tremendous strain on the people who serve. As it has been said, all of 
the money for defense that Congress may provide, all of the weapons 
that the services may buy, all of the logistics infrastructure that may 
undergird the force, all of the military doctrine that strategists may 
pronounce, all of the campaign plans that commanders may devise, all of 
these things ultimately come down to a single soldier walking on point.
  It is also true, as a corollary, that the men and women who serve in 
the Armed Forces deserve material and moral support sufficient to allow 
them to do what we ask of them. In peacetime, however, we most often 
forget the costs of war and neglect to pay the price of peace. 
Sometimes I worry that this tendency to forget those who wear the 
uniform is inherent in a democratic society.
  The famous British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled 
``Tommy,'' about the treatment of soldiers in time of peace. It is 
written from the point of view of a British infantryman dressed in his 
red coat who was refused a pint of beer in a public house, and he 
complains:

     ``For It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' `Chuck him out, 
           the brute!'
     But it's `Savior of `is country'

[[Page H2478]]

     When the guns begin to shoot.''

  Like the British public a century ago, we Americans, too, have loudly 
cheered the troops coming home from war, only to turn away from these 
troops when the garlands of victory are no longer fresh. Remember the 
yellow ribbons that were so prominent during the Persian Gulf crisis in 
1990 and 1991? Recall the welcome home parade for our victorious 
troops? I fear that those moments of pride and glory are no longer in 
the consciousness of most Americans or of this Congress.
  Today, I want to focus our attention on the men and women who serve, 
but I want to do it with some care. In assessing how we treat our 
people, I am torn between two strong feelings. On the one hand, I am 
concerned that the pressures we are putting on servicemembers and on 
DOD civilians are growing to the breaking point. On the other hand, I 
do not want to discourage those who are willing to serve either from 
joining their Armed Forces or from staying in. On the contrary, and all 
I will say, I hope to encourage those who are willing and able to serve 
their country.
  The fact that we are now at peace and that no single great enemy 
threatens us does not mean that military service is any less necessary 
or any less to be valued than in the past. On the contrary, the burden 
of maintaining the peace lies on the shoulders of those who serve, and 
it is no less critical a mission than any soldier, sailor, marine, or 
airman has ever had before.
  So though I am going to discuss at length all of the problems that 
those who serve may encounter, I do not want to dishearten the 
patriotic people that the mission of defense requires.
  Mr. Speaker, one of the things that most impressed me and many others 
about former Secretary of Defense Perry was his focus on people. When 
he first became Secretary, one of the things he did most was to travel 
to military bases around the country, indeed, all around the world, and 
talk to the servicepeople he met there; management by walking around, 
he called it.
  As a result of this walking around was the persistent emphasis he put 
on improving the quality of life in the military. For those of us who 
had known William Perry for many years to be a hardware expert, his 
focus on people was an unexpected side of his character that was 
greatly welcomed.
  The value of Secretary Perry's focus on people was, above all, the 
message that it sent to the troops. I can tell the Members that it was 
noticed throughout the military and did much to prevent an unbridgeable 
rift from opening between the civilian leaders of the Clinton 
administration and the men and women in the Armed Forces.
  The example of Secretary Perry's focus on people is one that those of 
us in policymaking positions should take to heart. The U.S. military is 
a complex human culture, and its human dimensions must always be 
considered in making choices on strategy, budgets, programs, social 
rules, and regulations, or any other aspect of policy.
  In retrospect, therefore, I believe it was a mistake that the 
Quadrennial Defense Review did not include a separate panel on people. 
As many of my colleagues are aware, the work of the QDR has been 
carried out by six panels on strategy, force structure, modernization, 
readiness, infrastructure, and a late addition, intelligence, with an 
integration panel linking it all together.
  As I have been thinking recently about the issues that the QDR is 
addressing, so many of them, it seems to me, come down to people. Many 
people issues are integral to the work of the QDR's six panels. What 
stresses and strains are put on people by the strategy, given the force 
structure available to implement it? How does the quality of life in 
the military affect readiness to carry out missions?

