[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 56 (Monday, May 5, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2160-H2163]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                THE QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW: BUDGETS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speakers' announced policy of 
January 7, 1977, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, in all of this budget business, which has 
been in the headlines, I found not one word referring to the budget for 
national security. Thus, this second of three speeches I am making 
about the future of the U.S. military is not only appropriate, but 
timely. This afternoon, I will address whether projected defense 
budgets are sufficient to support the military strategy that is 
emerging from the Quadrennial Defense Review or QDR the reassessment of 
defense policy that the Defense Department is due to provide to 
Congress on May 15. In the first speech, I discussed the principles 
that should shape U.S. military strategy in coming years. In the final 
speech, I intend to consider how we are treating our people--the men 
and women in the Armed Forces and the civilian personnel who support 
them.


                    Constitutional Role of Congress

  As I remarked in my first speech on these topics, I intend to begin 
each statement by reiterating a simple point under the Constitution, it 
is Congress' responsibility to ensure that the size and composition of 
U.S. military forces are sufficient to provide for the common defense. 
I referred to article 1, section 8 of the Constitution. Historically, 
Congress has often failed in this responsibility. As a result, the 
United States has repeatedly been unprepared for the military 
challenges it has faced. The price for this unpreparedness has been 
paid in the blood of young men and women in the Armed Forces. I fear in 
the future that the price will be even greater. At the very least, I 
fear, our security will erode because we will no longer have the 
strength to keep smaller scale conflicts

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from weakening international stability. And at worst, I fear, major new 
threats will evolve in the future that would not have developed if we 
had maintained our strength.
  My fellow Missourian, Harry S Truman, made the point clearly: We must 
be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we will pay the 
price of war. I believe that Harry Truman's assessment is no less true 
now than when he spoke those words. Once again, however, as so often in 
the past, the U.S. Congress appears unwilling to pay the price of 
peace. Since the mid-1980's, the Department of Defense budget has 
declined by 40 percent in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. Funding for 
weapons procurement has declined even further by 67 percent since 1985. 
Today we are spending just one-third as much on new weapons as we did 
in the mid-1980's.
  I do not believe that these levels of spending can be tolerated 
without critically weakening our military capabilities. And yet, there 
is all too little support for restoring even modest rates of growth in 
military spending. On the contrary, the budget plan that the 
administration presented earlier this year projected that defense 
spending would continue down in fiscal year 1998 and then, essentially, 
level off in real terms. The budget agreement that was announced last 
Friday calls for inadequate levels for defense across the board--both 
in budget authority and budget outlays. Even more importantly, for 
long-term planning purposes, the Quadrennial Defense Review is being 
carried out on the assumption that defense budgets will be frozen at 
about $250 billion per year, in constant prices, as far as the eye can 
see. The military services have been required to plan, therefore, on 
the assumption that any real growth in costs will have to be offset by 
reductions in programs--and, as I will argue shortly, I believe that 
growth in costs is unlikely to be avoided in the military.


