[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 69 (Wednesday, June 7, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H3961-H3973]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 4576, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2001
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I
call up House Resolution 514 and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the resolution, as follows:
H. Res. 514
Resolved, That at any time after the adoption of this
resolution the Speaker may, pursuant to clause 2(b) of rule
XVIII, declare the House resolved into the Committee of the
Whole House on the state of the Union for consideration of
the bill (H.R. 4576) making appropriations for the Department
of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2001, and
for other purposes. The first reading of the bill shall be
dispensed with. All points of order against consideration of
the bill are waived. General debate shall be confined to the
bill and shall not exceed one hour equally divided and
controlled by the chairman and ranking minority member of the
Committee on Appropriations. After general debate the bill
shall be considered for amendment under the five-minute rule.
Points of order against provisions in the bill for failure to
comply with clause 2 of rule XXI are waived. During
consideration of the bill for amendment, the Chairman of the
Committee of the Whole may accord priority in recognition on
the basis of whether the Member offering an amendment has
caused it to be printed in the portion of the Congressional
Record designated for that purpose in clause 8 of rule XVIII.
Amendments so printed shall be considered as read. The
Chairman of the Committee of the Whole may: (1) postpone
until a time during further consideration in the Committee of
the Whole a request for a recorded vote on any amendment; and
(2) reduce to five minutes the minimum time for electronic
voting on any postponed question that follows another
electronic vote without intervening business, provided that
the minimum time for electronic voting on the first in any
series of questions shall be 15 minutes. At the conclusion of
consideration of the bill for amendment the Committee shall
rise and report the bill to the House with such amendments as
may have been adopted. The previous question shall be
considered as ordered on the bill and amendments thereto to
final passage without intervening motion except one motion to
recommit with or without instructions.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs.
Myrick) is recognized for 1 hour.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the
customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Frost); pending
which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration
of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.
Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Committee on Rules met and granted an
open rule for H.R. 4576, the fiscal year
[[Page H3962]]
2001 Department of Defense Appropriations Act.
The rule waives all points of order against consideration of the
bill. It provides for 1 hour of general debate equally divided and
controlled by the chairman and ranking minority member of the Committee
on Appropriations.
The rule waives points of order against provisions in the bill for
failure to comply with clause 2 of rule XXI prohibiting unauthorized or
legislative provisions in a general appropriations bill.
The rule allows the chairman of the Committee of the Whole to accord
priority in recognition to Members who have preprinted their amendments
in the Congressional Record.
The rule allows the Chairman of the Committee of the Whole to
postpone votes during consideration of the bill and to reduce voting
time to 5 minutes on a postponed question if the vote follows a 15-
minute vote.
Finally, the rule provides for one motion to recommit with or without
instructions.
Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 514 is an open rule for a strong bipartisan
bill. In fact, the Committee on Appropriations approved this bill 2
weeks ago by voice vote and without an amendment.
I have always admired the patriotism and dedication of our military
personnel, especially given the poor quality of military life for our
enlisted men and women; but today we are doing something to improve
military pay, housing, and benefits.
We are helping to take some of our enlisted men off of food stamps by
giving them a 3.7 percent pay raise, and we are offering $163 million
in enlistment and reenlistment bonuses. They are called bonuses, but
they earn them.
To follow through on our health care promises to our service men and
women, we are providing a 1-year 9 percent increase in health care
resources. A good portion of these funds will go to improve care for
our military retirees who have never been given the treatment that they
deserve.
At the same time, we are boosting the basic allowance for housing so
that our military families do not have to pay as much out of their own
pockets.
Along with personnel, we have to take care of our military readiness.
We live in a dangerous world, and Congress is working to protect our
friends and families back home from our enemies abroad. We are
providing for a national missile defense system so that we can stop a
warhead from places like China or North Korea or Iraq if that day ever
comes.
We are boosting the military's budget for weapons and ammunition. We
are providing $40 billion for research and development so our forces
will have top-of-the-line equipment for their job.
I urge my colleagues to support the rule and to support the
underlying bill, because now more than ever we must improve our
national security.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this rule and in strong support of
the Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2001. This
bill provides $288.5 billion in budget authority for the programs of
the Department of Defense, the very programs that ensure the security
of this Nation and which, in large part, enable our country to keep the
peace and remain the leader of the free world.
Mr. Speaker, this bill reflects the understanding of both Democrats
and Republicans for the need to ensure that our national defense is
second to none.
{time} 1445
This bill also reflects the understanding that in order for our
military to maintain its global superiority, it is necessary to make
substantial financial commitments in order to restructure our Cold War
forces to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This bill addresses
serious readiness deficiencies and equipment modernization shortfalls
that have seriously strained the ability of our military forces to meet
the demands of the many missions they undertake.
I am pleased to support this revitalization of our armed forces.
Among the important provisions of this bill, Mr. Speaker, is a 3.7
percent military pay raise and $12.1 billion for the Defense Health
Program, which provides monies not only for active duty personnel and
their families, but also to an unfortunately limited extent military
retirees and their dependents. This bill does make positive strides in
expanding prescription drug coverage for Medicare eligible military
retirees but falls short in providing for a permanent health care
system for military retirees.
While I appreciate the fact that the bill contains a provision
requiring the submission of a plan to Congress by an independent
oversight panel no later than December 31, 2002, I would encourage the
subcommittee to at least consider including the language of the Taylor
amendment in a conference agreement since this amendment was agreed to
by an overwhelming vote of 406 to 10 during the DOD authorization
debate. We have made a promise to our military retirees, and it is time
for us to keep it.
Mr. Speaker, this bill also continues the commitment to a wide range
of weapons programs that will ensure our continued military superiority
in the skies, on land, as well as at sea. I am particularly pleased
this bill includes $2.15 billion for the procurement of 10 F-22
Raptors, the next generation Air Force fighter that will assure our
continued dominance in any air campaign against any foe in the future
with air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities. The bill also provides
$396 million in advance procurement and sets aside an additional $1.411
billion for research, development, test and evaluation of the F-22.
The bill also includes $1.1 billion for the procurement of 16 V-22
Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft for the Marine Corps, $336 million for 4 Air
Force V-22s, and an additional $148 million for research and
development on this important addition to our military arsenal. In
addition, the bill provides $249 million for various F-16
modifications.
Mr. Speaker, during the recent recess in April, I had the opportunity
to travel to Bosnia and Kosovo to see firsthand the dedication of the
men and women of our military who are serving there. I had the
privilege of visiting some of the National Guardsmen from the State of
Texas who are serving in Bosnia to see how they are faring under very
difficult circumstances. I can say, Mr. Speaker, that these troops are
doing a remarkable job and are fully aware of the importance and
necessity of their mission.
However, as I mentioned in the Committee on Rules yesterday, this
bill does nothing to fund the missions that we have undertaken in
Bosnia and Kosovo. Mr. Speaker, it is vital that funds to reimburse the
Department of Defense for expenditures already made to meet our
obligations in that region be included. It is simply not responsible to
delay this funding, forcing the Defense Department to face shortfalls
in critical operations and maintenance accounts during the last quarter
of fiscal year 2000.
I was certainly gratified when the chairman and ranking member of the
committee assured me yesterday during the hearing before the Committee
on Rules that this funding would most likely be included in the
conference agreement on the military construction appropriations
measure no later than August 1, and I know of their commitment to
making the Department whole. However, Mr. Speaker, I think it is
important that we all understand that American men and women are
serving an important mission in Bosnia and Kosovo and this Congress has
the responsibility to provide the money to make this mission a success
without shortchanging other programs within DOD.
I spoke with a representative of the Army this morning who told me
that the Army faces a very bleak picture in the fourth quarter of this
fiscal year if this money is not provided forthwith. It is unfortunate
that this legislation is on the floor without addressing the money for
Kosovo and Bosnia. Because if this money is not provided as an add-on
to the military construction appropriation later this summer, the
Defense Department and the Army, specifically, will be forced to
curtail, drastically curtail, training and other activities that are
critical to the success of their mission.
Mr. Speaker, this is a good bill; and I urge Members to support it.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
[[Page H3963]]
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer).
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, I would share with my colleagues that I
believe we have a very fair rule and also a very strong bipartisan bill
that is coming to the House floor that will serve the national security
needs of those men and women who serve in our armed forces.
I want to compliment the Committee on Appropriations. I think the
chairman and the ranking member did a very good job in working with the
authorizing committee. I have not seen this type of cooperation in the
8 years I have served here in Congress. Sometimes we get conflict
between the authorizing and the appropriating committees, but in this
case I extend great compliments on their work.
Let me first speak about the quality of life. Despite 5 years of
sustained efforts to improve the quality of living for U.S. military
personnel and their families, service members continue to voice their
displeasure with the military life by leaving the force, which is very
bothersome to many of us. As a result, each of the services has
experienced significant recruiting and retention problems, threatening
the strength and readiness of the all-volunteer force.
The authorizing and the appropriation committees recognize the great
personal sacrifices made by U.S. service members and have focused
quality-of-life improvements in two areas: one, reforming the Defense
Health Program and, number two, sustaining the viability of the all-
volunteer force.
While efforts in these areas in recent years have been substantial,
there are no silver bullets to end the quality-of-life challenges
facing the U.S. military. It will require a commitment to a long-term
battle against these challenges if America is to sustain the world's
foremost military force. It is with this commitment that the committees
recommended a quality-of-life package that will improve the military
health care system, provide for fair compensation, support the morale,
welfare and recreational programs, and improve the facilities for which
the military personnel live and work. We also are working on sustaining
the proper weapon systems that they need.
Let me speak for a moment about the military health delivery system.
Again, I extend compliments to the appropriators, because what we are
trying to do here is put our arms around all of these different
programs that are out there, and specifically with regard to the
military retiree. Now, all of us here in this body have heard from our
constituents about the TRICARE System. As we seek to implement TRICARE,
we have had hiccups and little burps here and there with that system,
and it has been difficult. We have sought to make improvements. And I
appreciate the support of the appropriators. We are going to work to
create savings in the claims processing area, which will save $500
million and then will be poured back into the system.