                              {time}  1215

  How does military training, education and leadership development 
affect the military's ability to exploit new technology effectively? 
How will reductions in the defense infrastructure affect the morale of 
people in the services and of the civilians who support them?
  All of the QDR panels, therefore, will touch on people to some 
extent, but not as an explicit focus of attention. Moreover, many 
critically important people issues may not be addressed at all in the 
QDR. Do the people in the military have a clear sense of the manner in 
which the jobs they do contribute to the common defense? How are all 
the changes in the society as a whole affecting the military, changes 
that include increasing opportunities for women, the growing proportion 
of two-earner households, the problems of sexual harassment, the 
dynamics of race relations? Is there, as many fear, a growing gap 
between the culture of the U.S. military and of that civilian society, 
and how will this affect public support for national security and the 
willingness of many people to serve?
  The Quadrennial Defense Review will probably not address these 
questions; and yet, in the end, such matters have as much to do with 
national security as the size of the budget or the quality of new 
weapons technology. So in this speech, I want us to focus on the people 
who protect our national security and to raise some questions which I 
think need to be considered as Congress evaluates the forthcoming 
Quadrennial Defense Review.
  Above all, Mr. Speaker, I am concerned that if pressures on U.S. 
military forces do not ease, then the military will begin to lose many 
of its best and brightest people. Those I have talked to in the 
services most often cite three reasons why good people leave the force: 
First, because the operational tempo is too high; second, because of 
concerns about their families; and, third, because of uncertainty about 
the future.
  In the remainder of this speech, I will address each of these 
concerns. Certainly, the most immediate people issue on the agenda is 
how current demands in the force are affecting the troops. Two years 
ago, Lt. Gen. Ted Stroup, the Assistant Army Chief of Staff for 
Personnel, was asked what it was like for soldiers who served in an 
Army that was then composed of 520,000 active duty personnel. Soldiers, 
he said, were ``stretched and stressed'' by all the demands being put 
on them. He was asked what the effect would be when the numbers dropped 
to 495,000, as was then planned. He answered, ``stretched and stressed 
all the more.''
  Recently, however, the Department of Defense has proposed reducing 
the size of the Army to 475,000, which the Army has resisted. 
Meanwhile, the actual strength of the Army has eroded to about 490,000, 
even though the official end-strength target required by current law 
remains at 495,000. It is widely reported that the QDR will reduce Army 
end-strength by 15,000 or more. So Army people will be stretched and 
stressed even more. At what point does all this stretching and 
stressing reach the breaking point?
  Each of the other services has to face the same issues. Recently a 
senior Navy official testified at length before the Committee on 
National Security about the difficulty the Navy has had keeping forces 
on station as much as it had planned. In large part, this is because 
the Navy, to its credit, rightly tries to limit overseas deployment to 
6 months and puts other constraints on the amount of time units may be 
away from home. In the same testimony, however, the official had to 
defend the decision to reduce the Navy's end-strength by 11,000 in 
order to find money for equipment maintenance.
  The two issues cannot be separated. As end-strength declines, you can 
either increase personnel deployment times, which is damaging to your 
people and which the Navy has correctly refused to do, or you can 
reduce deployments, which means you are not fully supporting the 
military strategy.
  In the other services, and in the Army especially, the ability to 
limit deployments is not as great. Requirements for Army personnel are 
driven by overseas duty tours and by the increasing number of military 
operations, which are not as easy to limit as the number of ship days 
on station. As a result, too many people in the Army are being 
stretched and stressed individually by the demands of military 
operations.
  For those of us who spent any amount of time out talking to people in 
uniform, this message comes across very loudly. I spent the 
Thanksgiving weekend last year on a trip to visit United States troops 
in Aviano, Italy, Bosnia, and Hungary. In Hungary, I spent some time 
with soldiers from

[[Page H2479]]

