[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 86 (Thursday, June 19, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5956-S5959]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1998

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, we are going to be taking up hopefully 
today our DOD authorization bill, I believe at 1 o'clock. Sometimes it 
is important to look beyond the bill itself.
  There are several provisions of this bill that were very critical 
which were taken out, and one of them was taken out because I think it 
is certain that the President would have vetoed it, and it has to do 
with Bosnia and with our withdrawal from Bosnia. I think it is 
important that we talk about that a little bit because, while we are 
taking up our Department of Defense reauthorization bill, I can tell 
you right now it is not adequate. It is the very best that we could 
come up with, with the resources we had to work with, but as chairman 
of the Readiness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I 
can assure you that it is not adequate. We are really at a critical 
time right now, and, quite frankly, I hang this one on the 
administration. This has been a very nonmilitary, nondefense 
administration. We have had a difficult time getting any attention to 
our military, for the duties that they are trained to perform.
  I would like just for a moment to cover a couple of things and how 
this is going to affect our DOD authorization bill for this year and 
probably next year, too.
  As chairman of the Subcommittee on Readiness, we have jurisdiction 
over training, over military construction, over all readiness issues 
including the BRAC process. As I have traveled around to various 
installations, I have found that we are really in serious trouble. I 
have never been so proud of our troops for doing what they are doing 
under adverse conditions.
  I was a product of the draft many years ago. I came here believing in 
compulsory service, and I still think it is a good idea for our Nation. 
However, I am so impressed with the quality of troops we have in this 
all-voluntary military. However, I wonder how long they can hold on the 
way they are going right now with this ``Optempo'' rate. ``Optempo'' is 
a term that is used in the military that refers to the number of 
deployment days, the number of days that these troops are away from 
their wives, husbands, and families, and it has gone up now in some 
areas double the amount that is considered to be the optimum. For 
example, we normally talk about approximately 115 days a year, and it 
is up now to well over 200 in many areas. While seemingly they are 
holding on, they are dedicated, you cannot expect it to continue 
indefinitely because our divorce rate is starting to go up right now 
and our retention rate is starting to drop right now.
  The quality-of-life issues are really a very serious problem. I think 
both the chairman and the ranking member of the Subcommittee on 
Personnel--Senator Dirk Kempthorne and Senator Max Cleland--are doing a 
great job, but I assure you when you are talking about readiness, the 
personnel issues and the quality-of-life issues are very, very 
significant.
  Going back in time just a little bit, I can remember being here on 
the Senate floor back in November 1995 when we found out that the 
President of our country, Bill Clinton, was proposing to send troops 
over to Bosnia. I got to

