Political Quotes

“As it turns out, if you look across the globe today, we have United States forces stretched around the world in places and numbers we have not seen for a long time--not only Iraq but Afghanistan, Bosnia, Korea, Japan, Germany, and many other places. We support the deployment of those military personnel through a combination of sealift and airlift. When I served on active duty during the Vietnam war, we were fortunate in having so many more overseas bases from which we could forward deploy or resupply. Many of those bases are closed today, and we rely instead on a mixture of different kinds of aircraft, military and civilian, and on sealift, a variety of ships to serve as a bridge, a sea bridge or an air bridge, to connect this country to our troops deployed around the world. The air bridge is changing. In this country we are seeing the retirement of an older aircraft built in the 1960s. The C-141 is being retired. It is being replaced by a newer aircraft, a very good aircraft called the C-17.”