Click here to watch video of Senator Clinton's remarks.
(Courtesy of Center for American Progress)

It is a great personal pleasure for me to be here at CAP and to commend all of you who are working every day to make CAP such a reliable and leading voice on the important issues that face our country and the world. And I thank Melody for her introduction and for her leadership here. And particularly because of these issues I want to express my gratitude to Larry Korb and his team here at CAP because he has been extremely helpful in setting the priorities that we should be following and giving some real guidance based on his experience and expertise to those of us who are in the Congress. I certainly miss seeing my dear and longtime friend John Podesta who is, as Melody says, out on a family matter but I want publicly to really applaud his leadership here at CAP. I don't think CAP would have made the mark that it has in such a short period of time without John Podesta showing the way. So thank you all for everything that you are doing.

I've joined you here at CAP at a time in which the readiness of our armed services and the support structure for our service members are at the forefront of our minds and our national debate.

Four years after the Iraq war began, our troops are stretched to the breaking point with many soldiers - as Larry said - on second, third, or even fourth deployments. Readiness levels are down. According to the recent Center for American Progress report by Larry Korb and others, "public statements by high ranking officials about overall readiness indicate that two-thirds of the Army - virtually all of the active Army's combat brigades not currently deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan - are rated not combat ready," and the authors conclude, "Not since the aftermath of the Vietnam War has the U.S. Army been so depleted." Well, unfortunately, Larry, I agree.

This widespread lack of readiness extends also to the National Guard and Reserves. On March 1st, a congressionally appointed Commission on the National Guard and Reserves released its second report to Congress. The years of repeated and prolonged deployments and inadequate budgets have left the Guard and Reserves so short of equipment, training, and personnel that 88 percent of the Army National Guard units and 44 percent of the Air National Guard units are not ready to be deployed. They are not prepared for overseas deployments and in some cases cannot even adequately respond to homeland security threats or emergencies. The chairman of this commission reported, "We can't sustain the [National Guard and Reserves] on the course we're on." Again, unfortunately, I agree.

Once deployed, our soldiers continue to carry the burden of these strains. We are still hearing reports from the frontlines of inadequate training and equipment. In January, after visiting Iraq and Afghanistan, I stopped back by Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany to meet with recovering soldiers. A young soldier lying in his hospital bed told me that his armored Humvee saved his life, but that too many of his comrades would not have been so fortunate because they do not have properly armored vehicles. We have all heard story after story of mothers and fathers or husbands and wives buying body armor and shipping it to their loved ones. I even heard, Larry, a story recently about a family that shipped welding equipment to their son so that he could help try to weld on additional armor onto the vehicle that they had been issued.

While the Pentagon has publicly expressed its commitment to equipping every soldier with the proper body armor, our experience over the past four years has demonstrated that strong congressional oversight when it comes to personal equipment or vehicles is necessary to ensure that our troops have the protection they deserve. And mission after mission, we find that our soldiers are facing some very difficult challenges. They face these challenges before deployment, they face these challenges during deployment, and now we know they face these challenges after deployment.

We've all been following with great distress the story about Walter Reed's outpatient facility and news reports of other hospitals and facilities where soldiers are struggling to receive appropriate care. When I visited Walter Reed again on Friday to meet with soldiers from New York, I found their tales of being caught up in the bureaucratic nightmares that surround them heartbreaking.

A soldier I visited with - a major from New York - has been at Walter Reed for more than two years in part because after he was injured in Afghanistan, he did not want to be removed from the battlefield and from the troops that he commanded. He stayed longer than he should have, and by the time he was finally evacuated his condition had deteriorated. Because of inattention and ill-treatment at Walter Reed, he had to seek care at Bethesda Naval Medical Center - not an easy decision for a soldier. He appealed his diagnosis and he was finally given the surgery he required. Now he faces yet another battle, with the medical evaluation board, to determine his level of disability. His case officer canceled the first four appointments because of overwork and being overly burdened. The major asked for legal assistance but his requests have gone unanswered.

I want to make clear that in my experience, and based on what I'm hearing from our young men and women in uniform, the doctors and nurses and staff, when it comes to acute care, are performing admirably. But everyone is falling into the same trap laid by a broken bureaucracy, a strained military, and presidential leadership that is missing in action. It turns out there are only three lawyers and one paralegal assigned to Walter Reed's entire evaluation process. Compare that to 4,000 Army JAG lawyers assigned to active duty, the National Guard, and the Reserves. A perfect if heartrending example of what are the real priorities for our administration.

The reports out of Walter Reed represent the latest pointed example in a constellation of disgraceful episodes, a pattern that has to go right to the top - a failure of planning, a failure of priorities, and a failure to achieve results. Too often our young men and women who give their all for us lack proper healthcare and preparedness before deployment, then the equipment and training is missing during deployment, and then they come home and once again lack proper treatment and care.