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thinking at that time, are we going to go through this same exercise 
again? Right now, we have more troops deployed in more parts of the 
world than we have had at any time since World War II, and yet they are 
not over there for any purposes that relate to our Nation's security. 
Our strategic security interests are not being served. They call them 
peacekeeping missions. They call them peacemaking missions. They call 
them humanitarian missions.
  Mr. President, with the scarce resources that we have right now--and, 
of course, you know because you serve on the Senate Armed Services 
Committee--we cannot continue to do this.
  I can remember the debate that took place on this floor in November 
1995 when the President was suggesting that we send troops over to the 
northeastern sector of Bosnia, and I remember going over there and 
seeing what it was like and seeing what our mission would be like, and 
supposedly we were going to go over there to make peace, to draw the 
lines out so that we would have these lines of demarcation where the 
Serbs had to be over here and the Croats had to be here and the Muslims 
had to be here, forgetting all about the fact that there are many other 
factions there. I do not think it is even a remote possibility we could 
the stop the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims from fighting with each other. 
They have been doing it for 500 years.
  Let us assume we could. If we could, we still have the Mujaheddin, 
Arkan Tigers, Black Swans--we have all these rogue elements, and the 
only thing they have in common is they hate us. Here we are sending 
troops, proposing at that time in 1995 to send troops over when we have 
been sending them other places.
  I remember--and I am not hanging this one on President Clinton 
because it was President Bush who initially sent troops into Somalia, 
and he sent them over in September, before he was defeated and before 
the new Clinton administration took over. They originally were sent 
over for 45 days. Each month--and you and I were both serving in the 
other body at that time. We passed a resolution calling for the 
withdrawal of our troops from Somalia because they were spending our 
precious defense dollars and they were endangering their lives. And 
month after month after month President Clinton said, we are going to 
leave them over there indefinitely. And it wasn't until 18 of our 
Rangers were brutally murdered and their nude corpses dragged through 
the streets of Mogadishu that finally the American people woke up and 
applied enough pressure, and we were able to bring back our troops. I 
do not want that to happen in the streets of Sarajevo. I do not want 
that to happen in Bosnia.
  But if you will remember, Mr. President, it was in November when they 
were trying to sell the idea of having the support of Congress to send 
our troops over there, we had a resolution of disapproval saying we 
can't afford to do it. We were not without compassion. We were not 
unconcerned about the plight of those poor people over there. But that 
has been going on for many, many years. The problem was we just could 
not afford another mission like that, and so we had a resolution of 
disapproval. And the President and the Secretary of Defense and the 
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, said 
that they would be over there for only 12 months. They go over in 
December, come back in December of the following year.
  That was 1996. Well, anyway, this was not just approximately 12 
months. This was not simply a suggestion that maybe we can get our 
mission, whatever our mission was--I still don't know what our mission 
was over here--maybe we can get that mission accomplished in 12 months. 
It was an absolute promise by this administration, and I have it down 
in the words of Secretary of Defense Bill Perry that they said this is 
an absolute, there are no conditions under which our troops will be 
there beyond 12 months. I knew it wasn't true. They lied to the 
American people.
  We missed passing a resolution of disapproval, Mr. President, by four 
votes--four votes. I can remember several, at least four people 
standing on the floor of the Senate saying, well, it is only for 12 
months, because that was an absolute at that time. We said it was not 
going to be 12 months.
  I went to Bosnia. Nobody had been over there at that time. Sure, they 
were firing guns and all of that, and I wanted to go up to the 
northeast sector because the northeast sector of Bosnia is where we 
were going to send our troops, we were proposing to do it at that time. 
That's where Tuzla is, Brcko, up in that northeastern sector. I went up 
there. In fact, I wasn't able to get up there any other way, so I 
borrowed a British helicopter and went up to the Tuzla area and landed 
up there only to find that there were some troops up there that were 
U.N. troops, not American troops, and the commanding general of the 
northeast sector was a guy named Haukland from Norway, a great guy.
  So I went in there. I said, ``I hear gunfire out there.'' ``Yeah, 
it's been going on for a long time. It's still going on.'' I said, 
``Well, you know, we are proposing to send troops over here and have 
this joint effort to cause the divisions to stop the fighting up 
here.'' I said, ``Of course, it is only going to be 12 months.'' And he 
started laughing. He said, ``Twelve months. You mean 12 years.'' He 
said, ``It is different here than it is most other places.''
  This is the analogy that he drew. I have mentioned it in this Chamber 
before, but it is so accurate today to remember. We knew this in 
November 1995. He said, ``It's like putting your hand in water and 
leaving it for there 12 months. Then you take it out and nothing has 
changed. It is the same.''
  I would suggest to you, Mr. President, that when we pull out 
ultimately--and I hope we can do it safely, I hope that we can have a 
minimum of terrorist activity at that time, but we know that they are 
just in a period of rest right now and they will go right back. This is 
the dilemma we find ourselves in. The President promised we would be 
out in 12 months. He broke his promise, and we were not out. Then he 
said we are not going to stay 18 months beyond the 12 months, so June 
30, 1998, would be the withdrawal date.
  I have to say that the President has us, those of us who are 
conservatives, those of us who are for a strong national defense--and I 
have to say in a not too charitable way that we have a lot of Members 
of this body that sincerely in their hearts are not all that concerned 
about our Nation's defense because they don't think there is a 
significant threat out there. How many times have you heard from this 
administration that the cold war is over and so there is no longer a 
threat. And I said before, I look back wistfully at the days of the 
cold war when we had one opposition, we had two superpowers, and the 
other one was the U.S.S.R. and intelligence knew pretty much what they 
had, what kind of resources they had; they were predictable in what 
they were doing. They were people you could predict. Now, we are faced 
with a world environment where we have, admittedly, and it is not even 
classified, over 25 nations that currently, today, have weapons of mass 
destruction, either biological, chemical or nuclear. And they are 
working on the means to deliver them.

