The Associated Press October 28, 2007
Rep. Skelton makes good on his pledge of oversight
Missourian fears strained military leaves America vulnerable.
WASHINGTON (AP) - When Rep. Ike Skelton took over as head of the House Armed Services Committee this year, he pledged "oversight, oversight, oversight."
He has kept that promise with an aggressive schedule so far, holding more than 90 hearings and reviving a key panel on defense oversight and investigations that Republicans had disbanded.
The post has also given Skelton, D-Mo., a bigger platform to spread his warning that the Iraq war has stretched U.S. forces so thin, they might be not be ready to face another conflict.
"You’re just wearing these troops out," Skelton said in an interview. "If we don’t redeploy them in good order, get them back with their families and allow them to retrain themselves and re-equip them, when the next threat comes along, we’re not going to be able to handle it as well as we should, and that worries me to death."
But as Skelton and other leading Democrats have repeatedly failed to garner enough votes to set a deadline for bringing troops home, they have increasingly turned to oversight to influence the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.
Skelton’s committee has played a key role in that process. In its first major report this summer, the newly reconvened House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations found it could not verify how many of the 346,500 Iraqi military and police personnel are adequately trained to handle security in the country.
Despite the investment of $19 billion to train Iraqi security forces, the widely publicized bipartisan report concluded it would be years before those forces could take control of the country without U.S. help.
"Congressional hearings and investigations can bring to light information that might otherwise be pretty scarce," said John Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va., think tank.
Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who serves as the top Republican on the oversight subcommittee and signed off on the report, called it a "mixed picture" of progress and said it showed that U.S. officials need to do a better job of measuring how effective the Iraqi forces have become.
While Akin generally supports the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, he praised his Skelton for bringing an evenhanded approach to the panel, focusing more on solving problems than partisan finger-pointing.
"Ike is a Democrat, but he’s a Missouri Democrat," Akin said. "He’s a very cautious, very planning, don’t-take-risks kind of guy. And that’s the way he sees the military, that we need to have extra strength, we need to be well-prepared."
Skelton hopes the rebirth of the oversight subcommittee will place more pressure on Department of Defense officials to answer the tough questions and defend their conduct. He sees it as a successor to the 1940s-era Truman Committee, which saved the government millions of dollars in government waste and contractor fraud during World War II.
Skelton’s main focus, though, has been his concern about the "readiness" of U.S. troops.
The strain of extended troop deployments in Iraq has left forces ill-equipped to respond to other national security threats or unexpected conflict elsewhere in the world, Skelton said.
Over the past 30 years, the United States has been involved in 12 military conflicts, four of them "major" in size and nearly all unforeseen, Skelton said.
"You don’t know what the future holds," Skelton said. "That’s why need to keep forces ready and strong, and Iraq has just drained them out."
© Copyright 2007, The Associated Press