Now, what about the military retiree? The military retiree is
disgruntled, and rightfully so. The question is whether or not we as
the Federal Government are fulfilling our obligation to the military
retiree, given the sacrifices that they have given on behalf of the
Nation. With the expectation that they would receive health care
benefits for life, have we been fulfilling that requirement? The answer
is no.
When the military retiree retired and lived next to that military
base during the 1970s, 1980s and into the early 1990s, there was a
comfort zone. Even though they were turning 65, they gained access to
the medical treatment facilities despite in law that they would be
triggered into the Medicare program. When we went through the base
closure process, they were triggered directly into Medicare, and they
did not gain access to the medical treatment facilities. So they came
to Congress.
Congress is fishing for the right answer. We create different types
of pilot programs, and we struggle with them and try to figure out what
is the best way to provide relief in the system. I believe we have come
close to finding the right answer, and that is we have put our arms
around these pilot programs and we extend them to 2003. We sunset the
programs. We have created the commission to examine it; and in the
meantime, what we can deliver is the pharmacy benefit. I appreciate the
appropriators for funding the pharmacy benefit to the military retiree.
It is a generous benefit.
What was bothersome to the military retiree was that they felt that
because of their sacrifice and the protections of the freedoms and
liberties that we enjoy in our Nation, that perhaps they should be
treated a little differently. So it bothered them that they were then
taken and thrown right into the Medicare system back in 1965, which
many of them did not even realize until the early 1990s. So now, as
Congress is presently about to deliver a pharmacy benefit that is
different from the Medicare population, it is a richer benefit, the
last thing we should do is now say, oh, every grandma and grandpa who
never served in the military should now be treated just as if they had
served in the military.
What a curious thing. I think some people in this body look out the
window and think, well, everybody should drive the same kind of car and
should be treated the same way. False. I just wanted to bring this up
because it was not long ago, about 10 days ago, that the President
endorsed that. Well, of course he endorses it, because he thinks
everybody should be treated alike in this country. That is false. There
are different people who have done different things.
So I want to compliment the appropriators who have said, yes, we are
going to follow the lead from the authorizing committee; and we are
going to fund the pharmacy benefit for the military retirees, which
they rightfully deserve.
I also want to share that we are providing a 3.7 percent military pay
raise that has been funded; also $163 million for the reenlistment
bonuses. Those are extremely important. We provide $64 million for the
basic housing allowance. I think many of us wish that the numbers could
be higher in that regard, but the more monies we can move directly into
the pockets of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines is extremely
important. The more money we get in the pocket, and especially tax
free, the more we can actually help them.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from
Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, first, let me plead guilty
to one of the accusations that was leveled by the previous speaker. I
do believe that older people who are sick should have their
prescription drugs covered. The fact that there are 70- and 80-year-old
women who did not serve in the armed forces and who cannot afford their
prescription medicine does not seem to me a good reason to deny them a
prescription drug benefit under Medicare. So I will plead guilty to
that accusation.
Indeed, that is one of the reasons why I am opposed to this bill.
Much of what it does is very important, the pay increase and the
improvement in the living conditions for the people; but it maintains
an effort to fund inadequately an extremely flawed strategy. Obviously,
we should provide the funds necessary to carry out what we say we are
going to do militarily. The problem is we say we are going to do too
much. We continue to err by keeping large numbers of troops in Western
Europe when our Western European allies are well enough financed to be
able to do this on their own. We continue to hold to an obsolete two-
war theory. We continue to fund weapons whose idea began in the Cold
War.
{time} 1500
So, yes, I want an adequately funded military. I want one with a
margin of safety. I want the United States to be as it has been and
will continue to be by far the strongest Nation in the world. But we
make a mistake when we overreach and then use the overreach as an
excuse to overspend. And there we have also, of course, the tendency of
people, particularly in the Senate, to add weapons whose primary
justification is not the enemy they will confront but the constituents
they will comfort.
We have nuclear attack submarines that we are going to fund, and I
have not yet been able to have anyone explain to me who the enemy is.
They are wonderful weapons. But the fact that they are so
technologically skilled is not enough of a justification to have them.
It is unlikely that they are going
[[Page H3964]]
to encounter Iranian, Libyan, or North Korean submarines that they have
to encounter.
This bill will spend more than half of the money available to the
Federal Government in discretionary accounts. And prescription drugs
are relevant. Because the people who support this bill are telling us,
on the other hand, some of them, that we cannot afford prescription
drugs, that we cannot afford to send money to build schools, that we
cannot afford more police on the streets, that we cannot afford more
effective cleanup.
This bill overspends to defend the people of Western Europe against
nonexistent threats when they can afford to do it themselves. It
overspends on weapons whose political justification far exceeds their
military justification. It overspends to fund outdated theories that
date from the Cold War. And, consequently, it requires us to underspend
on important domestic priorities.
The bill ought to be defeated and sent back to the committee. It
increases by tens of billions of dollars over last year, and that comes
directly out of every other appropriation bill.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from
Indiana (Mr. Buyer).
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, I would advise everyone that it is no secret
that the Republicans are putting together the plan to derive a pharmacy
benefit for the over-65 individuals of whom are most needy; and we are
not ashamed of that at all.
I will also say that what a curious thing it is that we will always
have a critic that will always question a weapons system that will say,
well, what is the purpose of that? It has never shot a nuclear missile?
My colleagues, we had a B-2 bomber, this is called the Spirit of
Indiana, and I dedicated that B-2 bomber in Indiana; and when I
dedicated it, I prayed that it would never drop a bomb.
Now, why would we ever build a billion-dollar weapon system and pray
that it would never drop a bomb? Because it is a deterrent.
A police officer, when he carries a weapon, I say to the gentleman
from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank), he says a prayer that he never has to
use his weapon. When he pulls that weapon, he does not say, I want to
brandish it, I want to threaten, actually, I want to pull the trigger
and shoot and kill someone because it is going to make me feel good.
No. It is used as a deterrent. We have different weapon systems out
there that are used as a deterrent, and they are extremely important.
For the gentleman to question to say, why are we building nuclear
weapons, in fact, that we are never going to use them, and then to say
that we have other domestic priorities is ridiculous and rather silly.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BUYER. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, in the first place, I did
not question nuclear weapons. I questioned nuclear submarines, attack
submarines.
Obviously, we should have nuclear weapons. I want us to keep most of
them. My point was nuclear attack submarines had a Cold War
justification; and given the state of the enemy that we are likely to
confront today, the smaller, poorly armed, evil-minded states, nuclear
attack submarines are a waste of money and do take away from other
things.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the Russian Bear has been
replaced by a thousand Vipers; and we have to be leaning forward and be
very prepared and be very ready because we do not know who is going to
be the next threat.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from
Washington (Mr. Dicks).
Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman yielding me the
time.
Mr. Speaker, I want to say first of all that I think this is a very
fine rule that allows the House to work its will on this very important
legislation. I think this is an exceptionally good bill.
First of all, I want to compliment the gentleman from California (Mr.
Lewis), our chairman, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha),
our ranking Democrat, for their excellent leadership on this particular
bill.
One of the things that I think stands out in my mind about this bill
is the fact that we are moving forward the Army's program to transform
Army brigades to a new medium configuration that can be deployed within
96 hours anywhere in the world on a C-130 or, better, on a C-17. I am
very pleased that the Army has selected Ft. Lewis, Washington, as the
place to do this transformation of two of these brigades.
I think the Army is correct to try to have a more deployable force.
We saw the problems in Kosovo with the Apaches, first of all the
inability to deploy them for some period of time, and then the fact
that they were not prepared when they got there to be utilized. I think
that is a serious problem for the Army that we must confront.
I would only say to my friend, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr.
Frank), that attack submarines, by the way, were just given a scrub by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They think the fact that we only have 50 is
a serious mistake. They think we should have about 68. We will be very
fortunate if we can keep 57 attack submarines.
Now, I would point out to the gentleman that there is an ASW role for
attack submarines. There is a special forces role for attack
submarines. There is a very important intelligence role. And they are
very crucial in any kind of a war-fighting scenario against any
country. Anytime somebody has a ship at sea, an attack submarine is the
last thing they want to confront. So I think they still have a very
important utilization.
One of the things that I worked on, and I see my good friend from
Texas and my good friend from California here on the floor, has been
the effort to modernize our bomber force. In this whole defense debate,
I do believe the one serious mistake we are making is not adequately
funding our bomber force.
I was particularly proud of the fact that the B-2 bomber was
utilized, along with the B-1s and the B-52s, in the war in Kosovo and
Yugoslavia. Many of us read the report in Newsweek that talked about
the difficulty against relocatable targets. Well, I will tell my
colleagues this, that the B-2 with the 2,000-pound JDAMs was used
against fixed targets and it was extremely accurate and extremely
effective.
In fact, we are now going to, with the money that is in this bill,
put a new bomb rack on the B-2s and we are going to be able to put 80
500-pound JDAMs on each of these planes. And they will all be
independently targetable. We will be able to take out 80 separate
targets in one sortie. I mean, this is revolutionary.
We are also adding capability with Link 16 to give the B-2 not only
the ability to go deep underground but also to go against relocatable
targets and, with the use of submunitions, to go against advancing
armor. This will turn out to be the most impressive, the most important
conventional weapon ever developed by the United States or by any
military force in the history of mankind. I am proud that the Congress,
this House, four times voted with the gentleman from Washington on this
particular issue.
I think we have been vindicated by those who said it could not fly in
the rain. By the way, in Yugoslavia, it was the only plane that did fly
in the rain that could drop bombs because we were using the GPS system,
which does not rely on laser guidance. So I am very proud of the fact
that we continue the modernization of the B-2 with some adds in this
particular bill to give it even greater capability. Its mission
planning has been improved. We were giving it a multitude of bombs that
it can handle. It will be a conventional weapon that I think allows us
to make some reductions under START I, under START II, and eventually
under a START III agreement in the number of nuclear weapons that we
need for deterrent purposes.
