[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 7, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H1357-H1362]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. (Mr. Hansen). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter] is recognized for 60 
minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about something that was 
important to Ronald Reagan and important to the American people and at 
the heart, I think, of our success as a Nation during the 1980's and 
very much at the heart of whether or not we will be successful in the 
1990's, and that is national security.
  Today the President unveiled his defense budget and, Mr. Speaker, to 
be charitable, it is a budget that slashes national defense.
  To give you some idea of the magnitude of the cuts that have been 
made by the Clinton administration, it is important to understand that 
in 1990, President Bush, then President Bush, got together with the 
Democrat leadership of this House, and he established a defense line 
below which we would not cut, and Democrats and Republicans agreed that 
that was an important line to keep, an important mark to keep if we 
were to maintain America's interest and maintain the security of our 
people. Now, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the commencement of 
the breakup of the Soviet Union and in light of that, in 1992, 
President Bush got together with his Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, 
his then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and they 
put together an other defense budget, and because of the breakdown of 
the Soviet empire, they decided that they could prudently cut $50 
billion over 5 years below the agreement that the President had made 
with the Democrat leadership in 1990, and they started to engage in 
those cuts, $50 billion.
  Well, when President Clinton was elected, he put together a 5-year 
defense plan cut $127 billion below even the Bush cuts of $50 billion. 
That means about $177 billion below the agreement that had been made in 
1990.
  I want to talk tonight a little bit about what this installment, this 
year's installment of the Clinton defense cuts will mean to the armed 
services of the United States and to the security of the American 
people.
  You know, last year the President's people projected what this year's 
defense budget should be. And what is very interesting, and I heard 
Secretary Perry give a very well-ordered speech yesterday in 
description of the defense budget, but it was interesting to see that 
Secretary Perry and President Clinton have cut $9 billion in new 
weapons systems, new equipment systems, out of the budget that last 
year they felt were important systems. And it is also interesting to 
see that President Clinton understood last year that he was about $6 
billion short with respect to this year's defense budget. He knew he 
would have to get the money somewhere.
  And yet he only added $2 billion to this year's defense spending, 
meaning he knew that he was going to be going in the hole about $4 
billion.
  Well, Secretary Perry says, and I am paraphrasing his theme, he says 
that our country will be ready to fight even with these reduced forces. 
Let me tell you how low our force structure is going to be under the 
Clinton defense plan.
  We are going to go from about 18 active army divisions to 10, almost 
cut 50 percent in our army divisions. We are going to cut from about 24 
fighter air wing equivalents to about 13, and we are almost there. That 
means we will have to cut from America's
  air power almost 50 percent.That means we are cashiering young people 
at a rate in excess of 1,500 young people a week out of the military, 
and I am reminded of what George Marshall said at the conclusion of 
World War II when we were demobilizing at such a radical pace, and when 
he was asked how the demobilization was going, he said, ``This isn't a 
demobilization, it is a rout,'' and I would assert what we are 
undertaking right now is not a demobilization, it is not a drawdown, it 
is not a prudent reduction, it is a rout.
  [[Page H1358]] Now, I want to concentrate right now just on what the 
President is cutting this year, that last year he said he needed. 
First, the first item on this list is called the TSSAM, TriService 
Standoff Attack Missile, and very simply, for those folks that watch 
CNN and watched our aircraft in Desert Storm approach various strategic 
institutions of Iraq like bridges and roads, command bunkers, and for 
those people that watched those precision-guided munitions leave an 
aircraft some distance from the target and be guided in by a laser 
spotter or other means, they watched those munitions guided in and hit 
those targets precisely. I think we all remember when CNN showed the 
depiction of Iraq's luckiest taxicab driver. He was a guy that got 
about all the way across that bridge, just barely got across the bridge 
before a precise munition hit that bridge and destroyed it.
  Very simply, in these days when the other side, the bad guys, have 
some missile systems that are very accurate, that is surface-to-air 
missiles, that can kill your planes, knock down your planes and kill 
your pilots, you need to have standoff missiles. Those are systems you 
can launch from many miles away. You can turn the airplane back. You 
can get the airplane safe, and your missile will follow on. It will hit 
that bridge. It will hit that antiaircraft position. It will hit that 
command bunker with precision. We need precision-guided systems.
  Now, the interesting thing is that after he canceled this new 
precision-guided system that we desperately need, the President also 
canceled some other classes.

