National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. I thank the ranking member and the chairman for their work on this important piece of legislation.

In this en bloc amendment, I have an amendment that identified by DOD some important goals in maintaining the operational force of our Reserve and National Guard. These current conflicts have shown the Nation the incredible professionalism and the transformation from a strategic reserve to an operational reserve; and the three things that DOD identified are ensure that the armed services have access to trained, experienced, and ready Guard forces for missions short of war; capitalize on the gains made in readiness in the Reserve component; and ensure that the total force is able to sustain commitments around the world utilizing the unique skills and capabilities of the Reserve component.

What this does is it gives DOD--and it is a very limited scope--the ability to be able to access under title 10 those National Guard and Reserve forces for missions short of war at the end of the conflicts or as we wind down these conflicts.

My experience with this was after the first gulf war as our artillery units--and some of them were coming back--in training them, we ended up with no pieces of equipment and ended up taking tape and marking on the floor what a Howitzer looked like and using toilet paper rolls as the training aid for that. That is no way to maintain the incredible professionalism that we have in this force. It's no way to use the investment that we've made in this force in the proper manner. I'm very pleased that the ranking member and the chairman have agreed to put this in. I think it's the right thing to do for our security.

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