The 30-Something Working Group

THE 30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If the gentlelady would yield for a moment, let us also think about what this message is to those that would sign up for this volunteer military force being sent to defend our country overseas. Not only is this unconscionable to those who have sacrificed everything to fight for this country in Afghanistan and Iraq, but think about those who we are asking to join the Armed Forces. We don't have a draft any more, and many people are thankful for that. We rely on the decisions by courageous men and women across this country to join voluntarily our Armed Forces.

So when they see people coming back from these wars, being treated without the basic dignity that any of us would expect those men and women to be treated with, I would think, I hope it doesn't, but I would think it might give pause to those that would join our military.

So I think of this from a point of conscience deep inside me, and I also think about it from a standpoint of national security. What kind of signal are we sending to those who are going to be the next generation of troops when this is how we treat them when they come back.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Altmire. Your veterans in your district and veterans across this country have you to thank, along with others, that you helped rally to the cause to make sure that the continuing resolution that we passed here, which is effectively the Act that keeps the government operating, that provides the resources to different agencies, including the Veterans Administration, you made sure that that bill had the proper resources in it for our veterans.

Here is the good news. We are talking about what is past and we also have to talk about the prologue as well. A new sheriff is in town, and the good news for veterans and for the American people is that we are going to make those investments in veterans health care. We are going to change things in this Congress. Mr. Altmire and I ran in part to make those changes, and Mr. Meek and Ms. Wasserman Schultz stood up here night after night after night making the case for that change.

If the American people spoke out about many things, one of them certainly was that part of our change in foreign policy had to be doing justice to those veterans. So I hope that when people hear us talk about some of the bad things happening within our veterans system here, they understand that we are only saying it because we are part of the movement which is going to change that.

The Disabled Veterans of America were in my office today, and they shared with me a pretty remarkable statistic, and I hope I get it right. In previous foreign conflicts, the ratio of those killed to those that were wounded in battle was 3 to 1 wounded to killed in action. In this conflict, it is 16 to 1. Now, that is great news, that we have made advances in protection for our soldiers, in armor, in the ability of our medical professionals to intervene on the battlefield that we are saving that many lives. It is a tragedy that one is lost, never mind the 3,000.

The stress, though, that that puts on our system is a great one. We have more and more wounded, more severely wounded coming into our hospitals, and it means that we have to step up to meet that new obligation. We are so lucky to have people coming back that can still go on to lead productive lives, but only if we provide them with those resources.

The other story that they told me was of the number of young soldiers just back from this war who are ending up in in-patient care in our State veterans hospitals, those that have been afflicted not just by the physical wounds, but by the mental wounds as well.

Our obligation has to be not just to treat the broken bones, the damaged bodies, but also to the mental stress that these brave men and women have come back with.

I just want to talk for a minute about who we are talking about here, because we have fought previous battles in a very different way. We have relied largely on our enlisted men and women to fight these wars, and I think we need to remember who we are asking to go over to Iraq and to Afghanistan to fight because no longer is it just our enlisted men.

We are treating our National Guard basically like they are our normal Army today. Sometimes we forget that. It is good we are the 30-something Working Group here because sometimes young people that have only seen this conflict think that that is how things are, that the National Guard and the Reserve are sort of like everybody else and they get sent over there, and that is what they signed up for. Well, that is not what they signed up for. That is not how we have conducted our military interventions in the past.

We have zero active duty or Reserve brigades in the United States right now that are considered combat ready. We have 84,000 members of the National Guard and Reserve that have been deployed two times or more since 2001. The average mobilization for a Reserve or National Guard member is 18 months, and now, as we are learning that the President is once again going to rely on National Guard forces to be part of this new escalation in Iraq, we are finding out that these forces, as they get ready in their hometowns and their home States, are not even close to combat ready in terms of the equipment they need.

The Oklahoma National Guard reports that one-third of their members do not have the M-4 rifles.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We are talking about the best of the best. If anyone was able to operate and achieve under the strain, it is the men and women in our Armed Forces, and so we expect a lot of them because we know the training they have been through. We know the kind of people they are, but we have asked so much of them that we can ask very little more.

We do differentiate at some level between our enlisted men and our National Guard and Reserve troops, and I think it is appropriate because when you are talking about them, you are talking about ripping somebody out of a family, out of a community.

These are not just fathers and mothers. These are small businessmen. These are employees. These are employers. These are members of the PTA. These are members of the Elks Club. These are people who hold communities together. That is the type of people that our members of the Armed Forces are. Those people that sign up for the Reserve and National Guard do that because they have this commitment to their community, and it does not end with their commitment to their military service. They are part of the community in ways that a lot of other people are not.

So when you talk about bringing people out two or three times to serve in the Reserve and National Guard, you are breaking up families and communities. That is why we had an enlisted service.

I think one of the discussions that we will have going forward, and one that I think will be bipartisan agreement on, as there has been with most everything we have done here, is that we need to have an honest conversation about increasing the troop strength of our military, increasing numbers of troops that are enlisted and doing this as a permanent job, because it has gotten to the end of the limit of a lot of the people who are serving in our National Guard and our Reserve.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I just want to bring up one other topic here as well before we yield back to Mr. Meek, and that is also, when we ask our men and women to go over there and fight, and then when they come home and they are not taken care of, we also need to remember who we are sending over there, our Reservists and National Guard, but who is joining them over there. This is a tangential but important topic. President Bush has talked a lot about this coalition of the willing, and we need to understand that the American people, when they hear about the allied forces over there, know who they are now, because people are jumping ship faster than the evening news can keep up with it. Great Britain, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea. By the week, somebody else walks away. And as we make decisions in Iraq, like this plan for escalation in which there is not even a pretext of reaching out and forming some international consensus, remember when we went into Iraq in the first place, at least we tried to pretend that we were going to go through some international decision-making process. At least we sort of gave some faint illusion of using the United Nations as a forum for which to have this discussion. You didn't even hear a conversation about trying to reach out to our allies with this plan to escalate this war. I mean, we didn't. Because why? Because we knew if we asked Great Britain or Poland or South Korea or Lithuania to be part of this force, the answer would be pretty simple.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If you sort of listen to the rhetoric coming out of the administration, you would think this grand coalition has, what, 50 percent American troops, 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent? No. Ninety-two percent. Ninety-two percent of the troops on the ground in Iraq are American forces. We went from a high of coalition troops, those are non-American troops, of 25,000, and now down to almost below 15,000 troops and dropping by the day.

So I think that is just a point of information that we have now decided on a path that isn't even going to have a hint of coalition-building. We have decided to go this on our own. And, frankly, I think that has grievous consequences for what is happening on the ground in Iraq, frankly has just as important consequences for the future of foreign policy when we have gotten to a point where we don't even talk to our allies about our strategy there.

And I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida.

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