This country has tried repeatedly for generations now to try to make the UN more effective. We have consistently been good United Nations citizens. We have called for standing UN forces. We have called for rapid reaction forces. We had standby battalions for years that were at the beck and call of the UN, and we actually deployed them on occasion. Cyprus in 1964: we sent our standby battalion when that crisis blew up. But all the efforts that have been made to try to fix the UN have amounted to tinkering at the edges. And the idea that we should restructure our military in the hope and expectation that the UN will become more efficient somewhere down the road frankly doesn't make any sense to me. If the UN becomes more efficient, if world government becomes a reality, then we can restructure our forces. But it really isn't a chicken-and-egg thing. That chicken has to hatch before we do anything to do it.
We need a military force that is able to do UN work, blue-beret work, blue-helmet work, but we also need a military force that is able to do more robust operations, sometimes outside the UN. It seems to me that given the small size of our forces, that means we need a calibre of training and a quality of equipment that we can move from one type of role to another without great difficulty. It's a cliché, but it's one of those true clichés that a force that is only trained for UN duties can't do anything else, and we may want to do other things at other times.