Rodney Frelinghuysen: “I thank the chairwoman from Texas for her time and for her leadership on national security and intelligence issues.…”

“I thank the chairwoman from Texas for her time and for her leadership on national security and intelligence issues. Indeed, I would like to thank all members of the subcommittee-- Republican and Democrat--and the staff for their hard work to assure defense and intelligence funding and also for their work on a variety of continuing resolutions that relate to the same. Mr. Speaker, I rise, once again, to support this Defense Appropriations bill just as I did in July and again in September. I visited our troops in Iraq twice last year in addition to official trips to north Africa and Southeast Asia. My goal is always to assess U.S. posture in those regions militarily and diplomatically. I can tell you, from those experiences, our Nation's competitive military advantage is badly eroding, and our allies, partners, and adversaries know it. So how have we responded? The reality is: not well enough. In fact, we have pushed our military towards its breaking point. Instead of upgrading our hardware, we have allowed our equipment to age. Instead of arming our troops for tomorrow's fight, we have let them become seriously under-equipped. Instead of rightsizing our Armed Forces, we have reduced their size. Mr. Speaker, we ask a great deal of our men and women in uniform. We ask them to leave their families to complete difficult training. We ask them to move from duty station to duty station without complaint. We ask them to tolerate long deployments far from home.…”