As the military continues to downsize as the United States pulls out of the Middle East and as the decade-long conflict comes to an end, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith said some difficult budgetary decisions would be made that will impact Joint Base Lewis McChord.

With the budget reductions, Smith warned about the dangers of sacrificing military readiness and its ability to respond to a crisis in national security.

"You wind up with a force that is not trained and ready to perform the missions that our national security documents says they're supposed to do," Smith said. "To me that is unconscionable."

Smith, a democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1997, stressed the need for keeping funding for training, for updating equipment, for maintenance. Without the training, Smith said the result is a "hollow force."

"What you have is a large force, a lot of equipment, a lot of personnel, but you don't have the money to train them," Smith said. "You don't have the fuel to let the pilots fly when they need to. You don't have the ammunition that you need to train.  It's better to have a smaller force that is trained and ready."

Smith, speaking at Tuesday's Howard O. Scott Citizen-Airman Award presentation to reservist Master Sgt. Lance Nelson (read cover story in this week's Northwest Airlifter), said that JBLM will weather the downsizing better than most bases across the country. But reductions will be made as the Army is projected to be reduced from 590,000 to 440,000.

"You can't help but have some kind of impact on the forth largest military base in the Army," Smith said. "It will be interesting to see what will happen. What the impact will be on national security. If we don't make a decision on what to cut, inevitably the things that end up getting cut are the last person in line at the buffet and that's readiness. That's operations, maintenance. That's updating equipment, the training. And that's a hollow force."

Smith said the U.S. has gone into wars before without sufficient training and suffered the consequences.

"Most of the wars we've started the first people we've sent off to fight them have not fared well," Smith said. "They did not fare well because they were not trained well and they were not ready. That happened in North Africa in World War II. That happened in Korea. It happened in just a brutal and ugly fashion. We do not want that to happen again."

Whatever the military force size, Smith said it's imperative they're trained and ready to do the mission they're called to do.

Smith also talked about the importance of maintaining the industrial base that builds the military's weapons and equipment.

"One thing I'm not going to be shy about is advocating for budgetary decisions that try to maintain that industrial base," Smith said. "This is problematic because the media will inevitably criticize you for that. They're building stuff the military says they don't need. And while that's technically true, it overlooks that industrial base argument. When the military is going to need it, they won't have it. An option is we increase our foreign military sales. There are some options out there."

With budget challenges ahead, Smith said some difficult decisions would have to be made.