                      The Price of Peace is Small

  The reluctance to support modest growth in defense spending is all 
the more tragic because it is so unnecessary. Looked at from any 
reasonable, long-term perspective, the price of peace today is 
extraordinarily small. In 1997, the defense budget amounts to 3.4 
percent of gross domestic product. Under the new White House-
congressional budget plan, it will decline to 2.7 percent of GDP by 
2002. As recently as 1986, defense spending was over 6 percent of GDP, 
and even at its lowest level in the mid-1970's, it was about 5 percent. 
As a share of the Federal budget, defense spending has declined even 
further and faster defense is now 16 percent of the Federal budget, 
down from 25 percent in the mid-1970's and 1980's, and down from 42 
percent as recently as 1970.
  Suppose we were to allow military spending to decline to, say, 3 
percent of GDP and then grow at no more than 1 or 2 percent in real 
terms each year thereafter. As I will argue shortly, such very modest 
real growth in defense spending is necessary to maintain a well-
equipped, high-quality, well-trained force. At that level of spending, 
the defense budget would represent less than half the burden on the 
economy it did at the end of the cold war, and it would decline over 
time. This, to me, would be a disproportionately small price to pay for 
the benefits we derive from having a force that can maintain a 
significant, visible U.S. military presence abroad, respond to crises 
across the whole spectrum of conflict, and prepare for advanced 
technological challenges in the future.
  Instead of trying to bolster public and congressional support for so 
modest a defense burden, however, the administration, supported by the 
congressional leadership, has decided to try to support its defense 
strategy with budgets that start out two sizes too small and will 
become tighter and tighter as the years go by. As I pointed out last 
week, the strategy that the Defense Department is articulating in the 
QDR is appropriately broad and demanding. It calls for forces able to 
shape the international security environment, respond to the full range 
of challenges to our security, including two concurrent major theater 
wars, and prepare for potential future threats. This strategy is 
rightly more ambitious than the strategy that was laid out in the 
Bottom-Up Review of 1993. The QDR strategy is an improvement because it 
explicitly takes account of the fact that activities short of major 
theater war have imposed great strains on our current forces and have 
to be taken into account in shaping forces for the future.
  I do not see how it will be possible to support such a strategy with 
a force smaller than the force designed to support Les Aspin's Bottom-
Up Review--a strategy that sized the force simply to deal with two 
major regional contingencies. The new strategy, as I said, is rightly 
more demanding. And yet, by all accounts, in the QDR, the civilian 
leadership of the Pentagon is mandating reductions in forces in order 
to find savings with which to finance a very modest increase in funding 
for weapons modernization.
  The reason for this inconsistency between strategy and plans is not 
far to seek--the QDR is being driven by budgets, not by strategy. Force 
cuts, probably proportional reductions imposed on each of the services, 
have to be considered because budgets will not support existing force 
levels, while allowing any room to increase weapons funding.

  Now it would be one thing if the cuts in forces being driven by 
budgets were a onetime deal. That would be bad enough. My concern is 
that the effort to maintain even a slightly smaller force with flat 
budgets will lead to a perpetual cycle of budget shortfalls, cuts in 
weapons programs, reductions in maintenance and training, and pressures 
to cut forces yet again. The turbulence in the force that has been such 
a burden on our people will never end. And, in the long run, we will 
see a slow, steady, but almost imperceptible erosion in our military 
capabilities until, eventually, our forces are not present in key 
regions of the globe, we give up on responding to important threats to 
the peace, and we encourage others to challenge our eroding strength in 
key regions of the globe.


                 The Need for Growth in Defense Budgets

  To me, it is terribly ill-advised for the Defense Department to 
attempt to plan on the basis of flat budgets for the foreseeable 
future. Indeed, until recently, the Defense Department rightly insisted 
that modest growth was necessary in the long term. As recently as a 
year ago, I recall Secretary of Defense Perry telling the National 
Security Committee how the Defense Department planned to reverse the 
decline in weapons procurement that I referred to earlier. Funding to 
recapitalize the force, he said, would come from three sources: First, 
the four rounds of military base closures that had cost money in the 
past would soon begin to achieve savings, and the entire increment 
would be used to boost procurement funding; second, savings from 
acquisition reform, though not assumed in the budget, would also be 
allocated to procurement; and, third, modest growth in defense spending 
that was then projected in Administration plans, would also go for 
weapons modernization. All three sources, he said, are necessary to 
recapitalize.
  Well, that was just a year ago. Now, the story is, we will 
recapitalize the force, how? Also with savings from base closures and 
improved ways of doing business but not with modest increases in the 
budget. Instead, the Defense Department is being driven to make 
reductions in force levels in order to meet targets for increasing 
weapons procurement. But without a resumption of some growth in the 
future, where will this process end? And how much can we count on 
savings from infrastructure reductions, outsourcing, inventory cuts and 
other efficiencies to substitute for the growth in spending that was 
previously in the plan?
  Historically, we have not been able to support a force of a given 
size with flat defense budgets. A couple of years ago, the 
Congressional Research Service did a study which simply measured the 
trend in defense spending relative to the size of the force from fiscal 
year 1955, just after the Korean war, projected through the year 2000 
under the administration plan. It found that defense budgets have, on 
average, grown by about 1.7 percent per year in real, inflation-
adjusted prices per active duty troop.
  For defense budget analysts, this is not a surprising finding. Some 
of you may recall in the late 1970's the debate over whether to 
increase defense spending by 3 percent per year. The premise