  Just in yesterday's Washington Times there was an article about how 
now China is working on a joint project on a missile with Iran. Is Iran 
a friend? No. All these people talking about how friendly China is, yet 
we know that both China and Russia have a missile that would deliver a 
weapon of mass destruction from any place in the world to the 
continental United States. That is there today. We know that. It is 
logical, if we also know--again, it is not even classified--that both 
Russia and China are selling and have sold both systems and technology 
to countries like Iran and other countries, then why would they stop at 
this fine line, this bright line, you might say, and say they are not 
going to sell them a missile that would reach the continental United 
States? That does not do anything for my comfort level. Nonetheless, we 
are involved in a situation in Bosnia right now where the President has 
said we are going to extend it to June of 1999.
  Then I keep hearing whispers from these people who do not see any 
threat out there, ``That's all right, when that time comes, when June 
gets here, we are going to go ahead and extend it for another 6 months, 
and another 6 months.'' I can tell you right now, Mr. President, there 
are people in this Chamber and people in the White

[[Page S5958]]

House who have no intentions of any kind of withdrawal from Bosnia. So 
I serve notice, as I have many times and as have other Members, when 
that date gets here you better be ready because we are going to be 
pulling out.
  I think it is going to be necessary to be talking about this between 
now and through the entire next year, so they can be prepared. We do 
have NATO allies. We do not want to be insensitive to the fact that a 
lot of our NATO allies have strategic interests in keeping troops in 
Bosnia. Those people in the Balkans, those in the eastern part of 
Europe that are our allies in NATO, they certainly have reason to want 
to have peace in Bosnia because it serves their strategic interests. We 
are across an ocean. It does not serve ours. While we would like to 
have the luxury, we are faced with a depleted, almost a decimated, 
military in this country. We are in a position where we cannot meet the 
minimum expectations of the American people, which is to be able to 
defend America on two regional fronts. We know we cannot do that. Let's 
not kid anybody, we know we could not fight the Persian Gulf war again, 
even if we wanted to today. We do not have the resources to do that.
  It is not just that we do not have a national missile defense system, 
it is conventional forces, too. We have approximately one half the 
force strength that we had in 1991. I am talking about one half the 
Army divisions, one half the Air Force wings, one half the boats that 
are floating around out there. Yet people think we are in a position to 
adequately defend ourselves.
  So, I think we need to think of this problem that we have around the 
world and specifically in Bosnia in terms of, No. 1, what it is doing 
to our overall defense system in terms of money and personnel. If we 
should have to call our troops in for something in North Korea and 
simultaneously for something perhaps in Iran or the Middle East, we 
would be in a position of having to retrain these troops that have been 
sent to Somalia or Haiti or Bosnia or one of the other places, all 
these missions we are sending them on, because the rules of combat are 
different. There is not a general out there who would not tell you we 
would have to retrain our troops. That would take time, that would cost 
money, and that directly affects our state of readiness.
  But what else? There was another promise that was made back in 
November 1995, and that is we would send our troops over there and this 
whole mission, this 12-month mission, would cost between $1.5 and $2 
billion. It is all in the Record. That is what they said. It was 
repeated here on the Senate floor. ``It is not going to be that 
expensive. It's going to be between $1.5 and $2 billion.'' At that 
time, on the Senate floor --and it is in the Record--I said it is going 
to end up costing $8 billion before it is over. And guess what, we are 
now going through $6.5 billion.
  There are four elements of a defense system that we can control. We 
cannot control these missions because the White House has control over 
these missions. But what we can control are readiness, troop force 
strength, quality of life, and modernization. Those are the four 
elements that we can control. When we now are down to the point where 
we have an optempo of almost double what is considered to be the 
acceptable level and we have the troops that are deployed in all these 
places where there are no strategic interests at risk, we are spending 
that money over there for these missions that has to come out of the 
defense budget.
  The other day we had a committee meeting. We had all four chiefs of 
the services. I asked each one of them, one at a time, I said, ``We are 
going to come in for an emergency supplemental. We are going to have to 
nickel and dime this thing and pay for all this fun we are having over 
in these areas and all this good we are supposedly doing. It is going 
to have to come out of defense somewhere. You have four choices: 
readiness, troop strength, modernization, or quality of life. Where is 
it going to come from?'' Not one--finally the Marine general said, 
``I'd say quality of life, because we are tough.'' So maybe that was 
the only answer that we got.