I think it is much more important to have conventional weapons that
we can utilize. It is true that deterrence is based on weapons like the
Trident submarine, which I have been a major supporter of. But we are
not going to use those weapons. In fact, I hope that we can take the
four Tridents that we are downsizing and use them for conventional
purposes, to add a conventional capability with Tomahawk to those four
Tridents and maybe using two of them for special forces operations.
[[Page H3965]]
So I think there are many good things.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from
California (Mr. McKeon).
Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the
time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this rule and H.R. 4576.
Mr. Speaker, this is the first year that the President has brought us
a reasonable defense budget for consideration. Over the last 7 years,
the President's budget has failed the military service chiefs and our
fighting men and women in uniform. While the President's budget was
reasonable this year, it still failed our arms services to the tune of
$16 billion, according to what the service chiefs have told us.
However, under the leadership of the gentleman from California
(Chairman Lewis), the House has once again added funding to support our
defense requirements. While still living within a balanced budget, we
have added $4 billion to the President's defense request. This was used
to fund much-needed programs.
For instance, the B-2 bomber that my friend the gentleman from
Washington (Mr. Dicks) just spoke about was the central part of the
success story from the air war in Kosovo. The B-2's success in this
conflict underscored our need for an adequate and modern bomber fleet.
We also learned some very important lessons about the effectiveness
of our smart bombs during the war and we learned we had some
shortcomings. We found that there are changes that could be made that
would make our bomber fleet more effective. One of those was to add
500-pound bomb capabilities instead of just the 2,000-pound bombs. We
used to talk about how many planes it would take to take out a target.
Now we are talking about how many targets one plane can take out.
Unfortunately, the President failed to fund the research and
development of the 500-pound JDAM and the 500-pound JDAM bomb rack even
though the service chiefs had told us that that was a high requirement.
It was under the leadership of the gentleman from California
(Chairman Lewis) that funding was added for these upgrades and
advancements. In total, the committee added funding of $96 million for
upgrades on the B-2. These include the Link 16 upgrades that will
modernize the cockpit and allow for in-flight replanning, research, and
development of the 500-pound JDAM and the integration on the B-2.
The flights that we had over Kosovo were actually 30-hour flights
that went from the State of Missouri. And when we are on long missions
like that, sometimes changes are made in the planning. These Link 16
upgrades will allow for that. With the success of the B-2, these
upgrades will allow our military to exert further strength and keep
freedom and peace abroad, thus making B-2 truly the Spirit of America.
This is just one program of many that the committee has seen fit to
fund at the level it needs. Faced with a very difficult task, the
committee found a way to ensure that our forces are taken care of and
our national security remains strong. I congratulate them for this
bill, and urge a yes vote on this rule and on the legislation.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from
Vermont (Mr. Sanders).
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the
time.
Mr. Speaker, it is time that we in Congress get our priorities
straight. Today, despite the so-called economic boom, tens of millions
of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than was the case
25 years ago. They are working two jobs or they are working three jobs
and they are desperately trying to keep their heads above water.
In the United States today, 44 million Americans have no health
insurance, and millions more are underinsured. The United States has
the greatest gap in the industrialized world between the rich and the
poor, and 20 percent of our children live in poverty, the highest child
poverty rate of any major country.
Millions of senior citizens in this country and middle-income
families cannot afford the prescription drugs they need, and the U.S.
Congress has made the health care crisis even worse by cutting in 1997
several hundred billion dollars from Medicare. Throughout this country,
veterans who put their lives on the line defending this Nation are
unable to get the quality health care they need and deserve.
In the United States today, we are experiencing an affordable housing
crisis, with millions of hard-working families paying more than 50
percent of their limited incomes just to pay the rent; and some of the
more unfortunate low-income workers are people sleeping out on the
streets or in their automobiles.
In this country we talk a whole lot about education, but millions of
American middle-class families cannot afford to send their kids to
college and many of our kids who graduate find themselves deeply in
debt.
In other words, Mr. Speaker, the middle class of this country, the
working families, our senior citizens, our veterans, our young people,
low-income people, have some very serious problems.
{time} 1515
Unfortunately, when these constituents cry out to Congress and ask
for help, they are told over and over again that there is just no money
available to help them, that we just do not have the resources. But
when it comes to military spending, it appears that the defense
contractors who want to design the most exotic and expensive weapons
systems in the history of the world are able to obtain all of the
funding they want. When it comes to defense spending, we apparently
have billions to spend on the construction of a national missile
defense system that many scientists believe will not work and is not
needed; billions to spend on aircraft carriers and fighter planes that
just coincidentally are built in the States and districts of powerful
Members of Congress; billions to spend on military projects that
coincidentally are built by contractors who contribute huge sums of
money to both political parties. When it comes to military spending, we
apparently have the resources to increase the defense budget by 7
percent, a $22 billion increase from last year.
Mr. Speaker, I believe that the U.S. needs a strong and superior
military system. We must be prepared for the new threats and challenges
that lie ahead. We must provide decent pay, good housing, good quality
health care and child care and other vital services to our men and
women in uniform.
We must do a much better job than at present in understanding the
cause of Gulf War illness which is why I am offering an amendment later
on in this bill so that we can better understand the cause of that
illness which is affecting 100,000 Americans.
But the bottom line, Mr. Speaker, is enough is enough. Today when we
look at our military budget, it is not just that we spend more than 18
times as much as the military spending of all of our potential
adversaries combined; but when we combine our spending with NATO, who
will be our allies in any major international conflict, the numbers are
absolutely incredible. The bottom line is that we as a Nation have got
to get our priorities right. There is a limited sum of money out there,
and we must make sure that we spend it appropriately. We cannot turn
our backs on our seniors, on working people, on the children and simply
look toward the military budget.
I would ask that this bill be defeated, sent back to the committee
and brought forth again for a more appropriate response.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New
York (Mr. Quinn).
Mr. QUINN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina
for yielding me this time.
Mr. Speaker, I want to take with my short time maybe a little bit
different tack here. I want to speak on the rule for just a minute or
two. I think this is a good rule. I want to associate myself with the
remarks of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks) earlier from the
other side who took some time to talk to the rule and to the bill. I
think that the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) and the gentleman
from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) have taken great effort to fashion a
bill that warrants debate. The rule this afternoon allows for that kind
of debate to take place here in the House and offers
[[Page H3966]]
everybody an opportunity should they wish to be heard on that. I
suggest to Members that they approve the rule.
On the bill, itself, Mr. Speaker, we find increasingly here in the
House that nothing is easy when we are talking about appropriations
bills. We are asked increasingly to do more with less, whether we are
talking about this bill or any of the others that will come these next
few weeks and months. I happen to believe that our priorities in this
case are appropriate. I think as I said on the rule issue a few moments
ago that some time and energy has taken place here to make sure that we
do have a bipartisan bill for us to look at.
We have a bipartisan opportunity for us to talk about what should be
done and what should not be done, but when we are talking about money
and when we are talking about taxpayers' money and priorities, I
believe that this time around we are going to offer the House an
opportunity to vote affirmatively on a bill that has those priorities
in place. Whether we are talking about those of us who want to
geographically cast ourselves from the Northeast and the Midwest and
the West and the South, I think that the gentleman from California (Mr.
Lewis) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) have taken that
time, have listened to their members, they have listened not only to
the members on the subcommittee and the full committee, but they have
listened to Members at large who had things to say before the committee
during some of those hearings.
I would say to our colleagues who are out in their offices and will
be back here later this afternoon and this evening to vote on this bill
that they take a good look at it. I think that we have begun this early
in our system of rules and bills because it is a bipartisan effort. I
suggest approval later this evening.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from
California (Mr. Waxman).
(Mr. WAXMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Speaker, we are about to consider the defense
appropriations bill. Buried in this bill is a seemingly innocuous
provision that would have a profound effect. The provision would
require the Defense Department to obtain prior approval from both
defense authorizing and appropriating committees before transferring
funds to the Justice Department for litigation.
The motivation for this provision may be to allow the Congress to
keep track of funds appropriated to the Defense Department, but the
provision has a major unintended and adverse effect. It would
effectively block the Defense Department's contribution to the Justice
Department's suit against the tobacco industry. This suit is currently
under active consideration in the courts. Cutting off funds would
seriously cripple DOJ's efforts to hold the tobacco industry
accountable and to recover the billions of dollars spent by the
Government on smoking-related health care.
The tobacco lawsuit is strongly supported by the Department of
Defense. Smoking-related illnesses cost the Department nearly a billion
dollars each year. If the Justice Department case is successful, it
could result in a substantial financial benefit to DOD health care
programs which stand to share in the recovery.
I had considered offering a simple amendment. It would ensure that
the restrictions on transfers would not apply to currently pending
litigation. It would thus ensure that there is no unintended impact on
the tobacco case. However, I do not intend to offer my amendment at
this time. I understand that the underlying provision is part of the
bill's report language, not its statutory language; and I believe that
the provision can and, I am hopeful, will be fixed in conference so
that it no longer has any impact on the tobacco litigation.
However, other appropriations bills moving through the House, such as
VA-HUD and Commerce-State-Justice contain statutory language that is
explicitly designed to stop the tobacco lawsuit. This is simply wrong.
Rather than supporting the administration's effort to protect the
Federal taxpayers and public health, these bills are trying to defund
the litigation. This is nothing less than a secret gift to the tobacco
industry. As the other appropriations bills move through the process, I
urge my colleagues to strip out special protections for big tobacco;
but if these provisions remain, I intend to shine the spotlight on them
and fight to eliminate them.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from
California (Mr. Calvert).