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was that defense budgets should increase in real terms over time for 
several reasons. For one thing, in order to keep quality people in the 
force, the quality of life in the military has to keep pace with the 
quality of life in the civilian sector. So pay, housing expenditures, 
facility maintenance accounts and other related activities have to 
increase with the overall growth of the economy. Second, we have found 
that modern, advanced weapons grow in cost from one generation to the 
next. According to a recent report on theater, or tactical fighter, 
aircraft programs by the Congressional Budget Office, each generation 
of aircraft typically doubles in price, in real terms, compared to the 
generation that went before. So budgets should grow to allow the 
military services to take advantage of evolving technology. Finally, 
although the services have always hoped that new weapons would be more 
reliable and cheaper to operate and maintain than the generation that 
went before, this has never turned out to be the case. Since weapons 
necessarily are designed to maximize performance, operation and 
maintenance costs typically grow in real terms.
  Now if the Defense Department believes that these long-term trends in 
the costs of doing business have changed, then they should explain the 
reasons why. For my part, I cannot see how these trends would be 
reversed. On the contrary, a number of factors ought to make it more 
difficult to limit cost growth. We have not, for one thing, been able 
to reduce the size of the defense infrastructure in proportion to cuts 
in the size of the force, and I am very doubtful the Congress will 
approve another round of base closures in the near future. So we have 
to maintain a relatively large support structure, which drives up costs 
relative to the size of the force. Second, we are trying, in at least 
some parts of the force, to use technology to substitute for force size 
so the capital investments required will be relatively large compared 
to the size of the force. Moreover, with an all-volunteer force, it is 
more important than ever that the quality of life be protected. In 
recent years, we have been skimping on military pay raises; much 
military housing is in terrible condition and we have only belatedly 
begun efforts to improve it; we have deferred maintenance of military 
facilities for many years, and the backlog of requirements will 
inevitably catch up with us; and we have projected savings in military 
health care costs that will be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. 
Finally, requirements that the military comply with environmental 
regulations and with health and safety norms are increasing costs in 
the Defense Department as in every other part of the society.
  So the requirement that the military services plan on the basis of 
flat budgets is a prescription for perpetual underfunding of long-term 
defense requirements and the steady erosion of our military strength. 
Modest, steady, sustainable rates of real growth in military spending 
are necessary to maintain a well-equipped, well-trained, high-quality 
force of a size large enough to carry out the U.S. military strategy 
and protect U.S. national security.


                How Not to Think about Defense Spending

  Now, for some of my colleagues, that the notion that defense spending 
should grow over time must seem rather alien. In fact, my conclusion 
that defense budgets should increase follows straightforwardly from 
clear thinking about defense. The only proper way to decide how much to 
spend on defense is, first, to begin by deciding on a military strategy 
that will ensure our security, second, to determine what size force is 
needed to support the strategy, and then, finally, to calculate what 
resources are needed to ensure the quality of the force. But all kinds 
of other, extraneous arguments about defense spending get in the way of 
this clear line of thought.
  One common argument against defense spending is that potential 
enemies today appear to spend so much less than the United States. The 
implication is either that threats are not so great as our planning 
assumes, or that the U.S. military should be able to maintain its 
strength with much less money. The flaws in such reasoning are legion. 
For one thing, potential enemies simply have to be strong in only one 
area of military capability in order to challenge stability in their 
own regions. Possible challenges to U.S. security, however, come from 
so many different directions and in such a wide variety of forms that 
the United States must maintain strong military capabilities of all 
types. Second, the U.S. military is not in the business of being barely 
stronger than the Iraqs of the world. As General Shalikashvili has said 
repeatedly, we had military dominance in the Persian Gulf war, we liked 
it, and we want to keep it.

