Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) called for military reforms that reflect the changing nature of America’s wars while speaking at a conference Tuesday morning on national security and the military reserve.

Clinton joined Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura (I-Minn.) and other distinguished speakers on campus for the conference hosted by the Center for American Progress.

Clinton, Reed and Ventura, who all spoke separately, addressed the changing roles of the National Guard and Reserve both at home and abroad.

“We are in an era of changing and difficult challenges,” Clinton said.

The National Guard, which has historically remained on the home front during wars abroad, now constitutes, along with Reservists, over 40 percent of U.S. forces in Iraq. The Guard is also expected – and needed – to serve domestically in order to monitor homeland security and aid in relief efforts following natural disasters like the hurricanes which have devastated Florida over the past month.

“There’s been a fundamental shift in the way we utilize our Guard,” Clinton said. “The changing of the Guard presents many challenges.”

Clinton called on the Bush administration to “adjust to the new reality” and provide Guardsmen and Reservists with increased healthcare services and better, more modern equipment as they serve in unprecedented roles at home and abroad.

“We are not backing up our rhetoric with resources,” Clinton said. “The [Bush] administration wants to do all of this on the cheap.”

Senators Clinton and Reed, who traveled to Iraq together last November, called for more benefits to be extended to the Guard, including healthcare benefits and family support services similar to those provided to other military families.

Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that over 20 percent of National Guardsmen are without health insurance. Clinton also discussed a bill she has sponsored on improving the healthcare monitoring of Reservists called to serve in the war on terrorism.

Clinton and Reed said that they felt the size of the standing Army should be expanded to reduce demand on the Guard, especially given their role in overseas engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We have to rebalance our military forces,” Reed said.

Reed said that he felt an increase in the size of the U.S. Army should be put in the nation’s permanent budget, and he called the Bush administration’s opposition of such a provision “unfathomable.”

“We should be very proud of what our military has done in the past few years to protect us,” Reed said.

According to Reed, almost 50 percent of the National Guard has been mobilized since Sept. 11, 2001. Since Guardsmen generally live with families and work civilian jobs in addition to Guard responsibilities, Clinton said that this deployment has taken a toll on their families economically and emotionally.

She added that many Guardsmen serve as local law enforcement officers as well, so increased Guard deployments have left many towns in her state of New York with a depleted police force.

“These citizen soldiers reflect the full diversity of our nation,” Clinton said.

Unlike the Army soldiers they serve beside, Clinton said that Guardsmen and Reservists often lack the proper equipment and training for many of their missions in Iraq. She said that this was “totally unacceptable.”

Ventura, a former Navy SEAL, said that he felt the Guard sorely lacked adequate training for their assignments in Iraq. He added that the Guard’s purpose was to protect the homeland against terrorism and called their deployment to Iraq a “flagrant misuse” of the Guard.

“We’re putting our National Guardsmen up like a front line combat unit,” he said.

Clinton said that she felt “totally confident” that the war on terror would have a positive outcome, but added that she felt improvements in benefits to the Guard and Reserve will bring this end about faster.

Reed called the Iraq war “poorly planned,” a sentiment which Ventura echoed later that day.

The war in Iraq, Ventura said, was “invading a sovereign nation.”

“I have a problem with the U.S. military [being] used in that capacity,” he said. “I always thought the U.S. was above that.”

Ventura, the first Reform Party candidate to hold an office in the state of Minnesota, went on to criticize the two-party political system in the United States, comparing the choice between a Democratic and Republican presidential candidate to the choice “between Pepsi and Coke.”

“Don’t try to choose anything else – our country doesn’t let us,” Ventura said. “I’m not voting because I have no one to vote for. I think the majority of Americans sit where I sit,” he added.

He said that, following Ross Perot’s progress in the 1992 presidential election, the two main political parties have restructured presidential debates as to hinder the participation of a third party. He called televised presidential debates a “rubber stamp” for the Democratic and Republican parties.

“Pro wrestling is real compared to the debates you’re going to see,” Ventura, a former professional wrestler, said.

Green Party candidate Ralph Nader “is going to bring up subjects these other two won’t touch with a 10-foot pole,” he added.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank founded by Georgetown University law professor John Podesta, hosted the event in conjunction with the Association of the United States Army and the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.

Podesta said that the concept of the Guard, or citizen soldier, was “as fundamental to our nation as the Declaration of Independence.”

Members of College Democrats and Georgetown University Women in Politics received a limited number of tickets to the event.