[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 148 (Friday, October 16, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H11039-H11041]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ON NATIONAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Brady of Texas). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Hunter) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk with my colleague the 
chairman of the R&D subcommittee the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Weldon) and talk a little bit to our colleagues and those that are 
listening about some of the background with respect to the defense 
requirements that we just talked about with the Speaker (Mr. Gingrich). 
First, Mr. Speaker, let me talk about personnel shortages, because when 
we put together a defense budget, often the newspapers say the Pentagon 
got $300 billion, or the Pentagon got $250 billion or the Pentagon got 
this or got that. And the picture that they create is of just a big 
bureaucracy in Washington that takes up money, and that bureaucracy 
does not translate into real people who have real needs. Actually the 
Department of Defense is about 50 percent people. That means that not 
only the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen, the marines who serve this 
country, but also the many people who back them up. That means people 
who repair aircraft like those at North Island naval air rework depot 
in San Diego, California in my district or the people that repair the 
ships or the people that do the high-tech work or the teams that fly 
around the world as we project American military power to support a 
very complex military. Personnel is a very important part of our 
national defense. If you talk to folks like Commandant of the Marine 
Corps Chuck Krulak and others, you may come to the conclusion that 
actually they are the primary part of our national defense, they are 
the most important part, the good people, and they come from America's 
villages and towns and cities and farms and they serve in the American 
military often at great inconvenience and often at a pay scale that is 
much less than their civilian counterparts.
  Let us talk about personnel shortages that we have today. The United 
States Air Force is going to be short almost 800 pilots, a little over 
700 pilots for this fiscal year that is coming up. Now, when you train 
a pilot, you put several million dollars minimum into his training, so 
we are losing not only those good people and all that experience but we 
are also losing the money that we put into their training.

                              {time}  1445

  We are going to be very short on pilots.
  In the Navy we are going to be short 18,000 sailors and 1,400 
recruits in this fiscal year. That means that when a guy comes back 
from a 3 or 4 or 5-month deployment, we have to send him out 
immediately to another deployment because there is nobody there to 
rotate with him, to fill his shoes and to give him a little family 
time.
  Marine aviators have been traditionally our most loyal people with 
respect to re-upping, taking that next jump of 5 or 6 years or 4 years 
in the service and opting to do that instead of being in the private 
sector, and yet our Marine aviators are now leaving the service at a 
rate of 92 percent.
  Even the Army, which has a limited air power but also has, obviously, 
a very large helicopter force attending its ground forces, is going to 
be 140 Apache pilots short in 1999. Now those Apache pilots you saw on 
CNN when they were doing such a great job on Saddam Hussein's tanks 
during Desert Storm. Those are the pilots that we will be lacking in 
this next year.
  Now I talked a little bit about mission capable rates with the 
Speaker, and once again here are the mission capable rates, and this is 
a chart that shows how they are going downhill very quickly.
  Mission capable is kind of like the Speaker described it. If you send 
out 10 aircraft or you have 10 aircraft on the line, how many of them 
can actually fly out and do their mission? Just like having four or 
five combines on your farm, and it is time to harvest the wheat, and 
the first thing you ask your foreman is how many of the combines are 
working. It may not be all the combines are working; maybe only half of 
them are working.
  Well, we have gone from a mission capable rate that, for example, for 
the Air Force was 83.4 percent in 1991; that is when George Bush led us 
in Desert Storm; to today to about 74 percent. We have gone with the 
Marine Corps from 77 percent to about 61 percent, and with the Navy 
from 69 percent, almost 70 percent, to 61 percent. That means 6 out of 
10 aircraft are able to actually get off the ground and perform their 
missions.
  That is a good example of our declining readiness rates, and that 
means we have a lack of spare parts and we do not have enough 
components and enough people in some cases. That means mechanics and 
the people, the high-tech people that make these very complex weapons 
systems work, not enough people in the pipeline, not enough people on-
station at that particular base to take care of those problems.
  Let us go to equipment shortages.
  We had almost a 600-ship Navy when Ronald Reagan left office. Today 
we are down to about 330 ships. We actually had about 546 ships in 
1991. Today we are down to about 330. But we are losing a lot of those 
ships, we are retiring a lot of them. A lot of them are getting older, 
and, as you know, it takes a long time to build a ship. In fact, it was 
remarked the other day by one of our assistant secretaries for 
shipbuilding that actually when we started World War II, all the keels 
for the battleships had already been laid, meaning we had actually 
started to build these battleships knowing that there might be a 
problem. When FDR knew we would probably have a conflict with Adolf 
Hitler, he started a pretty good shipbuilding program in the late 
1930's, and those ships got completed and got put to sea during World 
War II in the 1940s.
  But the point is you have to start ships early. If you are going to 
field a ship in 1997, you need to start it in 1993 or 1994. Well, in 
this case we are building down to a 200-ship fleet by 2020. That means 
we are not replacing the ships in a 1-for-1 fashion. That means every 
time you retire three old ships, you only replace it with one young 
ship, one new ship. That means that we are going to have a 200-ship 
fleet by the year 2020 if we do not increase shipbuilding.
  Ammunition shortages; we are $1.7 billion short for the basic 
ammunition supply for the Army.
  Now I would say that we have a couple of duties to the people that 
wear uniforms who still carry rifles in the field and still fire 
artillery and do those very things that are very, very difficult in 
this modern world where you have bio warfare, biological warfare, 
chemical warfare threatening them, surface-to-surface missiles 
threatening them. Well, one of the basic things you do for your 
soldiers and your marines is you give them enough ammo. We do not have 
enough ammunition for the so-called two regional contingency that we 
are supposed to plan for. That means if Saddam Hussein starts a fight 
in the Middle East, and North Korea takes advantage of that by coming 
down the peninsula, you have to have enough ammo to handle both those 
wars, both those contingencies.
  We are short right now, we are short $1.6 billion in basic 
ammunition.
  Now that is not money for the Pentagon, that is money for people in 
the field who carry weapons in defense of this country who need to have 
ammo. There is nobody here who would send out a police force in a very 
difficult area without giving them ammunition for their guns, and yet 
we are preparing to do that with our people who wear the uniform in the 
Army and the Marine Corps.
  Age and equipment; this is a pretty good example.
  The CH-46 is kind of our workhorse helicopter in the U.S. Marine 
Corps. We