  More fundamentally, however, it is not enough for those who want to 
cut U.S. military spending to cite how much possible enemies spend. 
Instead, those who call for cuts ought to be able to identify aspects 
of U.S. military strength that they would give up. If the argument is 
that North Korea is not as great a threat as U.S. military plans 
assume, for example, because North Korea spends so little, then let us 
consider whether to weaken the U.S. military posture in Korea. Looked 
at that way, however, the argument is harder to sustain. Whatever North 
Korea spends, our intelligence assessments tell us how threatening 
their military capabilities are, and anyone who looks closely at the 
situation is aware of how much damage North Korean forces could wreak 
even if confronted by strong United States and South Korean troops. 
Few, therefore, would want to encourage aggression by weakening our 
deterrent posture in Korea. So an argument based on North Korea, or 
Iraqi, or Iranian levels of military spending is irrelevant. The only 
real issue is what are the threats and what U.S. posture is needed to 
deal with them.
  A second common argument for cutting U.S. defense spending is that 
the United States today is spending about as much on defense in 
inflation-adjusted dollars as it did, on average, during the cold war. 
The implication is clear--now that the cold war is over, we should be 
able to spend less. The flaw in this argument is one I have already 
discussed. To maintain forces of a given size costs more over time 
because of the need to improve the quality of life, pursue more 
advanced technology, and operate more sophisticated weapons. The fact 
is, we have cut the size of the force substantially since the end of 
the cold war. In 1987, the active duty force level was about 2.1 
million. Today, it is about 1.4 million--about one-third less. A force 
of that size understandably should cost more than a larger force 25 or 
30 years ago--but it is nonetheless substantially smaller and less 
costly than a force of the size that would be necessary if the cold war 
had continued.


                          How Much Is Enough?

  So if those are some of the ways not to think about defense spending, 
how should we think about it? How much is enough for national defense? 
Mr. Speaker, 2 years ago, I prepared an alternative defense budget that 
I believed at the time was adequate to maintain U.S. military strength 
over the next 5 years. It called for spending about $45 billion more on 
defense than the administration was projecting at the time. I still 
think that alternative budget is wise.
  Today, however, I want to talk a bit more broadly about the 
principles that the Congress should apply in fulfilling its 
responsibility to decide how much is enough.
  First, I do not believe that we should cut force levels further. I am 
disturbed by reports that the QDR may include a decision to reduce 
total defense end-strength by as much as 144,000 individuals. To me, 
such reductions would be destructive and dangerous. They would be 
destructive because they would break faith with the men and women who 
serve in the Armed Forces. As I noted just a few minutes ago, we have 
already gone through a defense drawdown that has reduced active duty 
force levels by about one-third. This drawdown has imposed an immense 
burden on military personnel. It has meant that people have had to 
change jobs much more often than would have been necessary if force 
levels were stable, because people have had to be moved around to 
replace the larger number of people who were leaving. It has imposed an 
immense strain on the military education and training system, and often 
people have started new jobs without complete training. It has made the 
military personnel system rather brutally competitive--many military 
personnel have complained to me that the pressure to force people

