Potential Drawdown of Land Forces
Floor Speech
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Mr. KNIGHT. Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Gibson for taking a leadership role in making sure that the military has a voice, and that is exactly what he has done in his tenure here in Congress.
I rise in support of H.R. 4534. The POSTURE Act is not just something that we are asking for. It is basically the bare necessities. We are getting down to the limits.
I can say, just on personal experience, when I enlisted in 1985 as a young person graduating high school and enlisting into the Army, I expected that we had such a great military and we had all of these things that were going to help me in my endeavors. As I went to Germany, my job was if something happened, if the Russians were going to come over, we were supposed to guard what was known as the Fulda Gap. I know that anyone who has ever served in the Army in the '80s knows what the Fulda Gap is. It was basically that line where we were going to stop the Russian Army.
Unfortunately, they told us that we were going to be outrun about 11 to 1 at that time from the Russian Army. That is not something that an 18-year-old wants to know, is that the very first assignment that might happen in the cold war is you are going to go to a spot and you are going to be up against an 11-to-1 army. At that time, we had about 781,000 active Army folks.
If we fast forward to today, we are sending people in rotations every 12 months or every 18 months. We are sending these people two, three, or four different rotations during their 4- or 6-year enlistments, and we have such a smaller active Army. I know that now folks out there will be talking about the total Army structure and the total structure. I think that is great that we have the Reserves and National Guard as part of the total structure. I believe in that. I think that is something that absolutely should happen.
But if we are just doing apples to apples from 1986 to today, we go from about 780,000 to less than 500,000. That is getting down to a point where, can we fight on two fronts, can we help, can we do all of the missions that the Army has done for the last 200 years?
I would say that we are getting down to that point where if we don't pass the POSTURE Act, we will go underneath that level and we will not be able to send our warriors into combat and into humanitarian situations with our best effort, with our best foot forward. I would say that this is the absolute--the absolute--end to where we should draw down.
Let's look at what we are looking at today. We are not looking at some of the larger countries, but we are also looking at rogue states. Russia and China, obviously, are out there and they are, obviously, doing things that we keep our eye on. Their technology has advanced, their amount of money that they spend on the military has jumped dramatically over the last 20 years. Some of the things that they are bringing forward are as technologically advanced as we have.
I would say that if we went back 20 years, we would never say that. We would say technologically we are ahead every step of the way. Today we can't say that. Today we also have rogue nations and rogue leaders out there that want to do things to us and to our allies.
So I say at a time where we are drawing down and continuing to draw down, where we have these types of rogue nations, where we have these types of superpowers out there, and we have these types of groups that want to do bad things to us and to our allies, is this actually the time that we should draw down to an unsafe level?
I would like to thank Mr. Gibson for everything that he has done in his tenure here in Congress and what he has done for the United States of America because, honestly, he is a true hero. But in this regard, he is trying to unite all of Congress behind what he has believed and what he has done for his entire life.
I think that Congress should listen, I think that Congress should say, yes, we absolutely have these levels, and we can't go below them. In fact, as we are watching everything that is happening on the news on a daily basis, we would say that maybe those levels are too low, too. So I would like to thank Mr. Gibson for his leadership.
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