Missouri, and I recall asking each of them how many military 
deployments they had been involved in during recent enlistment periods. 
Several had two deployments, a few had three, and one sergeant had five 
deployments.
  Every time I visit the troops, I hear similar stories. As a result, I 
have been thinking about the extent of the problem, its causes and its 
solutions. I am convinced, first of all, that the extent of the problem 
is not adequately identified by current measures. As I said, the Navy 
has in place a set of rigid limits on unit deployments abroad. Even in 
the Navy, however, the pace of deployment for individual personnel is 
not directly measured and limited. In other services, there is no 
systematic, effective way to measure the extent of individual 
deployments. So we really do not know how much stress we are putting on 
individuals in uniform.
  One of the things the QDR should have considered, therefore, is how 
to measure the strain put on individuals in the uniformed services and 
means of controlling it. I have recently seen a draft list from the Air 
Force of some things we should be measuring. It includes:
  How many people have temporary duty assignments of less than 90 days 
a year, 90 to 120 days, or over 120 days a year? If too many people are 
being deployed away from home on a constant basis, that is a sure sign 
of an excessive operating tempo.
  What is the average duty week for people on their assignments? 40 to 
45 hours a week; 45 to 55; or over 55? Some jobs require long hours, 
but if the trend over the whole force is up over time, that is also a 
cause for stress.
  How many aircraft crews receive waivers of training hour 
requirements? If the trend is up, then too many people are being asked 
to do too many other things besides their primary jobs.
  How many major exercises are people engaged in, on average, per year?
  How many people are delayed in meeting training qualification 
requirements for position upgrades?
  What share of enlisted personnel are pursuing college degrees and 
what share of officers are pursuing advanced degrees? What share of 
each disenroll from course work? A decline in the number of people 
pursuing advanced education is a good measure of stress on the force.
  How many people have accrued leave exceeding 60 days?
  How many fathers have missed a child's birth due to a temporary duty 
assignment? How many have been assigned to duty away within 30 days of 
a child's birth?

  The list goes on, and I could add to it. I am convinced, just by 
talking to people, that measures such as these will show a dramatic 
increase in the tempo of work in all of the services. Unless we get a 
handle on the degree of strain we are putting on the force, and do some 
things to control it, then we are heading for real trouble in retaining 
good people.
  What are the causes of such apparent problems? To me, the root cause 
is a tendency to underestimate how much is required to carry out 
military operations while still preparing adequately for full scale 
war. After all, it is the military's main mission to fight and win 
America's wars. In the past, the military services did not worry very 
much about the impact that smaller scale military operations would have 
on the force, first, because the cold war era force was relatively 
large, so a small deployment was not felt, and, second, because smaller 
military operations were relatively rare. That is the main reason why 
measures of stress on the force are inadequate.
  Now the force is smaller, and military operations have become more 
frequent and also, often, of very long duration. One calculation in 
this year's Army Posture Statement is striking. Over the 40 years from 
1950 through 1989, the Army was engaged in 10 deployments. In the 7 
years between 1990 and 1996, the Army was engaged in 25 deployments. 
Meanwhile, the size of the Army has declined by a third and the budget 
has dropped by 39 percent.
  Les Aspin's bottom-up review of 1993 did not come to grips with the 
impact of a larger number of operations on a smaller force. The bottom-
up review simply assumed that a force designed to fight 2 major 
