[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 38 (Thursday, March 30, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H1625-H1626]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     BOLSTERING AMERICA'S DEFENSES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gutknecht). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, we just passed a supplemental appropriations 
bill which had what a lot of folks think was a fairly sizeable chunk of 
defense spending. It passed by a very large vote.
  The vote surprised a number of Members, but I think the reason we had 
such a large vote, almost a three to one majority in favor of increased 
defense spending at this time, is because we have cut defense so 
drastically in the past.
  I think most Americans do not realize that, actually, the defense 
budget we passed this year was approximately $125 billion less than 
Ronald Reagan's defense budget of 1986.
  Now, this chart here shows how defense spending has fallen like a 
rock over the last 13 years or so. Certainly the dissolution of the 
Warsaw Pact, the fall of the Soviet Empire, which incidentally, was 
brought about by America having a strong national defense, but that 
dissolution means that we do not have to spend as much money on defense 
as we did in the 1980s.
  However, it does not mean that we can absolutely abandon our troops. 
I am afraid this administration has put together a blueprint for 
defense over the next several years that, for practical purposes, 
abandons the troops. Let me go through some of the problems, Mr. 
Speaker.
  Over the last 18 months or so, we have had about 80 crashes of 
American military aircraft. I have the crashes listed here. I know my 
colleagues cannot see this fine print, but that involved 90 dead pilots 
and crew members, and it involved almost every type of aircraft in the 
American inventory: helicopters, fixed wing, bombers, in some cases.
  There was a reason for that. If we look at another graph, this graph 
shows how mission capability has dropped. Mission capability means the 
ability to turn on your airplane just like you would turn on the car in 
your driveway, put it in gear, make it go, and go off and do its 
mission and come back. So if I ask you, if you had two cars in your 
driveway and I called you up and said, what is your mission capability 
rate, and you said, just a minute, you went out, got in both the cars 
and tried to start them and only one would start and go into gear, you 
would come back to the phone and say, it is 50 percent, one out of two.
  Our mission capability rate of our aircraft across the services over 
the last several years has been dropping because we are not spending 
enough money on spare parts, we are not spending enough time on 
training, do not have enough training money, and we have old airplanes, 
because we are not replacing the old airplanes with newer airplanes.
  So if we look at the Air Force, it has gone from 83 percent mission 
capability down to 74 percent. That means about 25 percent of the 
airplanes cannot get off the ground in the Air Force today.
  In the Marine Corps, it has dropped from 77 percent to 61 percent. 
That means about 40 percent of our marine aircraft cannot get off the 
ground today. In the Navy, it has gone from 69 percent to 61 percent. 
That means, again, about 40 percent of our Navy aircraft cannot get off 
the ground and go do their missions.
  A lot of Americans do not realize that we have cut our forces down 
drastically. This chart shows that since Desert Storm, we have cut our 
forces in America almost in half. These red tanks indicate what we had 
in 1991, and the blue tanks indicate what we had in 1992 with respect 
to the Army. So we went from 18 Army divisions to only 10, 546 Navy 
ships to only about 316 today, and 36 fighter airwings to only about 
20.
  Unfortunately, the small military that we have today is not as ready 
to fight as the big military that we had a few years ago because we 
have cut funding for the military too drastically.

[[Page H1626]]

  One thing that we have to look at today is the fact that we have cut 
the shipbuilding budget from a budget that supported almost 600 ships 
in the U.S. Navy to a budget that, if we build it out by 2020, we are 
only going to have a 200-ship Navy.
  Ammo shortages, we have about a $3.5 billion ammo shortage in the 
Army, a $193 million shortage in the U.S. Marine Corps, and the list 
goes on. So we passed this supplemental today that had a $4 billion 
military package in it that added spare parts, it added training time, 
it added health care for our retirees and our active duty people that 
they desperately need. It added a lot of the critical things that we 
need to make our military work.
  It was absolutely necessary. I commend my colleagues for this first 
small step to rebuild America's defenses.

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