                              {time}  2120

  He canceled the air-launched cruise missile, which is a very accurate 
system and which could have filled in for the standoff missile that he 
was cancelling. So, he canceled the air-launched cruise missile also. 
We were going to purchase between 75 and 100 air-launched cruise 
missiles, and the President canceled that system.
  Now, with respect to Cobra helicopters, the Cobra is a gun ship. It 
is one of--in light of the fact that we have not developed a new 
helicopter lately, we have not moved forth on the Apache program. It is 
an important helicopter for our ground troops and works in close 
support with our Army and with our Marine troops in ground assaults. 
The President canceled nine of those.
  With respect to the Comanche helicopter, which is a new scout, armed 
scout, helicopter that the Army says is very important to their mission 
and that the President's own review, the so-called Bottom-Up Review, 
said was important to the Army's mission, the President has entered an 
order of no production. We are going to be building a couple of 
prototypes, but we are not producing as of now.
  With respect to the DDG-51 Aegis destroyer, we are coming down from a 
Naval fleet that was close to 600 ships, between 500 and 600 ships, and 
we are coming down to less than 375 ships, and the DDG-51 Aegis 
destroyer is a very important ship because each one of these ships 
carries what I call a little SDI system. It is a system that allows 
radar to track a missile that is coming in, or an aircraft that is 
coming in, and shoot out a standard missile, one of our surface-to-air 
missiles, ship-to-air missiles, and destroy that incoming missile, and 
this ship has a potential of being developed as a theater ballistic 
missile defense system.
  Now what that means is, for those of us that watched those Scud 
missiles, which are ballistic missiles, zeroing in on our troop 
concentrations in Desert Storm, Aegis destroyers off the coast of Iraq, 
had he had this new theater missile ballistic missile system developed 
at that time, it could have shot down those missiles in mid-air, much 
as your Patriot missile systems did with varying results on the ground. 
So, this is a system--this new ship maintains an air defense system, 
which could blossom into a theater ballistic missile defense system 
that will protect American kids, our men and women in uniform who are 
concentrated in various areas of the world.
  So, it is a very important system. The President is canceling this 
new production, this production of a single new ship, in this year's 
budget.
  He is also canceling this LPD-17 amphibious transport dock. Now that, 
according to the bottom-up review, is an important part of our ability 
to take a beachhead, and the President is going to cancel that.
  F/A-18 C/D's; those are our new fighter slash attack aircraft that 
are based on our carriers which are supposed to take over the roles of 
two aircraft, our F-14's and our A-6 attack aircraft. Now the 
interesting thing is we actually purchased about 27 fighter aircraft 
last year in the entire American inventory. That means that the United 
States of America bought fewer fighter aircraft than the country of 
Switzerland.
  Now, just to keep our fleet modern, because we lose a few aircraft 
all the time, our aircraft are always exercising, they are always 
training, they are often on deployment. Just to keep the fleet 
modernized so we do not end up with a bunch of 1965 Chevy aircraft, we 
have to buy about six times that number of aircraft each year just to 
keep our fleet modern so the young men and women who are flying those 
aircraft have a good chance of coming back alive.
  The President this year is going to buy 12 aircraft. That is less 
than half of what Switzerland purchased last year.
  Now with respect to E-2C's, those are the AWACS aircraft that our 
Navy uses, and those aircraft can detect adversary aircraft. That means 
that, if we have a ship or a battle group that is off the gulf in the 
Middle East, and we have aircraft, adversarial aircraft, that are 
launched by Iraq or Iran, and E-2C aircraft is your early warner. That 
is the aircraft that has a guidant pod on top of it, a radar system, 
and it can tell you what is coming in, and when you scramble your own 
aircraft to meet that threat, it helps direct them in for the kill. We 
are canceling one of those this year.