Mr. CALVERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the rule and to
express my full support for H.R. 4576, the Defense Appropriations Act
for fiscal year 2001. This important legislation honors the men and
women serving in our Nation's armed services. I commend the gentleman
from California (Mr. Lewis) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr.
Murtha) for their leadership and commitment in addressing the needs of
our service men and women and their families.
This bill enhances recruiting, retention and quality-of-life
programs. It also includes a 3.7 percent pay raise and an additional
$64 million for basic housing allowances. It also addresses procurement
shortfalls that our military has suffered since the Kosovo campaign.
In particular, I am thankful for the gentleman from California's
support for metrology and calibration accounts and the C-17 Globemaster
funding levels. I look forward to working with the gentleman to explore
the active associate wing concept for any additional C-17s procured.
Mr. Speaker, I believe this bill is good for the U.S. service men and
women, good for the national security needs of our country, and a sound
investment for the people of the United States. Once again I would like
to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) and the staff of the
Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations for their
long hours and dedication. I know my district and the Nation's service
men and women are better off because of their commitment. I support the
rule and the bill.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).
Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.
Mr. Speaker, the bill before us today would in 1 year raise funding
for the Pentagon by $24 billion. Given some of the stories I have heard
from the troops in the field, some of that money might be well spent.
Unfortunately, I do not believe it is in this bill, and I do not
believe it is getting to the folks that need it. I met the dad of a
Marine who had a fancy new digital radio, that is true, they had
acquired that for him; but the Pentagon told him they could not afford
a waterproof cover for the nonwaterproof digital radio, and his dad was
in GI Joe's in Oregon buying the kid a waterproof cover for his radio.
There is something wrong with a Pentagon that can provide the fancy
equipment, but it cannot provide the basics. We still have families in
the military on food stamps. This bill does not take care of that
problem. We have recruitment and retention problems. We have problems
for hard duty, sea duty. There were requests by the Pentagon to fund
those programs. They are not funded in this budget.
This budget does not take care of the young men and women serving us
in the military, but it does take care of the defense contractors. Huge
new weapons programs will be rushed forward with this bill. More
billions for Star Wars that is yet to have one successful test. We are
going to rush production of the F-22 aircraft. Yet this is an aircraft
that is 2 years behind on its flight tests and has yet to complete even
basic flight testing.
But we are going to move ahead to procurement of a weapon that may
not be needed that at this point does not work at a cost of $300
million per fighter plane. It is supposed to be stealthy. The only
thing stealthy about it is if we spend all our money on F-22s, they
will be stealthy, we will hardly see an American fighter plane in the
next war because we will not have hardly any and the ones we have might
not be able to fly. Let us slow that down.
Contractors return voluntarily nearly $1 billion of overpayments sent
to them by a Pentagon that cannot keep track of its funds, and the GAO
says there were another $5 billion of overpayments at least that were
rendered.
[[Page H3967]]
They cannot even do bookkeeping. The answer is to give them another $24
billion; $24 billion that does not go to the troops, $24 billion that
does not go to basic readiness, $24 billion that does not go to
recruitment and retention problems, $24 billion that flows to weapons
systems that we do not need, that do not work, that are costing
outrageous amounts of money.
It is time to inject a little common sense into this debate. I am
going to offer an amendment on the F-22 to slow that program down and
save $1 billion. I am also going to offer another simple common sense
amendment, perhaps too common sense for us inside the Beltway here, not
for me but maybe for other Members, that would say that any contractor
who three times is convicted of procurement fraud against the taxpayers
of the United States would not be eligible to further contract with the
Department of Defense. I will not even go back in time. If we did it
retroactively, it would disqualify all our defense contractors. But let
us go from this date forward and say from this date forward defense
contractors are not going to commit fraud against the taxpayers of the
United States; and if they do, they will lose their contracts.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio
(Mr. Kucinich).
(Mr. KUCINICH asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks and include extraneous material.)
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, the Preamble to the Constitution of the
United States when it speaks of we the people of the United States, it
goes on to speak of forming a more perfect union, establish justice,
ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote
the general welfare, securing the blessings for ourselves and our
posterity.
Providing for the common defense is something that we as Members of
Congress need to do. But we also have to ask when $24 billion extra is
put into a defense budget, when the defense budget today is in excess
of $300 billion, we have to ask whether or not some of the other
promises to the people of this country are being ignored. Because
certainly the national defense should include the ability to provide
for decent health care for all, for a decent education for all, for
decent jobs for all. That too should be part of our national security.
If that is not, then we should in the alternative make sure that in
this huge Federal budget that we meet the economic and social needs of
the people.
{time} 1530
Now, this bill, Mr. Speaker, includes a provision for $1.8 billion
for a boondoggle called the National Missile Defense System. This
system is a fraud on the taxpayer, and it is a danger to arms
reduction. First, the technology is not feasible. It is not testable,
and, therefore, not reliable. It does not protect against real threats,
but it does richly line the pockets of military contractors.
It will destabilize our relations with our allies worldwide and will
spark a new and expanded nuclear arms race. It violates years of work
towards disarmament and nonproliferation. This national missile
defense, so-called defense, is a technological failure. A recent New
York Times article gives Congress an inkling to the truth about this
missile defense.
This Times analysis, which was based on a report from an MIT
scientist, goes on to state that, well, the national missile defense
system depends on the system's ability to discriminate between the
target warhead of an incoming missile and decoys, something has gone
wrong with this system.
According to the New York Times, the system has failed those tests,
that it cannot discriminate between the target warhead of an incoming
missile and decoys. This is a quote from the newspaper, ``The Pentagon
hailed the first intercept try as a success, but later conceded that
the interceptor initially drifted off course and picked out the decoy
balloon rather than the warhead,'' end of quote, that is because,
according to the Times, the system cannot tell the difference between
warheads and decoys. Experiments with the National Missile Defense
System have revealed that the system is, quote, ``inherently unable to
make the distinction,'' and that is between the target warhead, and
decoys. The New York Times characterized the MIT scientist as saying
the signals, quote, ``from the mock warhead and decoys fluctuated in a
varied and totally unpredictable way,'' that is inner quotes, revealing
no feature, inner quotes, ``that can be used to distinguish one object
from another,'' end quote.
Indeed, the Times reported the test showed that warheads and decoys
are so similar that sensors might never be able to tell them apart. In
other words, Mr. Speaker, the national missile defense which we are
about to appropriate close to $2 billion for does not work and cannot
work because it is inherently unable to tell the difference between
warheads and decoys, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpaying America.
Now, listen to this, Mr. Speaker. After this report appeared in the
New York Times, Defense saw to it that this letter that was sent was
classified. Now, it was classified before we had a chance to have a
debate over this on this floor; that classification tactic was simply,
I believe, to chill the debate.
I am going to be called on the appropriate legal enforcement agencies
to investigate this whole effort to cover up a system that does not
work, to trick up test results, because there is fraud and deceit here.
The taxpayers are being cheated. I am going to offer an amendment that
seeks to, as other Members will, deal with this subject, because the
national missile defense does not address the real threats that exist,
and the system will simply line the pockets of major defense
contractors.
It is wrong to cheat the taxpayers of the United States. And that is
what this so-called phony missile defense program does. We have already
spent $60 billion in the last 15 years on antimissile defense research,
and it has not produced a weapons defense system that can work. It is
wholly ineffective. It is a lie, and it needs to be exposed and it will
be.
[From the Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 6, 2000]
Missile Defense Is Political Fiction
(By Frances FitzGerald)
The debate over national missile defenses has been nothing
short of surreal.
On the one hand. President Bill Clinton and Vice President
Al Gore have been promoting a limited defense system to
protect the nation against attacks by rogue states, though
the system has not been proven and may never work reliably.
They have also been asking Russia to agree to amend the anti-
ballistic missile treaty to permit such a system, though the
Russians have always adamantly opposed such an amendment and
continued to do so at the summit meeting last weekend in
Moscow.
On the other hand, Gov. George W. Bush has promised a much
more robust national missile defense, though based on
technologies he has not yet named.
In addition, he has promised deep reductions in the
American and Russian strategic arsenals. The Russians,
however, have already told us that they see a larger defense
effort as a threat to their nuclear deterrent. The idea that
they would make deep reductions in the face of such an effort
defies logic.
Everyone in Washington knows all of this, so what is going
on?
The answer, of course, is politics. But it is a politics
that cannot be understood apart from the history of the
debate, a debate that has never been about reality.
On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan, whose hard-line
anti-Soviet policies had by then given rise to the largest
anti-nuclear movement in Cold War history, personally--and
almost in secret--wrote an insert to a routine defense
speech, calling on the scientific community to turn its great
talents to the cause of world peace and to give us a means of
rendering nuclear weapons ``impotent and obsolete.''
In background briefings after the speech, there was talk of
such Buck Rogers weaponry as space-based lasers that could
destroy the entire Soviet missile arsenal.
Reagan's own officials, among them Secretary of State
George Shultz, were appalled, and some speculated that the
president had gotten the idea from a science-fiction film. It
took them almost a year to discover what a stroke of
political genius the speech insert was.
Since 1946, opinion polls had shown that the vast majority
of Americans believed that scientists could develop a defense
against nuclear missiles if they put their minds to it.
Indeed, except when the issue of vulnerability was front and
center in the news, most Americans expressed confidence that
the United States had a defense against nuclear weapons
already.
Just two weeks after Reagan's speech, a White House poll
asked respondents whether they believed scientists could come
up with ``a really effective way to destroy Soviet nuclear
missiles from space.'' The answer was, as always, a
resounding yes.
[[Page H3968]]
Reagan certainly expected this answer. In addition, he and
his close aides recognized that, because of its inherent
ambiguity, a defense initiative would appeal to conservatives
as a way to develop a weapons system even while it appealed
to the public at large as a means to eliminating the nuclear
threat.
By the time of Reagan's re-election in November 1984, all
of his top officials had lined up behind the Star Wars
concept. A number of existing research programs were
cobbled together, and the Strategic Defense Initiative was
launched with great fanfare and much rhetoric about the
potential of lasers and other exotic technologies.
