[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 134 (Wednesday, September 30, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11165-S11168]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      1999 DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, we had a very significant meeting 
yesterday of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was a 
culmination of months and months of work on behalf of many of us trying 
to explain to the American people the very threatened situation that 
our country is in, and I am very proud that we had a meeting that I 
will describe to you in the next few minutes which, I think, is going 
to actually change America's approach to our defense system. I think it 
is very appropriate to talk about this now because I also would be 
speaking in favor of the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization 
Act for fiscal year 1999.
  I think it is important for us to understand the deplorable condition 
of our defense system. We have for 14 consecutive years, counting this 
year, actually had a decline in defense spending. It has dropped and it 
has dropped and it has dropped. I have to hasten to say this also 
transcends politics. It has been in Republican administrations and 
Democrat administrations. Of course, during the administration of 
President Clinton it has been worse than it has been before. We are now 
at the lowest level in procurement since 1960. This was attested to 
yesterday by General Reimer, Dennis Reimer, the commander of the Army.
  Our military now is smaller than it was in the 1930s and is on more 
missions than we went on during the Vietnam war. Our Army deployments 
have tripled, the Air Force deployments have quintupled, if there is 
such a word, and the Navy ships in the Persian Gulf have reached one of 
the lowest states of readiness in 5 years. We have Navy aircraft 
crashes. They are called class A mishaps. They have doubled this year, 
the highest in 5 years, and CNO Adm. Jay Johnson has attributed this to 
a lack of spare parts.
  As I go around to the various military installations, I see that we 
don't have spare parts, that we are cannibalizing perfectly good 
aircraft to get spare parts to keep other ones running.
  The Navy was 7,000 short in their recruits this year--7,000. That 
means we don't have enough sailors to go out and man the ships 
necessary to meet the minimum expectations of the American people. The 
pilots are leaving the Air Force in droves. Right now, our pilot 
retention has dropped below 20 percent. Madam President, it costs $6 
million to put a pilot in the seat of an F-16, and yet we are down now 
to a 20-percent retention.
  What does this mean? It means that it costs almost 100 times as much 
to go out and retrain someone as to retain someone who is already 
there. What is the reason for this?
  I spent most of the August recess, Madam President, going around to 
the various military installations in my plane. In fact, I was taking 
journalists with me so they would start writing about this deplorable 
situation that we find our military in right now. I know one of the 
individuals who went with me in my plane is Roland Evans, of Evans and 
Novak, and we made a lot of visits to various installations on very, 
very short notice. In one of the installations, we had over 20 pilots 
in one room. I said, ``Why is it you are down to 20 percent? How many 
of you in here, after this tour of duty, are going to come back in and 
continue your careers flying for the Air Force or the Navy?'' About 20 
percent are going to do it. It is actually a little below that now in 
the Navy.
  I said, ``What's the reason for it?'' They started out with the fact 
that we have starved the budgets for the military to the extent that 
they don't have

[[Page S11166]]