  The Tomahawk missiles I already mentioned; we are canceling 97 of 
those. Tomahawks are tried and true missile systems, and I cannot give 
you the absolute number of standoff weapons because that is a 
classified number, but I can tell you that we are
short on standoff weapons. We could expand in a real conflict like a 
Desert Storm conflict all of our standoff weapons in a fairly short 
period of time, and it makes no sense, even if you are downsizing 
people and you are cutting the number of ships and the number of 
aircraft you have, it makes no sense to cancel your standoff weapon 
systems and cut down those numbers. Those are bullets in your gun, and 
just because we have enough troops and have enough bullets right now to 
go out and engage in a very fast firefight, you also have to have 
sustainability. That means the ability to fight for days, for weeks, 
and sometimes for months, and that means you have to have a big enough 
  stockpile of ammunition and missiles to do that job.And finally we 
have the Trident II D-5 missiles. That is considered to be very 
important part of the remaining part of our nuclear deterrent. Those 
are nuclear missiles, strategic missiles that are mounted on our 
submarines, and while we are cutting out almost all of our land-based 
missiles, we are alshing our bomber force, we are relying more and more 
on our submarines, and yet the President is cancelling this most modern 
program in our strategic submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
  So this President interestingly is not just cutting $127 billion 
below what George Bush thought was prudent. He is cancelling his own 
systems. He is cancelling systems that he said last year we would need 
and that his own experts said we would need, and I see the gentleman 
from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] has risen. I yield to my friend.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I say to the gentleman, ``Thank you, Mr. 
Hunter. I wanted to make sure I got this straight. You were saying 
earlier that what the President or the administration had said is that 
we can fight a battle on two fronts, a war on two fronts, and, 
listening to you, I'm not so convinced that is true. How would you 
respond to that?''
  Mr. HUNTER. Well, actually I think it would be very, very difficult 
for the United States to be engaged in two wars the magnitude of Desert 
Storm and win, and secondly, even if we won, it would be very difficult 
to win without taking enormous casualties. Secretary of Defense Dick 
Cheney said, as I recall, some months into the Clinton cutbacks that it 
would be very, very 
 [[Page H1359]] difficult to win a single Desert Storm again in the 
manner that we won it the first time, and there are two aspects to 
fighting this regional conflict.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, let me ask 
him about Desert Storm.
  Now that was what, a 43-42 day war?
  Mr. HUNTER. It was a very short war because the United States has 
overwhelming force, and that was the point that I am getting to, that 
you reap a couple of benefits from having a vastly superior force. One 
is that you close the war down quickly by winning with overwhelming 
force, but the second is you do not bring a lot of young Americans back 
in body bags, and it was projected that we could have lost 40,000 
people in Desert Storm, but because we were so successful in building 
enough weapon systems in the 1980s, like the M-1 tank, the Apache 
helicopter, the Patriot missile system, we were able to win quickly, 
and that saved thousands of Americans' lives.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Now that being the case, as I recall, and I used to 
know the number, but the American casualties were just incredibly low 
for a conflict of that scale. Does the gentleman remember the numbers 
offhand?
  Mr. HUNTER. I do not have the exact figure on the number of American 
casualties, but I believe the number of American KIA, killed in action, 
was less than 200, and interestingly almost a majority of those, or a 
majority of those casualties, came from the Scud attacks, just a few 
ballistic missile attacks which were made by Saddam Hussein, and that 
brings out the question as to why this President is cutting back on our 
antiballistic missile capability because we saw with just a few 
launches Saddam Hussein was not only able to show the world that he had 
offensive capability against the United States, but he was able to 
bring about our largest number of casualties when his Scud missiles hit 
the American barracks.
                              {time}  2130

  So this President has cut back on theater ballistic missile defense 
systems, and that means our ability to stop an incoming missile that is 
launched by an enemy that is coming into our troop concentrations. Our 
old Patriot system was kind of a model T. It was kind of a model T 
Ford, and the incoming ballistic missile, the SCUD system, sold to Iraq 
by the Soviet Union, was kind of a model T also. They were both fairly 
slow moving in terms of modern warfare. But by golly, we shot down 
those missiles, a number of them in midair, and saved a lot of our 
troops. We had varying success, but at least we had something to shoot 
some of those missiles out of the air.
  This President ought to be accelerating the program. Let me tell the 
gentleman, you have the theater high-altitude defense program, this 
great Navy program where we already have the radars on the ships. We 
have to train them to be a little different. You have the missile tubes 
for the standard missiles. We need a little modification, and we can 
turn that system on the Aegis ships, which the President is cutting, we 
could turn those into theater defensive systems.
  So if we have a marine America amphibious force on the land in the 
Persian Gulf, say they just made a beachhead and are there with their 
tents and operations and artillery and are setting up, and SCUD 
missiles start coming in, our Aegis ships can back off of the land a 
little bit and throw up a protective umbrella around those marines with 
their antiballistic missile defense systems, they can shoot down 
incoming ballistic missiles that come in to threaten those marines.