Shultz, Robert McFarlane and other moderates in the
administration wanted to use SDI as a bargaining chip for
Soviet strategic weapons.
``It would be like giving them the sleeves off our vest,''
Shultz told the president.
However, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, his aide
Richard Perle and their fellow hard-liners had other ideas.
They saw SDI as a way to block offensive-arms reductions, to
tear up the 1972 ABM treaty and to begin an arms race in
defensive as well as offensive weapons.
The two sides brawled for the rest of the Reagan
administration, and neither succeeded in gaining its ends.
In the meantime, however, SDI became extremely popular in
the polls. While the hard-liners pleased knowledgeable
conservatives by blocking strategic talks, Reagan pleased the
public by offering to share SDI technology with the Soviets
and promising the elimination of nuclear weapons. The anti-
nuclear movement, its rhetoric stolen, gradually faded away.
In the past 15 years, the United States has spent $60
billion on anti-missile-defense research and has yet to
produce a workable weapons system. An effective defense of
the country remains wholly elusive.
Yet Republican conservatives have continued to speak as if
exotic technologies were ready to jump off the assembly
lines, and have continued to press for a deployment of
something--anything--that would irrevocably commit this
country to an open-ended process of developing national
missile defenses.
Congressional Democrats tried to resist the pressure, but
their ability to do so waxed and waned with their own
political fortunes and those of the Republican right. In
early 1998, or around the time the Republicans took their
impeachment case against President Clinton to the Senate, the
Democrats gave way.
The previous fall a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, a
former defense secretary, had concluded that ``rogue states''
could acquire ballistic-missile technologies, and North Korea
had test-fired a long-range missile out over the Pacific.
In January the Clinton administration pledged financing for
the deployment of a national missile-defense system to cope
with this threat. In March the Senate, with administration
support, overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for a
deployment.
At the time, White House officials commented that the
administration's support for the bill would help to defuse a
potent political issue for the Republicans in the campaign of
2000.
Last fall Clinton announced that he would make a final
deployment decision this summer, in the very midst of the
presidential campaign.
This determination clearly had little to do with
technology, for the schedule did not permit time for adequate
testing--and since then one of the two tests has failed.
Rather, it had to do with the fear that the Republicans would
call Democrats weak on defense.
In their unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Russians to
agree to the deployment, administration officials assured
them that they could defeat the system if they kept 1,000 or
more strategic nuclear weapons on full alert. This was hardly
a bargain for either country, given the decay of the Russian
early-warning system and the increasingly real threat of an
accidental launch.
In the midst of these technological and diplomatic
embarrassments for the administration, Bush revived the
political issue by calling for the entire Reagan program:
Star Wars, radical nuclear-arms reductions, the de-alerting
of nuclear forces and the sharing of anti-missile technology
with our allies and possibly the Russians as well.
The proposal is, of course, self-contradictory. It is also
wildly implausible, in that the Pentagon is no more likely to
agree to give away advanced American technology than it ever
was, and no country except the United States can afford an
open-ended missile-defense program.
But then, the majority of Americans did not notice any of
these problems when Reagan made the proposal 15 years ago.
____
[From the Washington Post, June 4, 2000]
A Strategy of Silence on Missile Defense
(By Greg Schneider)
If President Clinton wants to show Russian President
Vladimir Putin the potent mix of interests making ballistic-
missile defense a priority in this country, he could invite
Putin to continue their summit at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza
Hotel in Philadelphia.
There they would find an archetypal blend of politics,
military and industry in the form of a week-long conference
hosted by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and co-chaired by the
Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and
Lockheed Martin Corp.
Inside those closed-door sessions are the stakeholders in a
campaign to create a land-based anti-missile system designed
to shoot down warheads launched at the United States by
terrorists or ``rogue'' states. The National Missile Defense
program is to receive $12 billion over the next six years and
could grow much larger.
While President Clinton weighs a decision on whether to
order construction of the system, and while Republican
presidential candidate George W. Bush calls for an expanded
defense shield, the nation's defense contractors are
uncharacteristically silent about this potential windfall of
them and their shareholders.
The Philadelphia conference is closed to the public and
press, though representatives of several foreign militaries
will take part. The companies in attendance and others in the
defense sector do virtually no marketing of missile defense
in the media. They don't even do much direct lobbying on
Capital Hill, according to executives, lobbyists, staffers
and experts.
The technology is too risky, sources said, and the issue
has too many international complications. But mostly there is
little need to lobby, because Congress is already dead set on
finding a way to stop hostile foreigners from hitting
American troops or cities with long-range missiles.
``It's religion on Capital Hill,'' said an industry
executive who asked not to be named.
``I think [the companies] sense there's an irresistible
drive that something is going to be fielded, and perhaps in
this instance they can sit out the overt plug for the system
itself and let the events just carry the current like a wave
ahead of them,'' said retired Army Col. Daniel Smith, chief
of research at the nonpartisan Center for Defense
Information. ``That way they can be good guys in a sense and
still get the contracts and save their powder for the real
battles.''
Critics charges that the companies take a subterranean
approach to the issue, funneling money to think tanks that
use speeches studies and seminars to spread the gospel of
missile defense. ``It's been a very sophisticated disciplined
lobbying effort,'' said William D. Hartung of the World
Policy Institute in New York.
The stakes are high and growing. The national has spent
more than $60 billion on missile-defense research since
Ronald Reagan announced his plan for a space shield against
Russian warheads in the early 1980s. It could spend anywhere
from $30 billion to $50 billion more on the National Missile
Defense program by 2015, depending on how extensive a system
is built, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Thousands of companies across the country benefit from
ballistic-missile defense programs, though nearly half of the
spending goes to four major players: Lockheed Martin, Boeing
Co., Raytheon Co. and TRW Inc.
Although much of the work is done in Alabama and
California, a breakdown of $2.55 billion in current contracts
shows 46 Northern Virginia-based companies receiving a total
of $166 million, according to Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc. in
Fairfax. Seventeen contractors in Maryland and the District
divided another $28 million.
Others would like to get into the field. Northrop Grumman
Corp., for example, has spent years prepping for a chance to
build radar for an expanded version of the National Missile
Defense program.
But John Johnson, director of advanced technology
businesses at Northrop Grumman's electronics sector near
Baltimore, said he recently learned that National Missile
Defense prime contractor Boeing is planning to stick with the
radar it currently buys from Raytheon.
``It's difficult to understand why in the world they would
not want to have competition,'' Johnson said. ``Especially
when you consider the fact that whoever does this is going to
have a monopoly for the next 20 to 30 years in that
particular line of business. We're talking a tremendous
amount of money, billions of dollars, for tens of years.''
Such scale is especially irresistible to the big companies
that hunger for huge, long-term contracts after a decade of
industry consolidation and several years of rejection by Wall
Street. The primary question is how far Congress will
ultimately be willing to go.
Reagan's original vision of a vast space shield, dubbed
``star wars,'' evaporated in the hot glare of physics and
negative publicity. But the Persian Gulf War rekindled the
issue as Saddam Hussein menaced Israel and attacked U.S.
troops with crude Scud missiles. The military had no reliable
answers to that threat so Congress ordered it to come up with
something.
Since then, North Korea and other potential enemies have
worked to develop rocket technology that could let them
deliver warheads of every description to faraway places--
theorectially including the United States.
So the Pentagon is stoking antiballistic missile technology
on two fronts: The National Missile Defense program would
establish a limited network to protect the nation from the
odd missile or two launched by terrorists. And several
``theater missile defense'' programs are aimed at protecting
troops or ships in battle from Scud-like threats.
Boeing is the lead company on National Missile Defense,
having won a three-year, $1.6 billion contract in 1998 to
assemble a basic system.
[[Page H3969]]
Lockheed Martin lost out on that contract but is the major
player in theater missile defense, with its upgraded version
of the Patriot missile and the Army's $14 billion Theater
High-Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, system. The company
could gain an important role in national missile defense as
well, if the program is expanded to include Navy ships using
Lockheed Martin's Aegis combat system.
Raytheon and TRW are present as subcontractors on virtually
every type of missile-defense program. Raytheon makes the
crucial X-band radar for both National Missile Defense and
for Thaad, as well as the ``kill vehicle'' on the tip of the
NMD missile. TRW is creating the battle management,
command and control system for NMD; is working with Boeing
and Lockheed Martin on the Air Force's Airborne Laser
program; and is competing to build a low-orbiting network
of early-warning satellites.
The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which
coordinates most of the systems, also has a small-business
innovation program that has awarded about $450 million in
research contracts to thousands of companies in all but about
three states since 1985. The agency sends out a monthly
newsletter highlighting technology contracts in particular
states, which experts say is BMDO's most overt effort to
emphasize the far-flung political constituencies of its
programs.
National Missile Defense is by far the most politically
sensitive project. It is a topic not only at this weekend's
summit in Russia but also in this year's presidential
campaign. The central issue is when to begin deploying a
land-based missile-defense system, and how big to make it.
Many defense officials expect President Clinton to postpone
the deployment decision until the next administration.
One executive in the defense industry said that while
contractors believe George W. Bush would act faster and on a
bigger scale, they also have faith that pressure from
Congress would make Democrat Al Gore follow suit eventually.
Either way, the executive said, the research dollars will
keep flowing.
Such research could lead to valuable spinoff technology in
other business areas such as communications, remote sensing
and optical technologies, said Malcolm O'Neill, who heads
Lockheed's air and missile defense efforts. O'Neill, a
retired Army general who was the first commander of the
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, continues to serve on
a BMDO advisory panel.
The industry's expectation that research dollars will flow
regardless of when the system is deployed is one reason,
insiders say, that defense lobbyists are not trying to push
missile defense.
A bigger factor is that the topic ``is so political that
the defense contractors really don't want to be prominently
involved in something that is that visceral in terms of
opposition or support,'' said Richard Cook, a veteran
lobbyist and former head of government operations for
Lockheed.
