[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 6 (Tuesday, January 27, 2004)]
[House]
[Page H117]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   WE NEED MORE MILITARY END STRENGTH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, last year I stood in this well and called 
on my colleagues to support an increase in the Nation's military end 
strength, the number of people in our uniformed services. I am pleased 
that my colleagues rose to the challenge and recognized the increased 
pressures that have been placed on our servicemembers. As a result, 
Congress last year authorized an increase in end strength of 2,400 
soldiers for the Army and 300 airmen for the Air Force.
  Unfortunately, this increase is just a small down payment on what the 
services, particularly the Army, need in order to meet today's 
increased operational tempo. Nearly a decade ago, Congress heard from 
the Army leadership about the need for an increase in end strength. The 
then Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, General Ted Stroup, 
testified before the Committee on Armed Services that the Army needed 
25,000 more soldiers to meet ongoing operational needs. Our ongoing 
operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have only made the need for 
additional troops more imperative. I think we need an additional 
40,000-person end strength increase in the Army alone, not to mention 
the other services.
  Many servicemembers who were sent to Afghanistan to search for Osama 
bin Laden and defeat the al Qaeda went home after their tours only to 
be told to pack their bags because they were going to Iraq for a year. 
Brigades from the 10th Mountain Division and from the 101st Airborne 
Division were sent to Afghanistan. They returned home for a relatively 
short duration, and then they were sent to Iraq to prosecute Operation 
Iraqi Freedom. If we continue these back-to-back deployments, we will 
literally break the force. That is something we as a Nation can ill 
afford to let happen.
  And now our military is about to embark on the largest troop rotation 
in the history of our country. I wish I could say that the replacement 
troops will be fresh, but the hard truth is that many of them will be 
returning to Iraq for consecutive tours. If we had enough people in the 
military, back-to-back tours in Iraq would not be necessary. It is 
important for everyone to understand that in the new force rotation 
into Iraq, National Guardsmen and Reservists will comprise about 40 
percent of the force there.
  We are using the National Guard and Reserve as never before, and we 
have to be careful not to put such strains on these citizen soldiers 
that they leave in droves or that recruiting suffers.
  I was in Missouri recently and met with one wife of a National 
Guardsman now serving in Iraq. She told me when her husband returns 
from overseas he will be getting out of the National Guard and as many 
as one-third of folks in her husband's unit will be too.
  This may be anecdotal evidence of what is going on in our Reserve 
components, but it is certainly cause for concern. The increased 
demands being placed upon our troops in uniform call into question the 
ability of our forces to meet its commitments in other parts of the 
world. If conflict erupted on the Korean peninsula while these brigades 
are in southwest Asia, our ability to respond quickly would likely be 
compromised.
  Recently, Lieutenant General John Riggs, a senior Army officer, 
stated that the Army must be substantially increased to meet its global 
commitments. Yet the Secretary of Defense continues to maintain that 
the services have enough end strength already to meet their 
responsibilities and that the increased demands on the troops is only a 
spike or temporary increase. As a result, my expectation is that the 
President's budget will not include any permanent end strength increase 
but will permit only temporary overages associated with our current 
deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  The Department of Defense believes that additional servicemembers are 
not needed because we proved that our troops can vastly overpower an 
enemy with speed agility and power in war. The problem is that we are 
no longer in that type of war. We are rebuilding a Nation from the 
ground up. That kind of undertaking takes people. And right now we 
simply do not have enough.
  There is simply no substitute for having boots on the ground. To get 
the job done right I am pleased that a number of my colleagues have 
recognized the importance of increasing end strength. A number of them 
have written to the President and the Secretary of Defense calling for 
an increase in end strength. Others like the gentlewoman from 
California (Mrs. Tauscher) have introduced legislation to this effect.
  We must, we can, and we will in this Congress pass an authorization 
bill authorizing for appropriation additional end strength for the 
United States Army as well as the other services.

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