  That program is called the Navy upper-tier program, the high end of 
this Navy program, which has a Navy lower tier that is kind of like the 
Patriot missile defense system, but the Navy upper-tier program that 
can shoot down the fast-moving incoming ballistic missiles, has been 
cut down to $30 million by the President. That may seem like a lot of 
money, but that allows us to basically terminate the program. It gives 
you just enough money to terminate the program, pay all the contractors 
you owe money to.
  Mr. KINGSTON. You were saying earlier that the number of divisions in 
the U.S. Army is being scaled back from 18 to about 10. What is 
happening in the Marines, particularly as respects this program? 
Because if you do not have the manpower, you do not have the 
technology. I know that we have got shuttle diplomacy, and I do not 
know that this administration has really anything to brag about on 
shuttle diplomacy. I think the Carter administration sure does, it has 
resurrected itself quite well.
  Mr. HUNTER. I would say, to be fair to the President and the 
Secretary of Defense, Mr. Bill Perry, the Marine Corps forces have not 
been reduced. they have only been reduced by a few tens of thousands. 
They have not been reduced as drastically as the Army has been reduced 
and as the Air Force has been reduced. I think that that makes a lot of 
sense. So that is one area where this administration has not reduced 
drastically.
  But one thing that this President has done with respect to the 
marines is run them ragged. And my information is that the marines who 
came out of the Bosnian theater, who had to come back after 6 months, 
were given about 12 days of time with their families, and then they 
went right back into the Haitian theater. That is called stretching 
people thin. And that is one reason the Commandant of the Corps said at 
one time he only wanted single people to apply to the Marine Corps, and 
that is because there are not a lot of wives, except maybe some 
congressional wives, who will put up with these husbands being gone for 
such long periods of time.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I am going to have to grab a little time here to say it 
is also true with the Rangers. Fort Stewart is in the district I 
represent, the 24th Infantry Division, and my district manager's 
husband is a Ranger and another employee's husband is a Ranger, and 
they are gone all the time. And they are first class people, just 
topnotch.
  Mr. HUNTER. In fact, the gentleman has opened up another area that I 
think is very important, and that is that we have utilized our Armed 
Forces, the remaining Armed Forces that we have, as world policemen. 
And these peacekeeping operations in Haiti, in the Bosnian theater, I 
think we have carried on now the Bosnian airlift longer than we carried 
on the Berlin airlift. In Africa and around the world, we are using our 
military forces, but not so much in sending them out with a military 
mission to win a war
or battle and come back, but as peacekeepers. I think when the final 
bill is in, we will have spent about $1.7 billion until Haiti just on 
  that peacekeeping operation.What that does to the gentleman's Rangers 
is it stretches them thin. It keeps your Rangers from spending as much 
time as they should at home. It also uses up the money that they have 
for training and for equipment repair and for spare parts and all the 
things that amount to readiness, it uses that money up. And let me tell 
you what Secretary Perry has said, to go through this analysis he has 
been giving for the past several days.
  He has been saying, you know, we are not going to sacrifice 
readiness. He was a little embarrassed by the three Army divisions last 
year to be found to be in less than a complete state of readiness. He 
said it is true money used for peacekeeping missions comes out of the 
hide of the military. That means you do not get to train your top gun 
pilots, go out to the rifle range as much, get those spare parts, so 
you become less ready because you are using all your money to go off on 
peacekeeping operations.
  He said we are going to see to it we do not use up our readiness 
money this year. What he did not tell you is this: What he did not tell 
you was he was not going to add that much money, because we are only 
adding $2 billion this year, and we have a $6 billion shortfall by the 
President's own estimate of what we would need, the estimate he made 
last year. So we are still $4 billion short.
  What Secretary Perry did not tell you is he was going to cancel all 
these modern weapons and equipment programs to pay for this year's 
readiness. So what he has been doing, in the old axiom, is robbing 
Peter to pay Paul. So the problem is we are going to have less modern 
equipment for these young men and women when they need it.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Now, we are also about to consider an emergency budget 
for the military of about $3.4 billion. Of that, one-half of it is 
going to come from cutting existing programs. But then the other half 
of it has already 
 [[Page H1360]] been spent in Somalia, in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Haiti, 
and actually going back to Iraq as well.
  One of the things that concerns me as we do some of this globe 
trotting and getting back to the Rangers and the Marines and so forth 
is that when we were in Somalia there was not a clear American peril, 
there was not a clear objective and there was not a clear mission, 
there was not a clear timeframe to achieve the mission nor a plan to 
get our personnel out. And if you are a service person going over 
there, then it is going to have to be a little bit discouraging. Even 
as loyal as I know that they are, it is very discouraging to realize 
they are doing these missions, and there is not a statement, there is 
not an objective.
