Today is my #AliveDay.

The day 15 years ago that I probably should’ve died in a dusty field in Iraq after an RPG tore through the helicopter I was flying. https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/12/opinions/duckworth-alive-day-military-health-care-education/index.html

From the moment I woke up in Walter Reed, I vowed to repay my buddies who saved me—and all who've sacrificed to defend this nation. I can’t fly combat missions, but I can use my role, serving not from the cockpit but the Senate, to ensure our military is the strongest it can be.

We have the greatest military today, but that won't be true tomorrow if we keep embracing an oversimplified view of national strength that measures the might of our military by the size of its defense budget – making a flawed assumption that past dominance predicts our future.

So we need to balance investing in our weaponry with investing in our citizenry, rejecting the false choice between looking out for our troops overseas & caring for our families at home, by ensuring every American has access to good education & quality, affordable health care.

If we don’t… well, then we’ll be letting our dwindling recruiting pool shrink even faster, ceding our place in the world to bad actors like Russia and China in the process.

Because unless our citizenry is strong, our weaponry won’t matter.

Our nation was founded on the notion of a more perfect union. It was built on the idea that we can always do better—never achieving perfection, but always striving to climb a little higher.

To me, that’s true patriotism.

That’s how we honor the sacrifices of those in uniform.