regional conflicts would be large and diverse enough to handle any 
number of smaller operations. Only now are the services beginning to 
understand why such a cold war way of thinking will not do.
  The Army, for example, now has a way of assessing the impact of 
smaller conflicts that begins to explain the stresses. For each unit 
deployed in an ongoing operation, the Army says, four units are needed 
in the force. One unit is deployed. Another unit is preparing for 
deployment. A third unit is coming off deployment and needs time to 
restore its readiness. And a fourth unit is depleted because some of 
its troops were drawn on to fill out the unit that is deployed.
  Add to this the fact that only a part of the Army is available for 
deployments, because a portion is undergoing education and skills 
training, is in transit, or is in support functions and other 
positions. According to the General Accounting Office, 63 percent of 
active duty Army troops are deployable at any given time. So out of the 
495,000 total, 312,000 troops are available for operations. At the end 
of 1996, the Army says, 35,800 troops were deployed in operations, 
mainly in Bosnia. This does not count the number of troops forward 
deployed in Korea, by the way, who probably ought to be counted as 
deployed and not simply as forward based. Multiply 35,800 by 4 and the 
number of troops affected by deployments is 143,200, which is 46 
percent of the deployable force. The other 54 percent of the force, of 
course, is supposed to be training hard to be ready for two major 
regional wars.
  Mr. Speaker, this is what has me so concerned about the impact of 
further reductions in Army force levels. At any one time, a large part 
of the Army is either involved in operations or is directly affected by 
them. Already the Army has to draw people away from their normal 
assignments in order to fill out units that are being employed. To me, 
this is especially straining for Army people, because such assignments 
are not planned and often are for temporary duty of 179 days, without 
any offsetting benefits. Moreover, the people left in the unit from 
which people were taken away have to work twice as hard to accomplish 
the workload, which of course does not decline. Now the plan is to 
further reduce the overall number of personnel without reducing the 
number of divisions. If the reductions are made from division 
strengths, then some specialties will have even lower manning levels. 
If the reductions are made from support positions, which is presumably 
the rationale, then the opportunity for Army personnel to serve in 
slots that are somewhat less subject to uncertainty will decline.
  I do not believe that the Defense Department has an accurate level of 
understanding of the strains that these further reductions will put on 
the force. I fear that such reductions will break the force. And, this 
will be a national tragedy.
  So how can we resolve these problems? Each of the services has been 
searching for ways to manage resources to meet the needs, but I am not 
sure how successful the solutions have been or, if successful from the 
present, how successful they will remain in the future.
  One solution has been to use volunteer reservists to fill out 
deployed units. The key issue here is when we will reach the limit of 
reserve availability. Reservists willing and able to volunteer have 
likely come forward already for one duty tour, and enough may not be 
available in the future. Involuntary mobilization of reservists would 
soon cause many of them to quit. In addition, mobilization of 
reservists is expensive. Reservists receive full active duty pay and 
benefits when they are on active duty. Because Congress insists on 
offsetting supplemental funding for military operations with 
rescissions, such costs have to be absorbed within the overall defense 
budget.
  Another potential solution may be to reduce nondivision support troop 
levels in order to fill out division slots. But too often we lose sight 
of the fact that support personnel carry out assignments that are 
critical to mission effectiveness.