  So I think in terms of the dollar, it is one thing. But the morale is 
another.
  Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman is absolutely right. You know, when young 
men and women join our service, they do it under an understanding there 
is some risk involved, and they do it with an understanding their 
mission will be to engage in conflicts on this Nation's behalf, and win 
those conflicts. And I think a lot of them do not want to sign up to be 
peacekeepers, to spend their time away from their families nursemaiding 
folks in other countries.
  While Americans do not mind sacrifice, and I think that is the key, 
and I remember Desert Storm and I am sure the gentleman has not only a 
lot of active duty people but reserve people who volunteered for Desert 
Storm because they thought it was worthwhile, I think a lot of those 
people have second thoughts when they are told that the mission is 
``peacekeeping.'' In some cases that means ``nation building,'' trying 
to impose our structure of government on a country that is very 
resistive to that imposition.
  I think that Americans, American troops, have experienced a cut in 
morale because of this new mission that they see this President giving 
them.
                              {time}  2140

  And I think what bothers them most is he is not giving them 
everything that they need to carry out this tempo of operations. They 
know that that is making them a little less ready to have to carry out 
those operations.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Well, I wanted you to talk about the personnel and so 
forth in the Army and the Marines staying about level, but the Army 
going down tremendously.
  As I understand it, and these numbers are rough, but there were about 
2 million troops in the armed services in 1991. And now is that number 
not about 1.5 million? It has been cut roughly 25 percent in terms of 
personnel, which that may be appropriate since there is not a conflict 
going on like Desert Storm, but am I accurate in that?
  Mr. HUNTER. Let me give the gentleman the numbers that come right 
from the Personnel Subcommittee chairman, the gentleman from 
California, Robert Dornan, who issued this statement today of active 
duty end strength. It has gone from, the gentleman is right, from an 
excess of 2 million personnel to about 1,400,000. So it has been cut 
not quite in half but not too far away.
  Now, let me just read what the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] 
has said: ``End strength reductions for this year are slightly 
accelerated over what DOD projected in last year's budget submission. 
DOD will end fiscal year 1995 about 2,300 below the end strength 
authorized by the fiscal year 1995 DOD Authorization Act.''
  That means that this glidepath that the President has us on that is 
going to end up going from 18 Army divisions to 10, from 24 air wings 
to 13, that we are on that glidepath, we are cutting sharply, but this 
year's reductions cut even more sharply, 2,300 personnel, more sharply 
than what we have projected last year. It says that the fiscal year 
1996 DOD request projects an end strength loss of 40,790 from fiscal 
year authorized levels, so that is how fast we are going down. We are 
going to have 40,000 less people this year than we had last year.
  That means that we are losing people at a very high rate, at about 
1,700 young people a week are being cashiered out of the uniformed 
service.
  Mr. KINGSTON. In terms of dollars, we had a budget in 1991 of just 
shy of $300 billion. And now this projection, and I do not know if you 
or the gentleman from California, Mr. Dornan, had a number, but is it 
260?
  Mr. HUNTER. It is this year, I would say to my friend, we are going 
to spend about $257 billion. The President's people made a great thing 
about the fact that he was adding $2 billion to his glidepath. So it 
was 255. It is going to 257. And the gentleman is right. That is down 
almost $40 billion from what it was in 1991.
  But let me put it another way: If you look at what we spent in 1988, 
the last year of the Reagan administration, and really we had the 
highest spending level in 1985, but if you look at what we spent in 
1988, in real dollars, that means not adding inflation or adding 
inflation each year, in real dollars, and you compare that to what we 
will spend in 1998, that is 2 years from now on this glidepath that 
President Clinton has taken us on, the annual budget in 1998 will be 
$100 billion less than it was 10 years ago. That is the annual budget.
  So when President Clinton stands up and talks about how he is taking 
a knife to all these programs across the board, you have to understand 
that actually almost all of his cuts, real cuts are coming out of 
national defense.
  Mr. KINGSTON. It is ironic because you hear so often about cutting 
the budget and you hear about the Pentagon waste. You hear all about 
agriculture waste. And yet the two agencies that have had the biggest 
budget cuts of all are the Department of Defense and the U.S. 