Cook recalled catching a company official briefing a group
of senators on the promise of missile defense in the early
1980s. ``I chewed [him] out,'' Cook said. ``I said, `Hey,
what are you doing talking about missile defense? You have no
idea what it's going to cost, and the politics are such that
you're going to have little or no influence and in fact
you'll probably end up embarrassing Lockheed.' ''
At that time, too, he said, the company's own scientists
were divided over whether the technology would even work.
Critics argue today that the whole effort--but especially
National Missile Defense--is technologically impossible.
``This isn't going to defend anyone except defending the
interests of some defense contractors and lining their
pockets,'' Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) said last week at
a rally against missile defense.
He pointed out that the four biggest contractors are heavy
campaign donors. The defense industry as a whole supplied
more than $2.3 million in soft money to the major parties
last year, according to Common Cause.
Hartung, the arms-control expert at the World Policy
Institute, charges that defense companies have shaped the
debate over missile defense by working indirectly through
think tanks and study groups that influence key
participants.
``These companies are desperate for cash, and they view
this system as their meal ticket--not for this year but for
the next generation,'' Hartung said.
He emphasized links between defense contractors and the
Center for Security Policy, an arms advocacy group run by
former Reagan defense official Frank J. Gaffney Jr. The
center has written speeches for politicians who support
missile defense, hosted conferences and honored public
figures for championing the cause.
Gaffney said in an interview that he hopes his group has
helped accelerate interest in missile defense, but he
rejected the suggestion that his effort is tainted because
the center's board of advisers includes executives from
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and other companies.
``I think people who don't like our message would find any
pretext to dismiss the message,'' he said. The center
reported that corporations contributed 17 percent of its $1.2
million in revenue for 1998, the most recent year available.
Gafney also is intimately involved with a new group called
the Coalition to Protect Americans Now, which has funded a
pair of television ads warning that ``America is unprotected
against missile attacks and calling on the president to
deploy ``a strong missile defense--now.''
The ads, which were being run on CNN this weekend so that
the president could see them in Europe, are being funded by
Colorado heiress Helen Krieble, Gaffney said.
He expressed frustration that the companies involved in
ballistic-missile defense have not so far chosen to
participate. That was a sentiment shared by Curt Weldon, the
Pennsylvania congressman who persuaded the Ballistic Missile
Defense Organization to hold the conference in Philadelphia
tomorrow through Thursday.
``I think they've not done enough'', and they've benefited
from these programs,'' Weldon said of the companies. ``They
have a responsibility I think, to use their resources to at
least make the case why it's important business-wise. We're
not doing this because it means jobs, but the fact that it
does means jobs make it somewhat critical for them to tell
that story.''
Five or 10 years ago, Weldon said, the companies were
reluctant to take a high profile because the programs were so
controversial. ``But we've changed that. We've changed the
whole debate in this country,'' he said. ``Now I think it's
appropriate for them to weight in . . . and I will continue
to press them until that happens.''
____
Scientific Panel Says National Missile Defense Won't Work
The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Security Studies Program today
released the first major study presenting technical evidence
that the planned US National Missile Defense (NMD) system
would be defeated by simple responses from new missile
states.
The report, by a panel of eleven independent senior
physicists and engineers, also finds that the current NMP
testing program is not capable of assessing the system's
effectiveness against a realistic attack.
``This so-called national missile defense system won't do
the job,'' said report chair Dr. Andrew Sessler, former
director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and past
president of the American Physical Society. ``The United
States should shelve its NMD plans and rethink its options
for countering missile threats.''
The NMD system is intended to defend US territory from
attacks by tens of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles
armed with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
President Clinton is scheduled to decide on deployment this
fall, after a third intercept test in June and a Pentagon
recommendation in July. The first intercept test in October
scored an ambiguous hit; the second test in January was a
miss.
The report was researched by top scientists from Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory, MIT, Cornell University, the University
of California at Los Angeles, the University of Maryland, and
the University of Pennsylvania. Study members include senior
defense consultants to the US government and nuclear weapons
laboratories, and former members of the Defense Science
Board, the Rumsfeld Commission, and the Lockheed Corporation.
The scientists used physics and engineering calculations to
analyze both the planned NMD system and the simple steps--
known as ``countermeasures''--that nations developing long-
range missiles could take to foil the defense.
For biological or chemical weapons, the missile warhead can
be divided into many small bomblets that would be released
from the missile early in flight and overwhelm the defense
with too many targets. The analysis in the report shows that
the technology for bomblets would be readily available to an
emerging missile state.
``Any long-range missile attack with biological weapons
would surely be delivered by bomblets,'' said Dr. Kurt
Gottfried, a physicist at Cornell University and chair of the
Union of Concerned Scientists. ``The planned NMD system could
not defend against such an attack.''
The report also finds that attackers using nuclear weapons
could defeat the system by deploying their warheads inside
mylar balloons and releasing many empty balloons along with
them, presenting the defense with an unwinnable shell-game.
Or a nuclear warhead could be covered by a shroud cooled to
very low temperatures, preventing the heat-seeking
interceptor from detecting and homing on the target.
The US intelligence community, in a September 1999 report,
also found that developing nations could deploy
countermeasures with their long-range missiles and would be
motivated to do so by US NMD deployment.
``Any country that can deploy a long-range missile with a
nuclear or biological weapon can deploy these
countermeasures,'' said Dr. Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist at
UCS and MIT. ``Pentagon claims that the system can deal with
countermeasures simply do not stand up to technical
scrutiny.''
The study shows that the NMD testing program will not be
able to determine if the system would be effective against
these countermeasures. Tests against realistic targets will
not be conducted before the first phase of deployment in
2005, if at all.
``Since we find that even the full NMD system would be
defeated by realistic countermeasures, it makes no sense to
begin deployment,'' said Dr. Sessler. ``A defense that
doesn't work is no defense at all.''
As a companion to the new report, USC produced an animation
that shows how straightforward devices like balloons and
[[Page H3970]]
bomblets would confuse the NMD system. The animation and
report can be viewed on the UCS website at www.ucsusa.org/
arms/.
____
Missile Shield Analysis Warns of Arms Buildup
(By Bob Drogin and Tyler Marshall)
Washington--The U.S. intelligence community is writing a
secret report warning the Clinton administration that
construction of a national missile defense could trigger a
wave of destabilizing events around the world and possibly
endanger relations with European allies, a U.S. intelligence
official said Thursday.
The new National Intelligence Estimate will sketch an
unsettling series of political and military ripple effects
from the proposed U.S. deployment that would include a sharp
buildup of strategic and medium-range nuclear missiles by
China, India and Pakistan and the further spread of missile
technology in the Middle East.
A supplement to the highly classified report will also note
that the threat of attack from North Korea has eased since
last fall, when Pyongyang effectively froze its ballistic-
missile testing program in response to U.S. overtures.
Outside critics have long argued that the proposed national
missile defense could backfire and actually diminish national
security and global stability. But the CIA-led analysis and
updated threat assessment are the first official evaluation
of how the system could generate new threats.
The administration has pledged to decide this fall whether
to proceed with an initial base of 100 ``interceptor''
missiles in Alaska, backed by ground-based phased radar
stations and satellite-based infrared sensors, in a system
designed to shield the continental United States from a
limited missile attack.
Proponents of the system argue that North Korea, Iran or
Iraq may threaten U.S. territory with intercontinental
ballistic missiles someday. Critics argue that the threat is
exaggerated, that the antimissile technology is unproved and
that deployment would undermine crucial arms control and
nonproliferation regimes.
CIA analysts believe that Russia would accept U.S.
arguments that no system could protect against the number of
missiles Moscow could launch and that its deterrent thus
would be preserved. But China has only 20 CSS-4
intercontinental ballistic missiles in vulnerable silos, and
the analysts say that, after a U.S. deployment, Beijing would
conclude that it had lost its deterrent force--and act
accordingly.
``We can tell the Russians that [the missile defense] won't
affect the viability of their deterrent force,'' the
intelligence official said. ``I don't know how we can say
that to the Chinese with a straight face.''
If the U.S. system is built, the CIA believes, China would
install multiple independent nuclear warheads on its missiles
for the first time in an effort to overwhelm any missile
shield. Beijing has possessed the technology for more than a
decade but has not used it so far.
In addition, Beijing is deemed likely to build several
dozen mobile truck-based DF-31 missiles, which it first
tested last year, to create a more survivable force. It also
is likely to add such countermeasures as booster
fragmentation, low-power jammers, chaff and simple decoys to
confuse or evade U.S. interceptors.
The intelligence official said that Russia and China both
would increase proliferation, including ``selling
countermeasures for sure'' to such nations as North Korea,
Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Moreover, the official said, India is deemed likely to
increase its nuclear missile force if it detects a sharp
buildup by China, its neighbor and longtime rival. That, in
turn, likely would spur Pakistan, India's archenemy, to
increase its own nuclear strike force, the official said.
Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft called
such a scenario ``plausible'' and expressed concern about its
possible implications.
``We ought to think whether we want the Chinese to change
their very minimalist strategy,'' he said in a telephone
interview. ``I'm not sure what the answer is, but this is
certainly one of the possible consequences that, in a sense,
is more serious than the Russian reaction might be.''
The Likelihood of a Domino Effect
Other specialists said that, while it is likely China would
move to increase its intercontinental ballistic missile
arsenal--now thought to be about 20 strong--it is
questionable whether India and Pakistan would follow suit.
``China has had a strategic capability for a long time
relative to India, and India has hardly gone on a missile
arms race to counter it,'' noted John E. Peters, an arms
control specialist at Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think
tank.
Michael O'Hanlin, who tracks the missile defense issue at
the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in
Washington, argued that, however dramatic it may sound, a
domino-style nuclear arms buildup would be a lesser threat to
the United States than China's potential willingness to
develop and sell missile defense countermeasures to countries
like North Korea. Arms control specialists have expressed
strong concern that the missile defense system as designed
would be incapable of overcoming relatively cheap and
easy-to-deploy countermeasures, such as clusters of
decoys.