                              {time}  1230

  Intelligence, for example, is considered a support function but 
operations cannot proceed without adequate, timely, usable 
intelligence. Nor can operations proceed without supplies or

[[Page H2480]]

medical care or any other basic services provided through support 
activities.
  I intend to look very critically at the Quadrennial Defense Review to 
see how attentive the Defense Department has been to the issue of 
personnel and operating tempos. I believe there is a vast 
underestimation of the strain that ongoing smaller scale operations put 
on the force, that means of measuring the strain are inadequate, and 
that further force reductions may severely aggravate the problems.
  The second reason people cite for leaving the force is concern about 
their families. The U.S. military today is an All-Volunteer Force. 
Because of this, it is very different from the draft armies of the 
past. A larger and larger share of the force is composed of people who 
choose the military as a career, which is a positive trend, because 
modern, sophisticated weapons and ways of fighting require well-
trained, professional people. The professional U.S. military force is 
the envy of the rest of the world. It sets the standard to which other 
nations aspire.
  As a result of this evolution, the force is, on the whole, older than 
in the past and, most often, married. Today 64 percent of active duty 
Army personnel are married and, except for the Marine Corps, the 
proportion is similar in the other services. The modern American 
military cannot maintain its high quality, therefore, without 
adequately taking care of military families. The common phrase now is, 
``We enlist soldiers, we reenlist families.''
  Early on in the days of the All-Volunteer Force, we did not do a good 
job of taking care of families. Military pay levels eroded after the 
All-Volunteer Force was instituted in 1973. Military housing and other 
military facilities, following the war in Vietnam, were in awful 
condition. Social problems that plagued the rest of society, including 
drug use and racial tensions, also affected the military.
  Since the late 1970's, attention to the needs of military families 
has improved dramatically. Pay raises in 1979 and 1980 and much more 
attention to family needs in the years since then have had tremendously 
beneficial effects. The military has led the way in responding to 
social problems; I say this fully aware of some continued shortcomings. 
The results have been seen in the quality of people recruited into the 
Armed Forces and the ability to retain good people with the necessary 
skills.
  I am concerned, however, that the strains on military families are 
growing and that we are not doing as good a job as we should in 
protecting families. To be sure, many of the strains on military 
families are inherent in the nature of military life. Military 
personnel are necessarily away from home for extended periods of time. 
Military families move frequently, which makes it difficult for spouses 
to build careers, and which itself puts a strain on marriages.
  These factors make it all the more important that we devote special 
care and attention to the condition of military families. The most 
important correction needed is to limit personnel and operating tempos 
so that military personnel are not away from their families for longer 
times than necessary.
  It is especially important that temporary duty assignments away from 
home be kept within limits. We also need to ensure that military pay 
keeps up with pay in the civilian sector. I am concerned that pay 
levels have eroded over time because of the way we calculate pay 
raises.
  In addition, we need to be careful to preserve some of the benefits 
which military families rely on. I am disturbed by proposals to 
eliminate military commissaries and exchanges. Because of the demands 
of jobs in the military, I believe it is critically important to assist 
military families in having access to quality child care. Quality 
health care for military families must be protected. I think it was a 
mistake to allow impact aid for schools with military bases to decline 
as it has. Military families care deeply about education for their 
children, and we need to ensure that the highest quality education is 
available wherever they are based.
  One of the most important initiatives the Defense Department has 
under taken recently is the effort to improve military housing. While 
much military housing is very good, much of it is not. I have seen 
military housing with broken appliances, cracked walls, warped floors, 
peeling tile, inadequate heat, stopped up drains, and with very poor 
responsiveness from maintenance staffs. We have to change this and we 
have to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
  I fear that the QDR will suffer from a major gap if it does not 
address the quality of life of military families.
  A third reason people cite for leaving the force is uncertainty about 
the future. Many military people have been willing to tolerate the 
stresses that have been placed on the force in recent years because 
they believe things will get better in the future. If things do not 
soon get better, however, I am afraid that the best people will throw 
in the towel and get out of the military.
  As I noted in this speech on defense budgets that I made a week ago, 
we have already gone through a defense drawdown that has reduced active 
duty force levels by about a third. This drawdown has imposed an 
immense burden on military personnel. It has meant that people have had 
to move to new jobs much more frequently than before because of the 
need to replace the large number of people who were leaving. It has 
imposed this strain on the military education and training system, and 
often people have started new jobs without complete training. It has 
made the military personnel system rather brutally competitive, the 
pressure to force people out means that any single mistake will cost a 
good soldier his or her career.
  This has directly affected people's ability to meet their career 
goals. Officers cannot count on receiving the education they need to 
advance. The amount of time that officers spend in command assignments, 
where they really can learn their trade, has declined significantly. 
Officers used to have 2 years of previous command experience at lower 
levels before they rose to be battalion commanders. Now they have a 
year or a year and a half. As a result, we are not adequately seasoning 
our officers, we are sometimes setting them up for failure, and we are 
not offering people the command experience for which they joined the 
force.
  All of these changes in the force, together with the high operating 
tempo, have created a great deal of uncertainty about the future. As a 
result, unless we stabilize the force, unless we pay attention to 
training and education, unless we allow good people to progress through 
the ranks in a predictable, fair way, we will discourage the best 
people from remaining in the force.
  Already we see signs of good people beginning to leave. It would be 
wrong to attribute the exodus to external factors. Pilots are leaving 
in large numbers, many say, because the airlines are hiring again. I 
will acknowledge that may be a factor but not the main one. The best 
people in the military services will always be confident of 
opportunities in the civilian sector. The people we want most to keep 
in the force are precisely the people who can always find lucrative 
careers on the outside. The issue therefore is not what lures people 
out but what drives them to leave.