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out means that any single mistake will cost a good soldier his or her 
career.
  Military planners have a term of art for all of this--they call it 
turbulence in the force. In fact, it has meant a good deal of 
turbulence in peoples lives. In my view, the good people who serve in 
the Armed Forces have suffered through this turbulence for long enough. 
For years we have told them that the problems that attended the 
drawdown would ease once the reductions were over. We told them to hang 
in and that things would get better. I do not believe it is right to 
ask these people to go through yet another period of such turbulence. 
To start another drawdown on top of the one just completed is to break 
faith with the people who serve.
  I also think that we cannot afford to reduce force levels for 
strategic reasons. All of the services are being strained to the 
breaking point by the multiple requirements imposed on them by the 
demands, first, to be trained and ready for major wars and, second, 
meanwhile, to be engaged in the multiplicity of smaller operations 
which have proliferated since the end of the cold war. Already the Army 
is short about 40,000 slots in support positions. This has meant that 
operations in Haiti or Bosnia, for example, require that support 
personnel be taken out of units that are not deployed abroad in order 
to fill out units that are being deployed. The remaining support 
personnel then have to do twice the work they should. Now we are 
talking about further thinning Army ranks, which, inevitably will make 
these shortfalls even worse.


                        Four Guiding Principles

  We should be guided by four principles:
  First, I do not believe we should reduce force levels further.
  The second principle is, increase weapons investments enough to get 
back to a steady state replacement rate for major items of equipment. A 
key goal of the QDR, reportedly, is to find funds to increase weapons 
procurement substantially--the target that has been set for several 
years is $60 billion a year for procurement. This will require an 
increase of about one-third from current levels--for the past couple of 
years, we have spent about $45 billion on procurement. I hope that the 
QDR will get there--though not at the cost of cuts in the size of the 
force. I am doubtful, however, that $60 billion a year will be enough.
  To explain my doubts, it will take a little arithmetic. Currently, 
between them, the Air Force and the Navy have about 3,000 fighter 
aircraft in their inventories--about 2,000 in the Air Force and 1,000 
in the Navy. If we assume a 20 year average service life for fighters--
which is getting pretty long-in-the tooth--then, on average, we have to 
buy 150 aircraft a year to maintain a steady-state replacement rate. 
For the past few years, we have bought about 28-42 fighter aircraft a 
year. So, by my calculations, we need to increase aircraft procurement 
by at least 400 percent to get to the right level.

  Similarly for the Navy--the Navy now needs a minimum of about 350 
battle force ships. If we assume an average service life of 35 years, 
we need to buy 10 ships a year. Lately we have been buying four or 
five. So we need to double shipbuilding budgets to get back to a steady 
state replacement rate.
  Add to those increases, the need to increase spending modestly each 
year in order to exploit new technology. Suffice to say, $60 billion a 
year won't do it. So the next question is, what are we giving up by not 
modernizing as fast as we probably should, and how are we going to 
adjust to the shortfalls? We may be able to keep some equipment going 
longer by pursuing upgrades instead of new systems. We may be able to 
limit cost growth between generations of new weapons by careful 
attention to cost--as the services plan for the Joint Strike Fighter. 
But all of these adjustments come at a price in reduced military 
strength. The compromises should be kept to a minimum.
  The third principle is that we should not allow military readiness to 
decline. On this issue, I am skeptical about DOD budget plans that show 
operation and maintenance costs declining in the future relative to the 
size of the force. Some savings, to be sure, may be achieved from base 
closures and other changes in ways of doing business. But it is 
unrealistic to expect training costs to decline or to plan on reduced 
maintenance costs of major weapons.
  Fourth, and finally, while I do believe that some savings can be 
achieved by improving DOD business practices, I am very skeptical about 
claims that very large savings can be achieved. It may be true that 
there is waste in defense business practices--but waste is not a line 
item in the budget that can easily be eliminated. I am very concerned 
that proponents of revolutionary changes in government procurement 
practices are vastly overstating the savings that can be made.


                             in conclusion

  Mr. Speaker, these four principles--maintain force levels; increase 
weapons modernization funding substantially; protect military 
readiness; do not overstate savings from improved business practices--
force me to conclude that currently projected levels of defense 
spending are not enough. And as the years go by, if defense spending is 
frozen at the current inadequate level, I fear that we will see the 
erosion of U.S. military strength and, as a direct result, the slow 
decline of U.S. global leadership.

                          ____________________