[[Page H11040]]

are trying to replace that. But the average CH-46, and if you look at 
the crashes that have taken place in the last 5 years, you are going to 
see a lot of these CH-46s there because a lot of them have crashed and 
taken the lives of the young Marines flying those airplanes and 
attending those airplanes as crewmen. But the average age of that CH-46 
right here, about 40 years old.
  We owe those people new equipment. They have a tough enough job as it 
is.
  The assault vehicle; that is the amphibious vehicle that comes out. 
If you watched Saving Private Ryan, that is a vehicle that comes out, 
hits a beach and makes the assault from there; that is called an AAV. 
The average age of those vehicles is 26 years, so they are getting old, 
and we need to replace them with a new assault vehicle. We do not have 
money for it because this budget has been handed down to us by the so-
called budget deal pressed by the Clinton administration to cut 
defense.
  Now my Republican colleagues have added $21 billion to the defense 
budget over the last 5 years, and I am very proud of that, and, as the 
chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, I am really proud of 
the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence) who is our chairman of 
the full Committee on National Security, and the gentleman from Florida 
(Mr. Young) who is chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, 
because they tried to swim against a tide that was being handed down to 
them by the White House, and we put $21 billion extra to try to meet 
some of these shortages.
  But even after we put that in, the services finally came forth the 
other day, and they gave us a list of what they are short. They are $80 
billion short in what they call unfunded requirements. That means ships 
that we planned to build that we cannot afford to build, it means 
ammunition we cannot afford to buy. That means flying hours for our 
pilots, and we cannot afford to send them up because it is too 
expensive to fly the planes for those hours. That means spare parts and 
a lot of other things.

