On the recordJuly 6, 2016
I reserve the balance of my time to close. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. For those who persist in the fantasy that, someday, we will need to reinstate the draft, this legislation allows the President the authority to restore funding should he believe that such actions are in the interest of the national defense. Beyond that, the report, actually, from 1979, from the Selective Service, itself, said: We do not have the training capacity of the old days of training, with broomsticks, the young troops to go into war. Today, we have a professional military--the best in the world. If you believe in our military and if you believe in an all-volunteer force, then you will vote for this amendment. If you want to send a message that, someday, we are going to conscript young men, involuntarily, to go into the military, into a training capacity that doesn't exist, and have hundreds or thousands or millions of bodies, untrained, go into a massive land war, unlike the way wars are fought today with the professional military and much more targeted with drones and air strikes, then vote for this, say that we are going to go back to Korea, that we are going to go back to the way it was in World War II, that we are going to go back to World War I. If you believe we have entered into the 21st century and that we are never going to involuntarily conscript Americans to serve in the military again, the all-volunteer force is the best in the world.…
