Chuck Hagel: “I wish to acknowledge my friend, the junior Senator from Virginia, and also recognize his leadership, not just on this…”

“I wish to acknowledge my friend, the junior Senator from Virginia, and also recognize his leadership, not just on this issue that he has framed over the last few minutes on which the Senate will be voting, as we did in July, but his years of contributions to this country--specifically his efforts on behalf of our military. I think most of us recognize the distinguished record of Senator Jim Webb, that service to his country. We appreciate that, and in particular his leadership on this amendment is important. Senator Webb and I wrote this amendment many months ago. We introduced it on the floor of the Senate in July. We received 56 bipartisan votes for it. As Senator Webb has noted in his explanation of what this amendment does, it is relevant to our Armed Forces, to our country, and to our future. I wish to take a little time to expand on a couple of the points Senator Webb has made. First, a democracy of 300 million people, the greatest democracy in the world, the oldest living democracy in the world, finds itself in a situation today where we are asking about 1 percent of our citizens to carry all the burden, make all the sacrifices. We will be dealing with this issue for many years to come, because the consequences of what has been going on are that we are doing great damage to our military force structure, great damage to our Army and our Marines.”