adequate spare parts, and those kids who are out there, the mechanics 
who are putting these engines back into condition, flying condition, 
are using spare parts that were cannibalized out of another engine, 
maybe a new engine, and the end result of that is they are not sure of 
the work quality of these individuals since they have been up and they 
are working sometimes--we ran into some situations where they are 
working 16, 18 hours a day. I ask you, Madam President, would you feel 
very secure about flying an aircraft that has been maintained by 
someone who has been on his 18th hour that day? It is a very difficult 
thing. These young people are willing to do it.
  Then after they talked about that, they talked about--Wait a minute, 
it is not just that; we were hired and recruited to have a career in 
flying and defending America. We want combat skills. As a result of the 
deployments to places like Bosnia where we don't have any national 
security interests, these people are not able to continue their 
training. Out at Nellis Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert where they 
are supposed to have the red flag exercises--these are beautiful 
exercises that allow fighter pilots to go in and train under actual 
combat conditions, or nearly actual combat conditions, and they are not 
able to do it. They have cut down the number of training flights, 
because when they come back from the long deployments to places like 
Bosnia and other places where we don't have any national security 
interests, instead of being with their families, they try to get 
training in, and there isn't time when they are back home. 
Consequently, we are having them leave by droves.
  Now, I used the example, of course, of pilots because there seems to 
be more interest in them. It is easier for people to understand that if 
you have a $6 million investment in a man or woman to fly a vehicle and 
they go off and start working for the airlines and yet they really 
wanted to stay and defend America, you have to examine why is this. It 
is money, it is the contingency operations and it is a lack of mission. 
I have heard that so much from these people, saying, well, we no longer 
know what the mission is of this country. We are in places where we are 
not able to use our combat skills. The marine pilots, they are flying 
helicopters that were used by their fathers in Vietnam.
  We hear about the MTWs. Sometimes we stand on the Senate floor and we 
start talking in the language that a lot of people don't understand 
because they don't know what an MTW is. That is a major theater war. 
There is an expectation out around the United States that America's 
military is able to defend America on two regional fronts, and this is 
not our situation today, as came out in the hearing that we had 
yesterday. I think the people in Oklahoma are aware of this because I 
commute, I go back every weekend, and I have town meetings. They are 
fully aware of the condition of our military. I was recently in 
Chelsea, OK, the home of Will Rogers, and over at the Port of Catoosa, 
places where they would otherwise have to depend on what they are 
reading of something that is coming out of the Washington media market 
so they wouldn't really be in a position to understand how deplorable 
this situation is.
  As far as the two major theater wars, we are not able to do that 
today. If you ask the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and you ask 
the various chiefs, they will say: Yes, we can do two nearly 
simultaneous major theater wars. But then you ask them, what is the 
risk factor? The ``risk factor'' is a term that is used in saying: Yes, 
you are prepared to do this, but if you do this, No. 1, how long will 
it take? No. 2, how many soldiers will be wounded or killed?
  In asking them yesterday what the risk factor is of two major theater 
wars, they said it is medium for the first one and high for the second. 
We need to have the risk factor low, because we are now quantifying as 
to how many American lives will be affected should we find ourselves in 
a situation where we have two major theater wars. It comes to something 
like 16,000 additional Americans will be wounded because of this high-
risk factor.
  One might wonder why there is a high risk factor. Right now we know, 
if you have been reading the newspapers, Madam President, that we have 
very serious problems in places like Iraq. I don't think there is 
anyone with a background in the military who will tell you if a crisis 
exists, as it does now, if we have to go into Iraq, that it can all be 
done from the air. It cannot all be done by air. You have to follow up 
with ground forces.
  If you go over to the 21st TACOM in Germany--that is where they 
handle all the logistics in that theater, which includes Bosnia, Iraq, 
and the entire Middle East. What would we do if we had to support a 
ground effort in Iraq when we are now at over 100 percent just taking 
care of the needs of Bosnia?
  I know that is a shock to a lot of people when they realize that 
going into Bosnia, taking all the stuff down there to support the 
troops that we have there and that our NATO allies have there, and 
fulfilling the commitment we made to them--which we never should have 
made--is using up 100 percent of the capacity of the 21st TACOM.
  That means, in the event we had to go into the Middle East, like Iraq 
or Iran or Libya or any other place, we would have to be dependent 100 
percent on the Guard and Reserve.
  What has happened to the Guard and Reserve? Because of underfunding 
and deployments to all these different places like Bosnia, in Oklahoma 
we are deploying our Guard and Reserve for up to 270 days. How many 
people are in an occupation where they can be let go for 270 days?
  We have our occupation specialties, our MOSs, that we don't have. We 
don't have doctors going over there now. If we were forced to support a 
ground operation in Iraq, we could not do it with our Guard and 
Reserve. That is how desperate the situation is.
  We covered something else yesterday--I wish the hearing that took 
place yesterday had happened maybe a month before; then we would have 
been able to do a better job with the defense authorization bill which 
we are, hopefully, about to pass in a short period of time--and that 
is, we brought to the surface the realization that, in addition to the 
problems I have outlined, we have a backlog of real property 
maintenance--these are things that have to be done to maintain our 
property to house our soldiers around the world--of $38 billion. This 
is $38 billion that will have to be spent sometime, and we have no 
preparation for that at all.
  We have a shortfall of $1 billion in BASOPS. Those are things that 
have to be paid for today. We are talking about garbage collection, 
water bills, and this type of thing. We do not have that kind of money. 
General Tilleli, who is in charge of some 37,000 troops in South Korea 
right now, said just the other day:

       They will not be able to fully support sustained operations 
     due to overdue infrastructure repairs.