In the leadership vacuum that has been left by the Bush administration, too many members of the military and their families have been left literally holding their breath about what will happen next. Our soldiers are often finding themselves in impossible conflicts abroad where they're not sure who the enemy is, who's shooting at them, who's side they're on. And then back here they feel, in a metaphorical way, just about the same: who's on their side? Who's standing up for them? Who's speaking out for them? Where do they go to get the help that they and their families deserve?

I'm here to say that the buck does stop with this president. And if he doesn't take responsibility, I can assure you that the next president will - because our soldiers, our Marines, our airmen, our sailors, our Guard and Reserve, they don't have the luxury of passing the buck to somebody else. They step forward and they step up and they do the best they can, often under incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances.

When did we stop seeing every young man and woman who wears the uniform as our sons and daughters? Because we would certainly would not stand for this treatment for our own sons and daughters. And so today I'm proposing a series of steps to remedy some of these problems that have come to our attention: to enact a new G.I. Bill of Rights and a series of reforms aimed at keeping our promise to those who serve our nation. But we've got to do more, and we've got to make sure that we are reordering our priorities from wasting billions of dollars in overpayments to contractors overseas that cannot be accounted for, and instead spending what it takes to give the benefits that truly are needed by our soldiers, our veterans, and their families.

I believe if you serve your country your country should serve you. And that means we send that promise out to those who we ask to enlist, those who we ask to fight, those who we ask to do their best no matter what the orders they receive might be.

During my parents' generation, the original beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill - signed into law by President Roosevelt - believed in that basic bargain, that their country would give them something in return for what they gave their country. And they understood that if that basic bargain wasn't honored for our soldiers and our veterans, you couldn't count on it being honored for anybody. And the bargain helped a generation return from war to build families and businesses, highways and schools, expand higher education, forge the great middle class, and unleash the creative and hardworking spirit of America.

Now, we have been blessed in our history with leaders who understood that in the face of a "long, twilight struggle" we simply cannot close our eyes and wait for morning to come. We have to have control over our own destiny. We have to make smart decisions that protect America's interests and we have to honor those who are willing to serve.

Now, since joining the Armed Services Committee, I've worked hard to uphold that bargain with more than words - indeed, with actions. And improving and expanding access to health care for members of the Guard and Reserve was one of my first priorities. Tracking the health of members of the military is something that I took very seriously because during the Clinton administration some of you may recall we had people coming back from the first Gulf War with all these unexplained illnesses. You know, perfectly healthy young men in the prime of life who went over and served their country came back from the desert with chronic fatigue, with gastrointestinal problems, with very serious skin conditions and other problems that nobody could figure out where they came from, what had caused them. And we didn't have a good tracking system so that we hadn't tracked them before they were deployed, and it was very difficult to make a proper diagnosis when they got back. It became known as the Gulf War Syndrome or the Gulf War Illness. And I headed up a commission during the Clinton administration to bring more attention to what was happening to these brave veterans who had served our country so well.

So one of the first pieces of legislation that I worked on and got passed was to set up a pre-deployment and post-deployment tracking system. I've worked to make sure that we gave financial literacy education to military families, not only the deploying member but the family that would be left behind often not knowing how to pay mortgages or how to keep up with car payments. We're talking about very young people. The 20-year-old soldier who deploys may be leaving an 18-year-old wife and a one-year-old baby and they needed that help to get in charge of their financial situation.

We demanded oversight, and frankly until recently we haven't gotten what we demanded. There was an unwillingness in the Congress to hold the administration accountable and a disdain toward Congress from the highest levels of the Pentagon and White House.

So when we think about what we should be doing, let's look at the situation that describes most of our active duty Guard and Reserve members now. You know, gone are the days when Guard and Reserve duty meant one weekend a month and two weeks a year. We are using our Guard and Reserve on an op tempo that hasn't been seen since World War II, and with these new demands come these new responsibilities. And when you look at what was clearly a disparity between active-duty and Guard and Reserve, it became clear that we were sending off young Guard and Reserve members who had health problems. About 20 percent of them couldn't even deploy because of health problems. You might ask, "Why did they have health problems?" Because a lot of them didn't have health insurance. They were employed by employers who didn't provide health insurance or often they were self-employed and could not afford health insurance.

In September 2002, the GAO reported that the Department of Defense had found more than 20 percent of Guard and Reserve members did not have health insurance, a higher percentage than that for the general population. I worked with my colleague, Senator Lindsey Graham, to expand TRICARE, the military's healthcare program, so that now for the first time every member of the select Reserve and Guard can buy into TRICARE, and so can the small businesses who employ our citizen soldiers. I also succeeded in creating a health tracking program to monitor the health of our service members before deployment and to improve treatment after.