``If they do that, it could defeat the entire purpose of
the national missile defense,'' O'Hanlin said, ``That is the
scenario that's very important.''
Further afield, the intelligence official who outlined the
report said, America's allies in Europe and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization could be angered if the United
States is seen to be walling itself off from its allies with
an antimissile shield.
n. korea's test program frozen
The updated threat assessment notes that North Korea has
frozen its program to test an intercontinental ballistic
missile--the Taepo-Dong 2--since the administration proposed
relaxing economic and diplomatic sanctions last year.
The missile still could be tested on short notice, the
official said, and related tests of the system's electronics,
pumps, tanks and other equipment are still going on.
CIA analysts, who warned last year that Iran may try to
test an intercontinental ballistic missile by 2010, have
detected little progress in Tehran's program. ``We're not
seeing some of the things we expected,'' the official said.
``We're not seeing the threat advance.''
The White House requested the intelligence estimate as part
of its decision-making review.
The analysis, to be delivered next month, presents two
different scenarios of how other nations are likely to react
to a U.S. deployment.
The first is based on the premise that Russia agrees to
U.S. demands to amend the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of
1972 to allow a missile shield. The second assesses the
effect if Russia refuses and Washington simply abandons the
arms control process, as many Republicans have demanded.
At the moment, Russia and China are the only potential
adversaries capable of hitting the United States with nuclear
missiles. Russia has about 1,000 strategic missiles and 4,500
warheads.
The report pointedly declines to describe North Korea and
other hostile states as ``rogue'' nations, since the argot
suggests that their leaders are irrational.
``The term rogue state almost predisposes you in favor of''
the missile defense system, the intelligence official said.
Moreover, the report warns that the missile defense shield
would not protect Americans against what the official called
``more accurate, more reliable and much cheaper'' ways of
delivering chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. These
include ship-launched missiles, suitcase bombs and other
covert means.
``The joke here is, if you want to bring a nuclear weapon
into the United States, just hide it in some drugs,'' the
official said.
____
Bipartisan Thinkers Look Past Traditional Arms Control
(By Carla Anne Robbins)
Washington--When President Clinton goes to Moscow next
month, he will try to sell Russian President Vladimir Putin a
new arms-control ``grand bargain.''
For years, the prospect of any agreement would have been
greeted with cheers and sighs of relief. This deal, in which
Washington trades somewhat deeper cuts in both sides'
arsenals for Moscow's grudging acquiescence to a limited U.S.
missile-defense program, is supposed to break a seven-year
stalemate in nuclear-arms reductions.
But a decade after the Cold War's end, a group of American
thinkers from both parties is raising a more radical idea:
Traditional arms control simply might not work anymore.
With the world vastly changed, they are calling for the old
rulebook to be jettisoned. In this bold new order, there
would be deep, even unilateral cuts in U.S. nuclear forces.
Russia, and perhaps China, would join the U.S. and Europe in
building missile-defense systems. Finally, there would be a
global campaign, championed by Washington and its allies,
along with Moscow and Beijing, to control the spread of
terror weapons.
Stephen Hadley, a top aide in the Bush Pentagon, says he
can imagine a day when the U.S. and Russia simply ``advise''
each other of their nuclear plans. ``It's a perverse outcome
of Cold War arms control [that] both sides have kept an
inventory of strategic weapons far above what they need or
want,'' he says. Jan M. Lodal, a former top official in the
Clinton Pentagon, warns that the U.S. is ``making a huge
diplomatic effort to preserve treaties that don't have any
effect on the real problems'' of fighting proliferation.
It is hard to overstate what a sweeping change this would
mean. For 30 years, mankind's survival was thought to rest on
the successful negotiation and implementation of arms-control
treaties. Only arms control could walk the world back from
the nuclear brink.
So why would anyone dare to try a different way?
Consider some current problems:
The U.S. and Russia agreed in 1993 to slash their arsenals
to 3,000 to 3,500 long-range weapons, but domestic and
international wrangling has blocked the cuts. Even if Mr.
Clinton and Mr. Putin make a deal, the GOP-led Senate is
threatening to reject it, while the Pentagon is already
planning a larger antimissile program. The next president
will have to start renegotiating the grand bargain a few
months after taking office.
The nuclear-driven India-Pakistan conflict is today's most
dangerous clash. But since
[[Page H3971]]
neither country is recognized as a ``nuclear state'' under
the nonproliferation treaty, the U.S. can't give them
technology or know-how to help prevent accidental launches or
wars of miscues.
Chemical weapons have been outlawed by an international
treaty championed by the U.S. But the organization negotiated
to monitor the ban has been hobbled by its members states'
lowest-common-denominator restrictions. The country setting
the lowest denominator? The U.S.
With such a grim record, there may be little choice but to
start over. Nobody can be sure how well a new arms-control
order would work. But here's how it might look:
Step one: The U.S. must begin, the new thinkers say, by
shrinking its own arsenal to reflect a world where nuclear
war with Russia is far less of a risk than the risk of Russia
losing or selling off its weapons to rogue states or
terrorists.
Moscow--which spent only about $5 billion on all its
defenses last year, or less than 2% of the Pentagon's
budget--already is calling for both sides to go down to 1,500
long-range weapons. U.S. military planners are insisting on
keeping 2,000 to 2,500 weapons.
Mr. Lodal says the U.S. can cut back to 1,000
``survivable'' weapons, mainly on hard-to-find submarines,
and still deter all potentials enemies. For the sake of
speed, he says the U.S. should make those cuts unilaterally
and expect the Russians to follow suit. Future agreements
with Russia would focus on ``transparency'' to calm
suspicions of a secret buildup by either side.
There is a precedent of this ``arms control by example,''
In 1991, President Bush broke all of the rules, unilaterally
taking all U.S. strategic bombers off alert and pulling all
American short-range nuclear weapons out of Europe and Asia.
A week later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pulled all of
his short-range nuclear weapons back to Russia and pledged to
slash another 1,000 long-range weapons from the Soviet
arsenal. The shocking moves and countermoves had analysts
heralding a new ``arms race in reverse.''
Step two: The U.S. has to figure out how to build missile
defenses without creating a permanent international crisis.
There are serious doubts about whether the technology is
ready or the rogue-state threat imminent. Nevertheless,
national missile defense may be a political inevitability.
The prohibition against building defenses, enshrined in the
1972 ABM treaty, is the most passionately held arms-control
taboo. During the Cold War, stability was supposed to be
based on mutual vulnerability to devastating nuclear
retaliation.
That high-risk equation may no longer be necessary, says
Barry Blechman, a longtime critic of President Reagan's Star
Wars concept who now embraces the need for limited defenses.
The threat today, he argues, comes from a few rogue states or
terrorists, making defenses an easier technological problem
to solve. But the challenge is still so daunting that it will
be years before the U.S. can build anything that can defeat
Russia's force.
``I've always been of the mind that deterrence is what you
do if you can't defend.'' Mr. Blechman, chairman of the
Stimson Center, a Washington international security think
tank.
The biggest challenge may be to calm Russia's fears of a
multbillion-dollar missile-defense race. Russia is unlikely
to launch a major nuclear buildup. But a spurned Moscow could
still make real trouble: slowing arms reductions, cutting off
cooperative nuclear-security programs or even selling
technology to foil missile defenses to North Koreas or Iraq.
By pulling out of the ABM, and provoking a crisis with
Russia, the U.S. would also seriously damage its already
strained credibility as a crusader against global
proliferation.
Mr. Hadley, who now advises the presidential campaign of
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, but says his ideas are his alone,
believes the best hope is to revive a Bush administration
proposal to bring the Russians and perhaps the Chinese into a
``Global Protection System.''
The U.S., he says, could start by sharing early-warning
data with Moscow. Russian and U.S. defense companies could
collaborate on building and selling smaller theater missile-
defense systems to countries that otherwise might be tempted
to acquire their own missiles. Most ambitiously, the U.S.,
Russia and Europe could work together to develop a national
missile-defense system that all could deploy.
The West would likely have to foot a good part of Russia's
cost, while Moscow would have to implement far tougher
technology-transfer controls. If China also wanted in, it
``would have to show a real commitment to the effort against
proliferation that so far it hasn't shown,'' says Mr. Hadlen.
Even then, China, which has about 20 long-range missiles
capable of hitting the U.S., is almost certain to increase
its nuclear forces to be sure of being able to overwhelm the
U.S. system.
Some of the fiercest opponents to Mr. Hadley's plan could
be members of his own party, who increasingly argue that the
U.S. can ignore a weakened Russia's objections. And while Mr.
Gorbachev once expressed interest, it isn't certain whether
Russia's new leaders would want to join.
Step three: Really fight weapons proliferation.
Nuclear tests by India and Pakistan showed how few tools
there are to punish countries determined to flout
international treaties. The U.S. is still hoping to dissuade
the two rivals from mating nuclear warheads to missiles. If
that fails, it may have little choice but to rewrite or defy
the nonproliferation treaty, providing both countries with
the technology and know-how to prevent accidental wars.
``Arms-control treaties are only good when they reflect the
underlying realities,'' Mr. Blechman says.
Ferreting out secret cheaters is even harder. Politics is
part of the problem. To win Senate ratification of the
Chemical Weapons Convention, the Clinton administration
reserved the right to block challenge inspections on national
security grounds and barred monitors from taking chemical
samples abroad for analysis. Now ``other countries will have
the ability to block the inspectors the same way,'' warns Amy
Smithson of the Stimson Center. The Indian parliament is
considering the Technology may be a bigger obstacle,
especially when chemical and biological weapons can be cooked
up in a garage or a bathroom.
