Patty Murray

The Marine Corps deems the end strength of the Reserve Component is adequate.

Expanding TRICARE coverage to 'gray area' retirees must be weighed against costs and the ultimate impact to overall force readiness.

In December, I sent a letter to the National Guard Bureau signed by all the members of the Washington State Congressional delegation requested to have HAMMER training center be named the western regional training center for National Guard…

We are following it and hoping that we can keep it going as long as we have kids out there who need a second chance.

It is a great program, and I want to commend you for doing that.

So am I for big-time Youth Challenge? Absolutely.

I really commend you. I think you have made a lot of progress with that, and it is so important...

While the surgeons general aren't responsible for the enforcement of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice, it seems to me that they might be concerned about prosecutions of people who have severe mental distress while serving or after…

We all stick together.

I'm worried about compassion fatigue with our nurses, and I know that's a recruiting issue, and a retention issue.

The Army's deployment schedule and adequate care of both soldiers and their families is very important to me.

I wanted to personally thank all of you and everyone you oversee for the tremendous work that they do.

I think that the worst thing we can do is to not talk about it.

I find the trend very disturbing because these crimes are happening at all.

The Reserves and particularly the National Guard have some unique concerns when they're deployed.

Could you get back to me on that? It was one of our huge questions 1 year ago; making sure that people were registered and we were tracking them.

I thought we were all going to go to the same system.

No one said it was going to be easy.

I appreciate that. Again, once we get the 2009 bill passed, hopefully tonight, we do have money in there for some pilot projects on homelessness.

I think the best thing to do is to completely overturn the 2003 ban.

I do not think we should nickel and dime them for their care.

As the lead sponsor of the Women Veterans Health Care Improvement Act, I was especially glad to see the budget enable the VA to provide additional specialty care for female veterans.

I think our veterans already paid, and proposals that just simply balance the VA budget on their backs are, you know, as far as I am concerned, dead on arrival.

It will be dead on arrival if it lands here in Congress.

Modernizing our VA into a 21st Century organization is not an easy task.