But what I'm finding is that oftentimes it's not implemented. It's not being actually applied. And we could not - when I did this legislation with former Senator Talent, we couldn't persuade the Pentagon to approve it if it included mental health screening, so we now have a big problem with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder and we don't have the baseline, and we're going to try to fix that.

When I heard coming from Fort Drum and other bases in my state about unscrupulous lenders fleecing members of the military and their families, I went to work with Senator Enzi to try to make better financial education and training available so that people wouldn't be taken advantage of. And when I started hearing about equipment shortages and inadequate supplies of body armor and armored Humvees, I called for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing to investigate these reports. I requested a Government Accountability Office investigation to focus on how the Pentagon's procurement decisions were made for this equipment. And I demanded that the Army make every effort to provide that additional body armor as quickly as possible to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I have also proposed a plan that I call the Iraq Troop Protection and Reduction Act that will prohibit funds from being spent to send troops to Iraq unless the secretary of defense certifies to Congress that the troops are being deployed with adequate equipment and training for their mission. Promises simply are not enough anymore.

And finally, we have a duty to our young men and women when they return home and they are now veterans and they will be veterans for life. And some come back with debilitating injuries and some of course we know never come back. And because of what has now come to light, we can finally focus attention of the Congress and the country about what we need to do to try to fix the problems that have been identified.

Today I'm proposing new efforts to fix the disability benefits system; to help returning service members adapt to civilian life, especially while recovering from their wounds and their psychological challenges, their traumatic brain injuries and their post-traumatic stress disorder; and I also want to help the children of single parents who have lost their mom or dad in service to our country.

In response to the reports of the disgraceful conditions and treatment that we have been receiving, I've asked the Army Inspector General to investigate what senior Army officials knew about the conditions and treatment of patients at Walter Reed and when they knew it. It's important that we hold people up the chain of command accountable, and we haven't done enough of that in these wars since 2001.

One common thread of the complaints that I've heard from the soldiers from New York with whom I met on Friday is the disjointed and unfair process for evaluating disabilities: the untrained and overworked staff; the inaccurate documentation by a revolving door of medical providers; the missing documents, the lack of legal counsel; the failures to address new conditions, namely, traumatic brain injury, which is becoming the signature injury of the war in Iraq; and the endless time that our soldiers are made to wait to get any decisions at all.

We also know that 45 percent of the Traumatic Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance claims have been denied. This is an unacceptable rate for insurance that is meant to provide immediate financial relief for wounded service members and their families. There's a perception from these soldiers that the Army is only concerned with releasing them with greatly reduced disability benefits in order to avoid costs. So today I'm announcing a proposal to fix the process that determines medical compensation for injured troops. The Department of Defense should review previously-denied cases and failed appeals. If warranted, we should provide these service members a new hearing.

We also have a duty to reform and ready the military for the increased number of veterans that are suffering from complex injuries. Many have recently learned about the traumatic brain injury after hearing the incredible story of journalist Bob Woodruff. But there are literally thousands of these stories, and lots of them don't have such a positive ending. They're being told in small towns and cities across our country.

Hundreds of thousands of the troops that have rotated through Afghanistan and Iraq have not been given the support they need. According to a March, 2006, study, 19 percent of Iraq veterans and 11 percent of Afghanistan veterans reported mental health problems, and many of them will not report those problems. It is estimated that traumatic brain injury affects more than 25 percent of bomb blast survivors.

When I was in the lobby at Walter Reed, I met a young Army officer who had lost one arm and lost three of his fingers. And I stopped to talk with him and ask him how he was doing, and he said, 'You know, I'm working hard at my rehabilitation and they're taking great care of me with my prosthetics,' he said, 'but what really bothers me is my memory. I don't have the focus that I used to have. I can't really set out tasks and know that I can accomplish them.' And he said, 'That's the thing that really bothers me.' He said, 'I'll be able to cope without my arm and my couple of fingers, but I've got to have my brain back.' And that's what I'm hearing from so many of these young men and women. A lot of them have no memory of what happened when the explosion occurred. They're trying to sort that out. They lose their short-term memory. And the diffuse and debilitating symptoms that they suffer leave them with cognitive and emotional problems, including the inability to adapt to civilian life.

And lots of times traumatic brain injury goes undiagnosed because a lot of returning soldiers don't even know they suffered the concussion. It happened in a split second. They regained consciousness. They're in a battle zone with all kinds of chaos going on. It's not until later when they try to begin to re-enter that they realize that there's something not quite right.

Now, last year I introduced legislation called Heroes at Home. It was an initiative aimed at helping U.S. troops transition after deployment. The Congress passed that into law because it is a first step in recognizing these practical problems that our returning vets experience. And it requires that we do a better job not only by beefing up our response in our military hospitals and our VA hospitals, but starting to use more networks of care even in the civilian community so that people are not waiting for six weeks or six months until they can get in to talk to somebody to try to figure out whether what's happening to them is something that unfortunately is a result of their experience and the dangers they faced, or maybe there's something else that is wrong with them.

