Congress can best determine how the Army should look only if it has good and accurate data, a leading congressman with a National Guard background said last week.
Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., a co-chairman of the House National Guard and Reserve Components Caucus, said the structure of the Total Army is too important to get wrong and is not a decision that should be made by long-held biases and rhetoric.
“Let’s be driven by data,” he said last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C. He was speaking at the release of a CSIS report on the future of the National Guard. (See next story.)
Walz, who retired from the Minnesota Army National Guard as a command sergeant major, said he is open-minded on the issue despite his background.
“My goal is not to protect armories in every small town in America,” he said. “If that’s not what’s good for the nation, if that’s not what’s good for defense, if that’s not what’s good for the economic strength, then we need to make those hard decisions.”
He said the investment made by the nation in the National Guard since 9/11 must be protected, but only within good reason.
“It’s a force that is tested and hardened in battle and we need to decide how best to use them,” he said, “but it must be predicated on data.”
Walz favors a commission to study the structure of the Army.