  But there is no way we can take it out of quality of life and still 
retain people. Right now in this authorization bill, by the way, we 
have money that is in there for flight hours, which is very critical 
because we are losing our trained pilots. It costs $87,000 just to go 
through primary training for one of these pilots. What we are doing is 
training them for the airlines, because we are losing them. We cannot 
compete. We don't have to be able to pay the same money the airlines 
pay, but we have to be able at least to have a respectable level of 
optempo and be competitive, so we do have some money for flight hours 
in this authorization bill. Again, to do that we have to take it from 
someplace else. I, as chairman of the readiness subcommittee, can tell 
you I am not at all comfortable with our state of readiness as it is 
right now.
  I believe we should have in the authorization bill--and I had an 
amendment ready but decided, since it would be certain it would draw a 
veto, that we would handle this as a separate issue--but we need 
actually to have a resolution of withdrawal, giving our commitment to 
make sure our NATO allies know and can prepare today for our withdrawal 
on June 30, 1998.
  I went to Brussels where they had the last NATO meeting and made a 
speech there making it abundantly clear. I found at the same time I 
made a statement which I feel I can make on behalf of the U.S. Senate, 
there were other people who were walking around whispering, saying, 
``Don't worry, we will not leave you high and dry.''
  I am very much concerned. Normally we do not address these things 
until it gets hysterical around here. But rather than to wait to that 
point, I am going to say right now, a year ahead of time, that we have 
enough people in this body and the body down the hall who are going to 
stop the effort to extend beyond the June 30 deadline for our troops 
remaining in the former Yugoslavia. As I say, there are two reasons for 
it. One is our state of readiness that is suffering as a result of it. 
And the second thing is the risk of the people and the cost of that 
risk. That cost, that $6.5 to $8 billion it is going to cost us, is 
going to have to come out of somewhere, out of our defense budget.
  The last thing I would say that is impaired by this, this issue we 
have talked about many times, is the fact we need to finish our 
national missile defense system that we started in 1983. In 1983--of 
course, that was the Reagan administration. There were a lot of people 
at that time who were very, very--they were very concerned over what 
was going to happen. They had the foresight to say we are going to have 
to have a system to defend America against a missile that would come 
in, an ICBM, by the year 2000. So we set up a system whereby we would 
have something deployable by 1999.
  Up until 1992, when the Clinton administration went in, we were right 
on schedule. We had an investment. We have a $50 billion investment in 
the Aegis fleet of 22 ships right now that have rocket-launching 
capabilities. You can stand on the floor and talk about the four 
different types of potential systems that we now have an investment in 
that would offer us a defense against a missile attack from overseas, 
but perhaps the Aegis system is the best one because it is a matter of 
protecting an investment, a $50 billion investment. It would only cost 
$5 billion more to be able to take the launching capability and go out 
of the atmosphere.
  Why is that important? Because if a missile is launched from China or 
from North Korea or from Russia--and certainly don't assume something 
couldn't come from Russia. It could be an accidental launch. We know 
that. We went through that. When we had the hearings not too long ago, 
we talked about how long it took to retarget over there and what the 
risk was of an accidental launch or an unintentional launch from 
Russia. But if that happened, if we have this system in place where we 
can go up beyond the atmosphere, we would have about 30 minutes to 
shoot down a missile that is coming in our direction. We know it works. 
There is not anyone in America who did not watch on CNN what was going 
on in the Persian Gulf war. We know that rockets can knock down 
missiles. So it is a matter of getting it out of the atmosphere.
  If you wait until it comes into the atmosphere, you have about 2 
minutes. So the choice there is 30 minutes or 2 minutes. When you have 
a system that is 90 percent paid for and it takes about $5 billion more 
and we are spending $6

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or $8 billion over in Bosnia, we have to get our priorities straight. 
Unfortunately, we have a very biased media in this country that does 
not allow a lot of this stuff to get out.
  We can say it on the floor of the U.S. Senate and we know that we 
have the facts. But by the time it gets reported, it shifts through the 
beltway media and people do not realize that risk is out there.
  So I will just say, Mr. President, since we are dealing with the DOD 
authorization bill today, I would like to serve warning we are going to 
have a resolution, well in advance, so our allies will know that when 
June 30, 1998, comes, we are going to be out of Bosnia. I think it is 
better to go ahead and serve notice early rather than to wait to the 
last minute.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. Bond pertaining to the introduction of S. 938 are 
located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and 
Joint Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks recognition?
  Mr. FAIRCLOTH addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina is recognized.

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