So today I'm announcing a new initiative to expand my previous initiative that was enacted into law, the Heroes at Home, and I've developed this with the Wounded Warrior Project and the National Military Family Association. One, we should do what I tried to get done back in 2002: screen our troops for physical and mental conditions before they are deployed. Two, help families that take care of a loved one. Give them the education and the training they need for dealing with brain injuries and psychological challenges. When a roadside bomb explodes halfway around the world, it touches the lives of so many others who are waiting here at home.

And when the injured soldiers return home, they should be greeted with open arms, not a wall of bureaucratic red tape. Shortly after I joined the Armed Services Committee I heard reports about injured soldiers being in the hospital receiving bills for damaged or missing equipment. Now, imagine how you would feel, as one young man whom I met from New York, Robert Loria, felt. Here he was having lost his arm and being dunned because he didn't pick up his equipment and gather it while he was being evacuated on a stretcher. I mean, this was just out of some kind of Catch-22 world that just made absolutely no sense. It was embarrassing to hear these stories. And I have been pushing the Pentagon ever since. I've called for hearings. I've written the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army to call for investigations. I got every one of them to admit to me that they would begin to try to fix these problems.

And I demanded an audit. And just last month I received the results of that audit. The Department of the Army found that almost a quarter of the 1,216 wounded soldiers that they examined in the audit had not been paid what was owed them on time, so clearly we have a lot of work to do to straighten out so many of these unconscionable delays, difficulties, and barriers that our soldiers and their families face.

And finally, there's an issue that doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's one that I think every one of us ought to be just determined we're going to fix. We're deploying a lot of single parents overseas. They leave their children maybe with their parents or their siblings or a trusted other relative or friend. And when that single parent is killed in the line of duty, that child - now an orphan - is often cared for by a loving, but financially ill-prepared grandparent, relative, or guardian. In too many cases, single parents killed in combat were not given sufficient understanding of the options they faced to designate a guardian as a beneficiary for survivor benefits. So today I am proposing a simple but important step: to provide service members the option to select a guardian as a beneficiary to provide care for designated dependents. That is an option that we currently do not offer.

Now, everything that I've talked about today I wish we didn't have to talk about. I wish that this was not the subject that anybody could give a speech on, but it's important that we face up to our shortcomings. And no matter how anyone feels about the war in Iraq or any other issue concerning the use of our military, I think we all agree that we owe these young men and women the very best care and treatment that we can offer them. A new G.I. Bill of Rights will honor the basic bargain at the heart of America's promise: our troops deserve all the healthcare and support that they are entitled to.

I want to end with just two quick stories. Another one of the New Yorkers I met on Friday - a staff sergeant - is in outpatient facilities. He, too, was physically injured and suffered from traumatic brain effects as well. He's appealing a disability benefit of 10 percent. His wife is also in the service: an active duty soldier who recently returned from a hardship tour halfway around the world. This couple is doing everything they can to support our country and to fulfill their duty, but they're not being given the best that they deserve. The staff sergeant requested that his wife be reassigned or made temporarily available so that she can assist him in making this transition he's going through. He's in tremendous pain. He suffers memory problems.

And the morning that I met with him, he heard I was coming and he wanted to feel like he was in total control of his faculties, so he denied himself his medication so that he could tell me his story. And his story really is about how he feels: that he's been left behind by our country. It was clear that despite the low disability rating he'd been given he is terribly afflicted.

The second story comes from an earlier time in our history. On December 9th, 1941, when President Roosevelt addressed the American people in one of his fireside chats, the nation was in shock. Pearl Harbor had taken place just two days before.

At that moment, the president said, "We are now in this war. We are all in it - all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories."

That was presidential leadership that understood when American soldiers are in harm's way, we are all at risk. When any one of them is injured, we are all diminished. And when they give the ultimate sacrifice, it is all of our loss.

Two and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor and that fireside chat, President Roosevelt signed into law the original G.I. Bill of Rights.

Well, we have a choice to make: are we all in it? Are we all going to stand behind those who are giving everything they have? I think we will, but I think we need to be summoned to do that. So let us work not just to respond to the outrage and the problems of the moment, but to chart a new course for the military and the VA to take care of those who are taking care of us. I have no doubt in my mind that we are guided by the best of American values, not by politics, and if we are steered by the truth, not by wishing it were different, we will produce real results and not just rhetoric. And that is what our troops deserve from us.

Thank you all very much.

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Watch video of Senator Clinton answering audience questions.

Read more about Senator Clinton's proposed new GI Bill of Rights.

Read more statements by Senator Clinton concerning conditions at Walter Reed.

Read more statements by Senator Clinton concerning veterans.

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