Department of Agriculture. And if we can get HUD and Health and Human 
Services and Education and some of these other agencies to take the 
cuts just in percentage that defense has taken, we would be very close 
to having a small deficit compared to the $200 billion deficit which 
the President's budget projects for this year.
  Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman from Georgia is absolutely right. We have, 
as I recall in this city, in Washington, DC, we have what I guess 
military would call headquarters personnel, because all of the agencies 
do not carry out functions in this city but they have their 
headquarters people here who issue orders and demand reports that come 
in from all over the Nation. So we have all these agencies like 
Agriculture and all the rest of them, HUD and many others, 
headquartered here in Washington. So I guess our line troops would 
refer to these as headquarters
staff, and we have over 450,000 headquarters personnel in the social 
  agencies right here in Washington, DC.Mr. KINGSTON. It is 
interesting, everybody does like to jump on the Pentagon, wasteful 
spending and talk about the $400 toilet seat and $200 hammer and so 
forth. We want to know about these things. We want to ferret it out. We 
think that is what the mission is about, defense of the country, 
survival of the country, and protecting your son or your daughter who 
may need to have the most high-technology airplane or tank or ship or 
whatever.
  Here is something that we spent, as taxpayers, your taxpayers in 
California and mine in Georgia, $30,000 on this poem. I am going to 
read this to you.

       Suddenly, masked hombres seized Petunia pig and made her 
     into a sort of dense Jello. Somehow the texture, out of 
     nowhere, produces a species of Atavistic anomie, a melancholy 
     memory of good food.

  It was written by Jack Collom of Boulder, CO. The National Endowment 
for the Arts awarded $30,000 for that poem.
  And yet we are telling our American service personnel that they 
cannot get a raise. We are rolling the COLA's of veterans so that they 
cannot get what we contractually obligated to them.
  I have met in Hinesville, GA, service personnel who can qualify for 
food stamps and other public assistance benefits. Some of them are 
taking them, some are not. But it is very hard to tell somebody who is 
on his way to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, wherever, we have got $30,000 for 
poems like this and your tax dollars are paying for it. I think one of 
the things that we are about in this Congress right now is to go back 
and try to find things like this so that we can spend our dollars 
smarter, cut where we need to. But where we are going to spend, let us 
spend it appropriately.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thing the description of the expenditures that were 
made by the National Endowment for the Arts 
 [[Page H1361]] are one thing that would lower the morale of our 
service people if they knew that that was keeping them from having a 
higher quality of life. Let me just say, this Secretary, Secretary 
Perry, gave a very even and I thought a very smooth press conference. I 
like Secretary Perry. I think he is a fine gentleman.
  He gave, he has given a series of briefings about the defense budget 
and said we are ready, our readiness levels are good and I am good to 
spend, he said, and I am quoting him, ``I am going to spend enough 
money to provide for quality of life for our armed services families.''
  What the Secretary did not say was that he is providing this new 
quality of life because Republicans have rolled the administration in 
past years. Last year, when President Clinton did not provide a pay 
increase for military families, the Republicans saw to it that he did. 
So this year the President is anticipating that and they are going to 
provide a pay increase for military personnel. But they are going to do 
that by taking out these very important modernization programs which 
could save the lives of those young people in battle. So they are 
serving them in one way, they are disserving them in another way.
  But let me tell the gentleman that the cavalry is here. The 
Republican Contract With America, which was successfully passed out of 
the Committee on Armed Services with a good bipartisan vote, and I 
might compliment the Democrats on that committee who really have the 
interest of the country at heart, because we passed it with the vote of 
a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans, but that H.R. 7, the 
National Security Act, that legislation provides for something that is 
very critical to the United States.
  It says that the United States shall deploy at earliest opportunity 
theater missile defense systems to stop those ballistic missiles from 
coming into our troop concentrations where they exist around the world. 
It also says that we shall deploy missile defense systems against 
ICBM's that may come in and strike portions of the United States.
                              {time}  2150

  Now we are doing this because we have listened to all of our 
intelligence agencies, we listened to CIA director James Woolsey, who 
talked about the growing ICBM threat and missile threat. We live in an 
age of missiles.
  One thing that was not lost on all these Third World countries, 
including countries like Korea and China, was that with all of our 
superior military capability in Desert Storm, the one place where 
Saddam Hussein was able to get the attention of the world and make an 
impression was when he used ballistic missiles against American troop 
concentrations.