So what to do? The new thinkers suggest the U.S. will have
to move beyond treaties. It will need to enlist Russia and
China, the biggest potential sources of illicit weapons, as
well as its European allies, in a global antiproliferation
campaign: Sharing intelligence, policing their defense
industries and scientists, and joining in diplomatic
initiatives to isolate offenders.
Sen. Richard Lugar, a longtime arms-control proponent, says
that even with their weaknesses, these multilateral treaties
can still provide useful ``norms'' for rallying international
pressure or justifying unilateral punishments, as in the U.S.
bombing of Iraq. ``It may be the only real sanction in the
world is the U.S. armed forces,'' the Indiana Republican
says.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I would like to inquire of the gentleman
from Texas (Mr. Frost) if he has any more speakers.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I respond that I reserve the final 2 minutes
to close. There are no other speakers on the floor.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may assume to the
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer).
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the
time.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond to some of the comments from the
critics of the bill and from those of whom consistently vote against
the defense bills that are brought to this House floor in a bipartisan
basis. It always is difficult for me to try to understand the dimension
of others of whom perhaps do not share my opinions, because I, for one,
believe that part of the purpose of forming a government is to make
sure that we protect the Nation's borders; that we protect our
interests; that we protect those of whom sleep in peace and tranquility
and domestically within the borders of our own country, so we take
great pride in our police force, our firefighters, those who serve in
the military, those of whom who put on the uniform and say they give an
oath to lay down their life.
It was a Vietnam veteran that turned to me when I was a young cadet
and said I want you to memorize this statement: those who serve their
country on a distant battlefield see life in a dimension for which the
protected may never know.
Those of whom may be the protected yet have never seen the horrors of
a battlefield are very quick to become the critics of the defense
industry, become critics of those of whom serve in the military, those
of whom question a system of honor and of integrity, of character, of
the essence of the nobility of life.
They say, well, we will be there when you need it; that is false. It
takes the commitment of a Nation, weapons systems that we will use in
the next war are not crafted and built based on the successes of the
last. If we do that, it is a prescription for failure.
You design your weapons systems thinking far ahead; it is why when
you go into battle that we want to place our men and women who serve in
harm's way with the ability to overmatch, so we do not see the coffins
coming back to Dover, Delaware.
That is why I enjoy it when the defense bill comes to the House
floor, because it is one of the few bills that this body comes together
as Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BUYER. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana. Since I am a little
hard on you, I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I do not take from anything that the
gentleman said that the gentleman would endorse fraud.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, I will reclaim my time, that is a silly
statement. No one in this body endorses
[[Page H3972]]
fraud, for crying out loud. I do not even know where that came from.
What bothers me is it is easy to say, oh, well, the Pentagon, they
spend this much on a weapons system, they spend that much on a part,
these weapons systems are highly sophisticated and it takes awhile.
They only make one or two parts. It is not making 10,000 parts.
Let me go back to my compliment, though, to the body. My compliment
to the body is that we have many Members in here that have put on the
uniform, and no one ever asked when we took that oath whether we were
Republican or Democrat. So those of us who served in the authorizing
committee and the appropriating committees who have the interest on
national security keep that dimension.
Now, there will always be a critic of a bill for one particular
reason or another. We have those of whom who are passivists. They
should take pride in themselves, if they are a passivist, say they are
a passivist. Do not just pick apart the bill for one reason or another.
Expose your character. If they do not, I will be more than happy to.
Let me tell you something else that has bothered me when we take an
individual who may be a critic of the defense industry or, in
particular, of our defense. They are the same individuals of whom are
seeking to socialize our military. So when they stand up here on the
House floor and they talk about, well, we are having recruiting and
retention problems in the military, and they give this long laundry
list of what is wrong with the military, see they are the same ones who
endorsed socialization policies of our military.
Socialization policies that, in fact, then begin to hurt the
military. A sergeant at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, came up to me and
says, Congressman, if the Army gets any more sensitive, it is going to
cry. We have to stop and think what are we doing to the military.
Mr. Speaker, I have traveled around; and I have conducted a lot of
hearings, being chairman of personnel. Well, many are quick to blame
recruiting and retention problems on a good economy, easy access to
other sources of college funding, reduced propensity to enlist, a
shortage of quality recruits. My findings point to other issues that
stress the military force. It is called lack of spare parts, lack of
adequate training time, aging equipment and high depreciation rates on
our equipment, socialization policies, longer working hours and
prolonged family separation due to an increased operational tempo.
We also have a mismatch in the Clinton/Gore national security
strategy between a foreign policy of engagement and enlargement at our
national military strategy. When we take 265,000-plus troops and put
them in 135 nations all around the world and then we begin to have them
serve as quasidiplomats, we then have a workforce out there that begins
to then have questioned the mission; it is called mission credibility.
They say I do not mind being separated from my family, but to do this?
And they say then, wait a second, what happened to the warrior. The
warriors now have become the humanitarian.
They are outstretched all over the world as quasidiplomats on all of
these humanitarian missions. Now, are some of them noble? Are some of
them worthy? Yes. But we always have to be very careful about what
happens when you take a warrior and we then turn him into a
humanitarian. You dull the war-fighting skill. When you do that to a
division, it takes us a year to retrain the division back to the war-
fighting skill.
So as I listened to some of the comments of some of the Members, it
is easy to pick apart the bill. I believe that this bill is going to
receive a large bipartisan support.
Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BUYER. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.
Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman, I understand
his criticisms and critique. We could give a critique on both sides of
the aisle, but what the gentleman just said, I think, is the most
important thing, and that is, we need to continue to maintain a
bipartisan consensus in the House for national defense, for our troops,
for taking care of the spare parts problems. I think it is good if we
can try to work and build consensus behind national defense.
I hear some of the criticism on my side of the aisle, because they
are worried about wastefulness. They are worried are we doing enough in
terms of testing, national missile defense, have we done enough testing
on the F-22. Frankly, as a member of the committee I am concerned about
those issues myself.
I think we need to be careful as stewards of national security not to
always believe everything we are told, I know the gentleman does not
fall under this category, by the Pentagon is necessarily totally
accurate. I mean, we have to go in and do a good job of oversight and
looking at what has actually happened. And that is why I was impressed
when the gentleman said he was going out and taking a look to see about
spare parts.
By the way, our committee has added hundreds of millions of dollars
over a sustained period of years on these issues during the Reagan
buildup, during this buildup; but I hope we can try to have the
rhetoric in a constructive tone, rather than in a tone that kind of
gets us into a fight over this issue.
There still is a huge consensus in this Congress, at least 325
Members, who are strongly committed and it is very bipartisan. So I
just wanted to make those points.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, I reclaim my time. My compliments to the
gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks). He has have devoted a great deal
of his time in Congress to the issues of national security. The issues
on spare parts, I think American people would be shocked to go out on
the flight line and see that we are swapping out engines to put F-14s
in the air.
If we told our parents that, you know, I am going to be a little bit
late for Christmas dinner because I have to pull the Chevy engine out
of the car and put it in any other car, they say what are you doing;
that sounds ridiculous. With the spare part problem out there that we
are actually swapping out engines to put planes in the air is a little
stunning.
I want to compliment the gentleman, because he has worked very hard
on our spare part problem and concern.
Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, this
is a good bill. I see the gentleman from California here. I want to say
to the gentleman, too, our subcommittee, it is a great subcommittee to
be a Member of, there is never any partisan rhetoric to speak of; and
we try to focus in on trying to do the best possible job with the
resources we have to do the best for defense.
I think this year, for example, taking the money and accelerating the
two brigades that will be part of the Army's effort to lighten up and
be more mobile. That is a great decision on the part of the committee.
I hope the Congress will endorse that, and I hope we can get the Senate
to go along with it.
Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I think we are going to
see the real compliment of the work product that came, not only out of
the authorizing committee, but also the gentleman's work, this bill is
going to pass in a huge bipartisan bill. I compliment the gentleman.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time.
Mr. Speaker, this is a good bill. It will pass with a very
significant bipartisan vote of both Democrats and Republicans.
{time} 1545
I would only like to underscore one point that I made earlier in the
debate, and I would hope that the leadership on the other side of the
aisle in this body will impress upon the leadership on their side of
the aisle in the other body how important it is to move the defense
supplemental for Kosovo and Bosnia right now. Because while there is
significant money in this bill for 2001, our troops face a crisis in
the fourth quarter for fiscal year 2000, beginning in about a month,
because of the inability of this Congress to fund what has already
happened in Bosnia and Kosovo, and because of the fact that this
requires our military to take money away from training and to take
money away from the vital things that need to be done right now in the
remainder of this fiscal year.
[[Page H3973]]
So while it is laudable that we are going to pass by a significant
bipartisan vote a good piece of legislation for the fiscal year that
starts October 1, we need to move the money in the supplemental for the
remainder of this fiscal year, or we are going to face a real crisis
situation starting about August 1.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the
gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) to close.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, I would like to reiterate what the
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Frost) spoke about and the gentleman from
Washington (Mr. Dicks). The supplemental is important. We have over 21
ships that are tied up to the pier that cannot go anywhere, and we are
going below that 300-ship Navy. Yet, there are some people on that side
of the aisle that would even cut defense in an emergency situation like
this. I think that is wrong.
I would like to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha)
and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks) and the Subcommittee on
Defense of the Committee on Appropriations. When I served on the
authorizing body, it was the absolute best committee to serve on. There
are no Republicans and no Democrats on that committee; they are all
looking forward to helping the men and women in the services.
Unfortunately, when we get to this floor, there are critics of those
policies that want to cut for social spending. That is wrong. We put at
risk our men and women in the services.
I would like to thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Frost) and the
gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks) and the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), the authorizers. This is a good rule. I
thank especially the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis), the
chairman of the Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on
Appropriations, who has been tied up in another committee today.
Mr. Speaker, this is a good rule and a good bill. I thank my
colleagues for supporting it. We need to get the other body in line
with the supplemental.
Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I
move the previous question on the resolution.
The previous question was ordered.
The resolution was agreed to.
A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
____________________