Roger Marshall: “I very much appreciate the job that you and the ranking member and the staff and members of the committee have done in…”

“I very much appreciate the job that you and the ranking member and the staff and members of the committee have done in putting this bill together. It is an appropriate balance. Madam Chairman, the bill appropriately balances the needs of all of our branches and all of the different defense needs that we have, both present and future, whether it's in space or land or air or on the water. What I want to particularly mention is that part of the bill that contemplates the kinds of conflicts that we are likely to have in the future and how we need to organize ourselves to better address those conflicts. We have found, with our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq most recently, but historically with our experience in Vietnam, that our conventional force has a very difficult time dealing with the kind of conflicts that we are seeing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the kind of conflict that we saw in Vietnam. In Vietnam and today, we learned lessons, and those lessons are reflected in some of the things that we have in the committee's report and in the bill itself.”