  Good people do not sign up for the military as a career because they 
expect to make a lot of money. They need enough to provide security for 
their families but they are not going to be lured away by simply higher 
salaries. If good people are leaving, it is because military service no 
longer offers them the rewards they expected or because the burdens of 
service have become too great. If we continue to cut budgets, to reduce 
force levels, to require people to do more with less, we will drive 
away the best and the brightest.
  Mr. Speaker, these are the problems that I believe may in time lead 
too many good people to leave the force: High operating tempos, eroding 
support for families, and uncertainty about the future. There are other 
people issues that the Quadrennial Defense Review should also be 
expected to address. One is the very broad issue of civil-military 
relations. While there are many aspects to the issue, I am concerned 
especially about a potentially growing gap in culture between those who 
serve in the military and civilian society.
  We ask a great deal of people in the military. Sometimes, I think, we 
may

[[Page H2481]]

expect too much. When we see failures in the military such as evidence 
of sexual harassment at Aberdeen or in the Tailhook episode, the 
cultural gap may grow wider unless parties on all sides are careful in 
their judgments. When issues such as these arise, some within the 
military react by criticizing civilian society for imposing too much on 
the military, while some outside conclude that military culture itself 
is flawed. Both are wrong. Yes, I think there are failures within the 
military, but I also believe that the military can be counted on to 
identify and correct its failures. No, I do not think that the military 
can be exempted from advancing social norms, including requirements for 
sexual and racial equality, nor do I think that the military is 
identical to civilian society. Within the Congress, we have a special 
responsibility to take care of the military personnel from whom we ask 
so much. We are responsible under our Constitution to make rules for 
the Government and regulation of the land and naval forces. It is 
incumbent upon us therefore not to allow the gap between military and 
civil society to grow into a gulf.
  Mr. Speaker, over the past 2 weeks I have delivered three speeches on 
the future of the U.S. military. In each of these statements, I have 
called attention to the fact that Congress has often failed in its 
responsibility to provide for the common defense.
  I have said that I fear we are again embarked on a course which will 
leave our forces ill-prepared for challenges to come. More than that, I 
have argued that failure to maintain military strength will encourage 
the evolution of new international threats in the future that otherwise 
would not arise to challenge our security.
  This is a strong message. It is a sincere message. It is one that, I 
expect, some of my colleagues will find difficult to accept. I have 
tried to state it carefully and to explain my reasoning and to use good 
facts and figures to support my conclusions. Sometimes, however, an 
argument such as this needs something stronger. I am reminded in this 
regard of a passage in Gen. Douglas MacArthur's autobiography entitled 
``Reminiscences,'' in which MacArthur discussed a meeting he had with 
President Roosevelt in the late 1930's. At the time, MacArthur was Army 
Chief of Staff, and he was meeting with the President, along with the 
Secretary of War, to make an appeal for more defense spending.
  Secretary Dern, wrote MacArthur, quietly explained the deteriorating 
international situation and appealed to the President not to economize 
on the military. Roosevelt, however, was unmoved and reacted to Dern 
with biting sarcasm. Then MacArthur joined the argument, which became 
more and more heated. Here is how MacArthur describes what followed:

       In my emotional exhaustion, I spoke recklessly and said 
     something to the general effect that when we lost the next 
     war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy 
     bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying 
     throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be 
     MacArthur but Roosevelt. The President grew livid. You must 
     not talk that way to the President, he roared. He was, of 
     course, right, and I knew it almost before the words had left 
     my mouth. I said I was sorry and apologized. But I felt my 
     Army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation 
     as Chief of Staff. As I reached the door his voice came with 
     that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary 
     self-control' ``Don't be foolish, Douglas; you and the budget 
     must get together on this.'' Neither the President nor I ever 
     spoke of the meeting, but from that time on he was on our 
     side.

  Mr. Speaker, I hope that this Congress will not require an appeal 
like MacArthur's to remember the lessons of the past, that the price of 
unpreparedness is paid in war. The price of peace is much less.
  Let us, therefore, treasure those Americans who wear the uniform of 
our country. Let us appreciate them, encourage them, and care for them. 
For after all, it is they who bear the burdens of defending that 
precious American virtue: freedom.

                          ____________________