  This is a direct quote:

       Strategic airlift will be affected, regardless of one or 
     two MTWs, unless the en route infrastructure in Alaska, 
     Hawaii and Guam receive adequate funding.

  Which they are not right now.

       Presently these three locations require infrastructure 
     repairs on their fuel handling, fuel shortage and material 
     handling equipment.

  On a recent trip to Fort Bragg, one of the most necessary of all 
installations, they have barracks that are leaking. The roofs are 
leaking like sieves. We were there right after a very hard rain. Not 
only was it leaking to where our troops were in the water at the time, 
but also it was going down into the basement where they have the 
armory, where the weapons are being stored. They are corroding and 
rusting, and our troops are spending their time in a high OPTEMPO or 
PERSTEMPO rate during the hours they have to work in order to keep them 
for use for training purposes.
  At Camp Lejeune--it might surprise you, Madam President, even Marines 
have to have a decent quality of life or at least have to know 
something good is going to happen--they have the CH-46. That is a type 
of helicopter they have been using. These helicopters are all older 
than the pilots flying them. We have a V-22 program that is supposed to 
replace all the CH-46s, and it is not in place. We are not there yet. 
We want to get there, but we are not there. That comes into this whole 
equation of having to fund the overall defense system. They say you are 
as

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strong as the weakest link in a chain. All of our links are equally 
weak and about to break.
  Madam President, we found at Camp Lejeune in one particular 
helicopter squadron that only 4 of the 11 helicopters were operational. 
The rest were either down for maintenance or had been robbed of their 
parts to keep the last four working. This is something that cannot be 
continued.
  I am very proud of General Bramlett. He is currently the FORSCOM 
commander. He is just about to retire. In his memo that came a couple 
of weeks ago--I am going to quote some things because I want them in 
the Record--he said:

       We can no longer train and sustain the force, stop 
     infrastructure degradation, and provide our soldiers with the 
     quality of life programs critical to long term readiness of 
     the force.
       Commanders at Fort Lewis, Stewart and Bragg report units 
     will drop below ALO--

  That is, authorized level of organization--

     in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 1999. This threatens our 
     ability to mobilize, deploy, fight and win.

  Further quoting General Bramlett:

       Funding has fallen below the survival level in fiscal year 
     1999 . . . . Current funding levels place FORSCOM's ability 
     to accomplish its mission in an unacceptable risk.
       Unfunded requirements can only be realized with an increase 
     in the overall funding level for the Department.