  Well, the Speaker, when he put together this, our side's position on 
the negotiation on this emergency supplemental spending plan that we 
just made the deal with President Clinton on, argued for a strong 
national defense, and he said I have got to have extra dollars for 
defense. He said we have got to have extra dollars for intelligence.
  We put $2 billion into intelligence. That is so that when somebody is 
planning to blow up an American embassy, we have a network of people 
who are in key critical places in that particular country, wherever it 
might be, who have their ear to the ground with the terrorist networks. 
It was some of the state sponsored terrorist organizations, and they 
find out about the plan, for example, to blow up an embassy or to do 
something else in a terrorist fashion, and they relay it back to our 
people here, and we are able to take action to keep it from ever 
happening in the first place. We need a strong intelligence force more 
than ever.
  You know, the Soviet Union was big and it was strong, but it was very 
predictable in the so-called Cold War. We could see a lot of what they 
did, they moved in a very traditional fashion, and we knew where to go 
to get information.
  Today we live in a world in which the CIA Director, Jim Woolsey, once 
said is full of poison snakes, although we have killed the big dragon 
of the so-called Soviet Union, and that is very true. There is a lot of 
small organizations that are terrorist organizations that want to kill 
Americans, and we need to have a good intelligence operation to cut 
them off at the pass. That means to find out what is going to happen 
before it happens and stop it. And to those ends, after a lot of 
behind-closed-doors briefings about the world situation, the Speaker 
fought for 2 billion extra dollars in intelligence funding.
  We also fought hard for missile defense, and let me tell you what the 
problem is with missile defense.
  The North Koreans have just launched a missile, went out over the Sea 
of Japan which surprised us. It surprised us just like the two nuclear 
blasts in India and Pakistan that our intelligence people did not know 
about, did not predict. We thought that the North Koreans would not 
achieve this ICBM capability for about 10 years. We thought that would 
not happen. But actually they have achieved it now. The missile that 
they launched, which is a so-called Taepo DONG I missile with three 
stages is capable of hitting parts of the United States. Now, if you 
couple that with the ongoing program that the Koreans, the North 
Koreans have followed, sometimes with greater exposure to us than other 
times, but nonetheless they have historically followed of trying to 
achieve nuclear capability and biological and chemical capability; that 
means the ability to throw a biological warhead with nerve gas in it, 
for example, that will kill civilians on contact; that program, married 
up with their missile program, will give them very soon the capability 
to reach some of the United States with missiles.
  Now the problem with that is we have a military that is designed to 
stop tanks, it is designed to stop ships, it is designed to stop 
planes, it is designed to stop infantry. We have nothing, nothing that 
will stop an intercontinental ballistic missile from hitting a city in 
the United States, and that is a question I ask President Clinton's 
Secretary of Defense every time he appears before us: Could we stop a 
single incoming ballistic missile. And he always has to tell myself and 
other members of the National Security Committee, no, not one.
  So we have to build a defense against incoming ballistic missiles. We 
live in the age of missiles. We have to understand that, we have to 
acknowledge it, and we have to prepare for it. We do not at this point 
have a missile defense, but we need to have one, and the Speaker put 
almost a billion dollars into missile defense and got the Clinton 
administration to agree with it. That alone, with a lot of the things 
in this bill that I do not agree with that the Clinton administration 
pressed for, the President's agenda, the fact that he gave us that 
extra billion dollars for missile defense, that we got that, that alone 
is a compelling reason to vote for this emergency supplemental, because 
having a missile defense, of all the things in this package, is 
probably the one that I would deem the greatest emergency.
  I want to close by going back to what we call the growing pay gap 
because this may tell you a little bit about what I started with. What 
I started to talk about, of course, was personnel, people. Why are they 
leaving the military after we put 1, 2, 3 or $4 million into training a 
young man or a young woman to be a pilot? Why are they getting out? Why 
are our sailors leaving? Well, I will tell you why.
  Since 1982, and I can remember being a Republican freshman in 1982, 
one of the first things that Ronald Reagan did was put in two bills 
that brought up our military to where they were level, they were even, 
with civilian pay, and that gave great morale to the people that were 
already in and it also gave a great incentive to young people that 
thought about joining to come into the military. Since then, and that 
is 1982 on this chart, you can see this big pink area which is now the 
difference between military people and civilians in the same type of 
work. So that means if you have got an electronics technician on the 
inside of the military, he is working in the military, and he looks 
outside and sees his friend who has the same schooling, same 
capability, that young person is making 13\1/2\ percent more than he is 
on the average. And so when you ask a young person to come into the 
military, and they look at that job level and the job description 
inside the uniformed services and the job description on the outside of 
the uniformed services, they come to the conclusion that it is best to 
stay on the outside, and that is what has been happening.
  So we need to address this pay gap between the civilian sector and 
the uniformed sector, and we are going to be doing that.

                              {time}  1500

  Now, there are a couple of other things in the defense bill that are 
in the emergency supplemental before us, this big omnibus bill, that 
are defense-related.
  We have the Y2K problem. We devoted some money to the Y2K problem. We 
have to solve that, because a lot of military activities are related to 
computers and could be badly damaged if we have a Y2K problem. That is 
this idea that in the Year 2000 many of the

[[Page H11041]]

computers are not predictable with respect to what they are going to 
do. So we are going to solve that Y2K problem. We have to do that in 
national security, as well as in the domestic area.
  Also some of this money is devoted to paying for Bosnia. Let me tell 
you, that tells us where some of the money went that should have gone 
to pay, some of the money that should have gone to equipment, some of 
the money that should have gone to spare parts and training, and some 
of the money that should have gone to personnel retention bonuses. That 
money instead went, among other places, to Bosnia. So now we are paying 
for the money for the President's Bosnia operation, without taking it 
out of ammunition, without taking it out of training, without taking it 
out of readiness.
  What we did in the old days, the President just said you military 
folks go look at your other areas, like training and people and 
ammunition, and pull some money out of those accounts, and we will use 
that money to go to Bosnia on. That is called taking it out of hide.
  Well, we stopped that in this emergency supplemental, so even that 
money going to Bosnia does not directly help us with respect to 
modernization or pay rates or spare parts. At least it takes the 
pressure off the defense budget so we can buy ammunition, so we can pay 
our personnel more and give them some retention bonuses and we can buy 
those spare parts.
  We spent about $1 billion in this emergency supplemental on 
readiness. Most of that is going to go to parts. That means if you are 
working on a carrier and you need a certain part now for an aircraft, 
and a week later you may need another part, instead of having to fly 
that in with an airplane from some parts depot in the United States to 
halfway around the world, hopefully we will be able to buy enough of 
those spare parts so you have a couple of them on the shelf in the 
plane or on the ship, or, for example, have some of those components 
for the air crew that works that particular plane. So that will solve 
some of our readiness problems. So we have devoted over $1 billion to 
that so-called readiness account in this emergency supplemental.
  Let me just make the case again that there was a lot of negotiation 
that took place in this bill, but the important national security 
problems that the Speaker and his negotiating team took care of far 
outweigh any concessions that we might have had to make to big 
government and to the President.

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