  So you have the North Koreans building the taepo-dong missiles, some 
of which, at the end of this century, will begin to acquire the 
capability to go several thousand miles and to hit American troop 
concentrations a long ways from Korea, and ultimately hit some of the 
United States positions in the Pacific, that will be able to threaten 
our allies.
  We see North Korea doing that. We see engineers and scientists from 
the Soviet union being hired by Middle East countries to develop 
missile systems for them. We see China moving ahead with ballistic 
missile systems.
  We have to develop the ability to stop those ballistic missiles. It 
makes sense-- a lot of Democrats say ``We will stop them in the 
theater, but we do not want to have a national ballistic missile 
system.''
  We passed out of the Committee on Armed Services, or now the 
Committee on National Security, H.R. 7, the Republican Contract with 
America, that said ``We shall deploy a national defense system.'' That 
means if a missile is launched intentionally or by mistake at the 
United States, we want the ability to shoot it down before it hits New 
York or San Diego or Houston or Detroit or any other part of the United 
States of America.
  And we are going to be building that missile defense system, even 
though this President this year has cut national missile defense 
funding by 80 percent in this budget.
  I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I guess it is just true that as long as 
there are people like the gentleman, and some of the others you have 
mentioned tonight and in the past in your speeches, I think there will 
always be somebody inside and underneath the dome who is looking out 
for the American service personnel and the security of our Nation.
  I appreciate the gentleman's leadership on this. I appreciate being 
with you tonight. I know you have some other comments, but I'm going to 
yield the floor and wish you the best and plan to support you in these 
endeavors, and work with you.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Kingston, I want to thank you as a good friend and a 
person who really has the interest of the United States at heart. Even 
though you are doing a lot of other important things and you are not a 
member of the Committee on Armed Services, we all thank you for your 
interest in national security, because that is one of the primary 
reasons for our existence, this House of Representatives, and you serve 
your people well by exhibiting that interest and supporting a strong 
national defense. Thank you for being with us.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. HUNTER. Let me talk for just another minute or two about the 
missile defense programs, because Secretary Perry went over that the 
other day and he has a word that he likes to use. It is called robust.
  Robust is a pretty subjective term, and something that is robust to 
one person may not be robust to another, so I want to talk about the 
real funding levels that President Clinton put out on the table in 
today's budget, this year's new budget, with respect to missile 
defense. We all know missile defense is important, both theater missile 
defense, that is when you shoot down the slow-moving missiles before 
they come into your troop concentrations, like the Scud missiles coming 
into our barracks in the Middle East during the Desert Storm, and you 
also want national missile defense that will shoot down fast-moving 
missiles that are coming into your cities, whether by accident or by 
design.
  Mr. Speaker, the President's request for missile defense in this year 
was $2.9 billion. That sounds like a lot, and that has been described 
by Secretary Perry as robust, and I guess compared to the rest of the 
President's defense slashes that may be robust, but this is the lowest 
amount requested since fiscal year 1985, which was the very first year 
that we started the SDI program, that is, the missile defense program.
  Mr. Speaker, regarding national missile defense, the President asked 
for around $500 million. That is $371 million for the ballistic missile 
defense office and $120 million for the Brilliant Eyes program in the 
Air Force, about $500 million.
  That amounts to about an 80 percent cut over what President Bush 
recommended in spending on missile defense, because President Bush 
recommended spending about $3 billion, so President Clinton has cut 
this program by four-fifths, even though his intelligence agencies tell 
him we live in an age of missiles.
  You had better be able to shoot missiles down, not only coming into 
your theaters, but coming in by accidental or designed launch by Third 
World adversaries into your population centers. At some point these 
nations are going to have the capability of delivering ICBM's into the 
United States, and several adversaries besides the remnants of the 
former Soviet Union have some ICBS's right now. China, for example, has 
ICBM's right now. North Korea is working at a feverish pace to develop 
ICBM's.
  Mr. Speaker, a lot of people say wait a minute, we don't have to have 
these theater defenses or these national defenses yet, because Korea 
doesn't yet have a missile that can reach the United States.
  The point is, it takes us a while to build these defenses. You want 
to make sure that the missile system you are going to send up to shoot 
down the incoming ballistic missile is ready for deployment before the 
ballistic missile that is going to come into the United States is ready 
for deployment. The point is, it takes us about 10 years to build these 
systems, so it does not make sense to not get started.
  [[Page H1362]] President Bush wanted to get started on a national 
defense system, and he recommended spending this year $3 billion. 
President Clinton has cut that by four-fifths, by 80 percent. Those are 
real facts.