  I chair the Readiness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services 
Committee. Last week, we had both General Bramlett and General 
Schwartz, who will be taking his place as commander of FORSCOM. They 
believe the memo he wrote is true today.
  I know I have described a very ominous situation, Madam President. 
But the good news is that at yesterday's Armed Services Committee 
hearing, we had Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Shelton, along 
with the chief of the Army, General Reimer, General Krulak of the 
Marines, General Shelton, Admiral Johnson of the Navy, and General Ryan 
of the Air Force. I want to say publicly how proud I am of the courage 
that they exhibited yesterday. I do not remember a time when--and I 
have been here for 12 years and I have read about this situation for 
longer than that--I don't remember a time when the chiefs of the 
services had the courage to stand up and say to the President that our 
budget that you have been giving us for the last few years is 
inadequate to defend America. It displayed an incredible amount of 
courage. I am very, very proud of them.
  They identified an immediate need for $17 billion above the 
President's budget. They displayed a level of honesty that we should 
all appreciate and we seldom get.
  I was very proud also--I happen to be a conservative Republican and 
have always been prodefense--but we had several Democrats on the 
committee yesterday. I was surprised and so gratified to hear them come 
out and join in. Senator John Glenn questioned the fact we may have 
gone too far in our drawdown in forces. I was very proud of Senator 
Lieberman and his statement when he said, ``We are asking more of our 
military post-cold war than during the cold war,'' and his comments 
regarding national ballistic missile defense, which I want to touch on 
very briefly in a minute.
  Senator Cleland, Max Cleland from Georgia, spoke out and he actually 
made this statement in the committee, that we are going to have to go 
back and listen to what Dr. Schlessinger said recently when he said 
that the problem is so severe that we are going to have to, in a 
massive way, rebuild our defense system and do it in a similar way that 
we did in the early 1980s. He said that it does not seem that with 3 
percent of gross domestic product we would be able to sustain an 
adequate force; it is going to have to be 4 percent.
  So what Senator Cleland was saying is, we need an additional $70 
billion just to build our forces up to meet the minimum expectations of 
the American people. What is interesting about what Senator Cleland 
said was that in addition to the fact that that equates to $70 billion, 
if you take what each of the chiefs says is necessary over and above 
what we have allocated for fiscal year 1999, it comes to about $70 
billion.
  Just for a minute, let's go back to Senator Lieberman who made the 
comment about the national missile defense system. I have found that 
when I go around the country and ask people what their feeling is and 
what we would be able to do if, for example, a missile were fired from 
someplace in China or someplace from the other side of the world to 
Washington, DC, knowing that it would take 35 minutes to get over here, 
and it is carrying a weapon of mass destruction, either biological, 
chemical or nuclear, what we in the United States could do--because 
most people think we could shoot it down--fifty-four percent of the 
people in America think that if a missile were coming over, we would be 
able to shoot it down.
  In fact we cannot shoot it down. We are naked. We have no defense, 
Madam President, against a missile coming in from another continent. 
And the reason is that it is outside the atmosphere. We do not have 
anything that will knock it down. By the time it reenters the 
atmosphere, it is going at a velocity that we do not have anything to 
knock it down with.
  We have been derelict in not pursuing the course we started on in 
1983 to have a system deployed to defend ourselves against an ICBM 
coming into the United States by fiscal year 1998. That is what we are 
just winding up right now. Yet we have noted that we were on that 
course since 1983, until Bill Clinton was elected President of the 
United States in 1992, and then started vetoing the defense 
authorization bills and the defense appropriations bills, until we took 
out funding that would have been there to finish the job to have 
deployed a national missile defense system by 1998. That is now. 
Someone was pretty smart back in 1983 to realize this is the time that 
we would have to have a system in place.
  However, we now know that it is going to take another 3 years or so 
to do it. Several of us who have been promoting a national missile 
defense system have concluded that one of the reasons we have not been 
able to impress upon the people of America how dangerous of a situation 
we are in right now is that they have been confused by all the 
different types of national missile defense systems.
  So we have all kind of gotten down to one, the one that would give us 
the best system, the cheapest in the shortest period of time just to 
take care of a limited attack by a warhead that would be coming over on 
a missile.
  That would be the Aegis system, Madam President. We have $50 billion 
invested in 22 ships right now. They have the potential missile defense 
capability to knock down long range missiles outside the atmosphere. To 
do this, to upgrade the system to be fully capable in the upper tier 
would cost approximately $4 billion more and take about 3 more years. 
We want to get on that road so we can get a system here as soon as 
possible, but we do not have it yet. We do not have it in this defense 
authorization bill. And yet we have gone as far as we can go with the 
bill now.
  I only regret that we did not have these committee hearings a month 
ago so that we could have done a better job preparing for the defense 
of America than we have done in the 1999 Strom Thurmond national 
defense authorization.
  So with that, I just want to say that I do fully support the bill. I 
hope it comes up some time either Thursday or Friday and we can vote 
for it, support it, pass it, and then start rebuilding our defenses so 
that we can at least meet the minimum expectations of the American 
people and be honest with them and defend my seven grandchildren, my 
four children, and the rest of America.
  Thank you. I yield the floor.
  Mr. GRAMS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gorton). The Senator from Minnesota.
  Mr. GRAMS. Thank you very much.
  I want to compliment the Senator from Oklahoma. I think yesterday's 
hearing was very, very important, and what the chiefs had to say 
regarding the defense of this country, and the money that is being 
spent or not being spent and how important it is. I really appreciate 
the Senator bringing this to the floor and helping all of us understand 
the problems that we are facing.
  I rise today briefly to express my continued disappointment at the 
political maneuvering which has resulted in an extension----

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  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Cloture has been invoked on the motion to 
proceed to the Internet bill. Does the Senator desire unanimous consent 
to speak out of order?
  Mr. GRAMS. Yes. Sorry. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to 
speak out of order.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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