Haley Stevens: “we join the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed, with his distinguished military career, who has raised this issue. Some…”

“we join the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed, with his distinguished military career, who has raised this issue. Some time ago, we had reports on this matter of the reset funding and the goal of about $17 billion for that purpose. I personally visited with Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Gordan England and Admiral Giambastiani about this and asked they check how much was needed for this reset operation and urged them to deal with the Office of Management and Budget so we would not have any problem over the total amount. If you examine the bill, as we have it now, with the moneys we added last night, and the money that is already in the bridge account, there is the $17 billion there that was requested by the military. In my trips to Iraq, I visited some of the places where they are up- armoring large trucks and up-armoring some of the humvees and saw some of the activities they were pursuing in order to get better armor on some of the helicopters. All of this is part of the process, and it is not something new. After the Persian Gulf war we had two separate requests for funds for the reset activities. And ``reset'' is a word of art in the military; that is, to literally reset the force and the equipment so it is usable and ready in the event of another operation, should that be necessary. But again, we had several sums suggested.…”