  Mr. Speaker, regarding theater missile defense, this President 
requests approximately $2 billion. That represents a cut of $800 
million from the spending level that was recommended by President Bush.
  Again, he recommends only $30 million for what is known as the Navy 
Upper Tier Program. That is this very effective, high altitude program 
that can be used to defend Americans by using Navy ships with their 
standard missile tubes and with their existing radar.
 You turn that into an SDI system, and you shoot down incoming 
ballistic missiles. That is a very promising system.

  When the President did his own bottom-up review, his experts, his 
reviewers, said ``We should move toward this Navy Upper Tier Program. 
It is an important program for acquisition.'' They called it at one 
point a core program, an important program, and he has killed it, 
because the $30 million that he has allowed for the Navy theater 
missile defense system is only about enough money to close up the shop. 
It is about enough money to close the doors, pay off the contractors 
who have existing contracts, and forget that system.
  Why is the President abandoning the defense of our troop 
concentrations around the world? Because that is exactly what you are 
doing when you give up one of your most promising technologies.
  Mr. Speaker, one other thing the President is doing that is very 
disturbing is this. Right now the ABM treaty does not limit the 
production of American theater missile defense systems. Yet, his 
negotiating team is now working with members of the former Soviet Union 
to limit the theater defense systems that we can set up around the 
world to protect our troops. That does not make a lot of sense.
  I can simply say that, without naming names, that I have talked with 
a number of our military experts, people in the service and out of the 
service, who are very, very worried that this President, in his haste 
to make deals, is making a deal that we are going to regret because it 
is going to stop programs cold that could have defended Americans in 
time of war.
  Therefore, the President should review this Navy Upper Tier Program 
which he himself, which his own analysts have said is a very, very 
important program.
  Mr. Speaker, finally, when the President did this bottom-up review 
program, he went through all the requirements, or his experts went 
through all the requirements of things we would need for a strong 
defense establishment in the coming year.
  One aspect of that review covered ammunition. Ammunition is kind of 
important. You need ammunition in time of war, and you need lots of it, 
because you have to sustain your troops. A three-month or a six-month 
or a nine-month war is a lot different from a two-week war, and you 
expend ammunition sometimes very quickly.
  According to the Army's own study, the amount of money that this 
President is going to spend on ammunition is about 50 percent of what 
we need. According to the Army's own study, we are seeing the collapse 
of about 80 percent of our industrial base that makes ammunition.
  Now, doggone it, you have to have ammunition in time of war. The fact 
that you have got smart, sharp, well-trained troops doesn't mean 
anything if their guns are empty.
                              {time}  2200

  And yet this budget that was presented today by Secretary Perry gives 
us about half the level of ammunition that the Army's open study says 
we will need in times of war. That is the President's open review, this 
so-called Bottom-Up Review board.
  So in this very important area of sustainability, the President is 
deficient, and his Secretary of Defense, while he is an excellent 
manager and he has taken this little shrinking pot of money that the 
President has given him and he has tried to manage that reduced amount 
of money as effectively as he can, he is giving up American capability. 
You have to have capability to keep your troops, to have quality of 
life, to equip them well.
  That means have modern equipment. We are not giving them modern 
equipment, because we are putting off modernization of Army and Air 
Force and naval systems. You have to be able to lift them. That means 
you have to be able to carry them into a theater in times of combat 
with either ships or aircraft and you have to be able to sustain them 
until they win the war for you, and that means they have to have lots 
of ammunition.
  They have to have stand off missile systems like the ones that the 
President is canceling to keep your pilots from being at risk. You have 
to have fairly modern aircraft so that they do not break down on you 
when you need them the most; you do not have to retire them off the 
carriers leaving gaps in those carriers.
  And this President, on the whole, is failing to provide that 
capability, and in doing so, he is doing a disservice to the American 
people who look to Congress to provide for the Army and the Navy and 
the Marine Corps to protect this Nation.
  But he is also doing a disservice to the men and women who wear the 
uniform of the United States, because ultimately in a conflict, their 
ability to stay alive and come home, as the vast majority did in Desert 
Storm, is a function of our modernization, our sustainability, our 
readiness, our airlift, and our national will.
  I would look to this Congress, and especially look to the Republican 
leadership in this Congress, to restore some of the cuts that this 
President has made in a prudent manner so that in 1995, 1996, 1997, 
1998, 1999, and into the next century we remain by far the superior 
force on the face of the Earth.


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