[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 52 (Tuesday, April 24, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3825-S3826]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page S3825]]
                            NATIONAL DEFENSE

  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, this morning as I read the Wall Street 
Journal, I came across Mark Helprin's article called ``The Fire Next 
Time.'' The thesis of Mr. Helprin is this:

       The consensus that doing much to protect America is 
     preferable to doing too little has been destroyed. If the 
     President does not rebuild it, we will suffer the 
     consequences.

  I commend this article to the Senate. I do not think it is totally 
the President's responsibility. It certainly falls on many of us to 
help the President and the Secretary of Defense and those in the 
National Security Agency and the Vice President, all of them working on 
what should be our defense policy, to find ways to rehabilitate our 
national defense. Very clearly, we do not have the defense we need for 
the future.
  At one point in this article, Mr. Helprin says this:

       God save the American soldier from those who believe that 
     his life can be protected and his mission accomplished on the 
     cheap. For what they perceive as an extravagance is always 
     less costly in lives and treasure than the long drawn-out 
     wars it deters altogether or shortens with quick victories.

  I do hope all of us will think about how we can restore our national 
prestige in terms of being the superpower of the world and having the 
power to defend that position.
  I ask unanimous consent this article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Apr. 24, 2001]

                           The Fire Next Time

                           (By Mark Helprin)

       From Alexandria in July of 1941, Randolph Churchill 
     reported to his father as the British waited for Rommel to 
     attack upon Egypt. In the midst of a peril that famously 
     concentrated mind and spirit, he wrote, ``You can see 
     generals wandering around GHQ looking for bits of string.''
       Apparently these generals were not, like their prime 
     minister, devoted to Napoleon's maxim, ``Frappez la masse, et 
     le reste vient par surcroit,'' which, vis-a-vis strategic or 
     other problems, bids one to concentrate upon the essence, 
     with assurance that all else will follow in train, even bits 
     of string.


                          Consensus Destroyed

       Those with more than a superficial view of American 
     national security, who would defend and preserve it from the 
     fire next time, have by necessity divided their forces in 
     advocacy of its various elements, but they have neglected its 
     essence. For the cardinal issue of national security is not 
     China, is not Russia, is not weapons of mass destruction, or 
     missile defense, the revolution in military affairs, 
     terrorism, training, or readiness. It is, rather, that the 
     general consensus in regard to defense since Pearl Harbor--
     that doing too much is more prudent than doing too little--
     has been destroyed. The last time we devoted a lesser 
     proportion of our resources to defense, we were well 
     protected by the oceans, in the midst of a depression, and 
     without major international responsibilities, and even then 
     it was a dereliction of duty.
       The destruction is so influential that traditional 
     supporters of high defense spending, bent to the will of 
     their detractors, shrink from argument, choosing rather to 
     negotiate among themselves so as to prepare painstakingly 
     crafted instruments of surrender.
       A leader of defense reform, whose life mission is to defend 
     the United States, writes to me: ``Please do not quote me 
     under any circumstances by name. . . . Bush has no chance of 
     winning the argument that more money must be spent on 
     defense. Very few Americans feel that more money needs to be 
     spent on defense and they are right. The amount of money 
     being spent is already more than sufficient.''
       More than sufficient to fight China? It is hard to think of 
     anything less appealing than war with China, but if we don't 
     want that we must be able to deter China, and to deter China 
     we must have the ability to fight China. More than sufficient 
     to deal with simultaneous invasions of Kuwait, South Korea, 
     and Taiwan? More than sufficient to stop even one incoming 
     ballistic missile? Not yet, not now, and, until we spend the 
     money, not ever.
       For someone of the all-too-common opinion that a strong 
     defense is the cause of war, a favorite trick is to advance a 
     wholesale revision of strategy, so that he may accomplish his 
     depredations while looking like a reformer. This pattern is 
     followed instinctively by the French when they are in 
     alliance and by the left when it is trapped within the 
     democratic order. But to do so one need be neither French nor 
     on the left.
       Neville Chamberlain, who was neither, starved the army and 
     navy on the theory that the revolution in military affairs of 
     his time made the only defense feasible that of a ``Fortress 
     Britain'' protected by the Royal Air Force--and then failed 
     in building up the air force. Bill Clinton, who is not 
     French, and who came into office calling for the 
     discontinuance of heavy echelons in favor of power 
     projection, simultaneously pressed for a severe reduction in 
     aircraft carriers, the sine qua non of power projection. 
     Later, he and his strategical toadies embraced the revolution 
     in military affairs not for its virtues but because even the 
     Clinton-ravished military ``may be unaffordable,'' and 
     ``advanced technology offers much greater military 
     efficiency.''
       This potential efficiency is largely unfamiliar to the 
     general public. For example, current miniaturized weapons may 
     seem elephantine after advances in extreme ultraviolet 
     lithography equip guidance and control systems with circuitry 
     not .25 microns but .007 microns wide, a 35-fold reduction 
     that will make possible the robotization of arms, from 
     terminally guided and target-identifying bullets to 
     autonomous tank killers that fly hundreds of miles, burrow 
     into the ground, and sleep like locusts until they are 
     awakened by the seismic signature of enemy armor.
       Lead-magnesium-niobate transducers in broadband sonars are 
     likely to make the seas perfectly transparent, eliminating 
     for the first time the presumed invulnerability of submarine-
     launched ballistic missiles, the anchor of strategic nuclear 
     stability.
       The steady perfection of missile guidance has long made 
     nearly everything the left says about nuclear disarmament 
     disingenuous or uninformed, and the advent of metastable 
     explosives creates the prospect of a single B-1 bomber 
     carrying the non-nuclear weapons load of 450 B-17s, the 
     equivalent of 26,800 100-pound bombs. Someday, we will have 
     these things, or, if we abstain, our potential enemies will 
     have them and we will not.
       To field them will be more expensive than fielding less 
     miraculous weapons, which cannot simply be abandoned lest an 
     enemy exploit the transition, and which will remain as 
     indispensable as the rifleman holding his ground, because the 
     nature of war is counter-miraculous. And yet, when the 
     revolution in military affairs is still mainly academic, we 
     have cut recklessly into the staple forces.
       God save the American soldier from those who believe that 
     his life can be protected and his mission accomplished on the 
     cheap. For what they perceive as extravagance is always less 
     costly in lives and treasure than the long drawn-out wars it 
     deters altogether or shortens with quick victories. In the 
     name of their misplaced frugality we have transformed our 
     richly competitive process of acquiring weapons into the 
     single-supplier model of the command economies that we 
     defeated in the Cold War, largely with the superior weapons 
     that the idea of free and competitive markets allowed us to 
     produce.
       Though initially more expensive, producing half a dozen 
     different combat aircraft and seeing which are best is better 
     than decreeing that one will do the job and praying that it 
     may. Among other things, strike aircraft have many different 
     roles, and relying upon just one would be the same sort of 
     economy as having Clark Gable play both Rhett Butler and 
     Scarlett O'Hara.
       Having relinquished or abandoned many foreign bases, the 
     United States requires its warships to go quickly from place 
     to place so as to compensate for their inadequate number, and 
     has built them light using a lot of aluminum, which, because 
     it can burn in air at 3,000 degrees Celsius, is used in 
     incendiary bombs and blast furnaces. (Join the navy and see 
     the world. You won't need to bring a toaster.)
       And aluminum or not, there are too few ships. During the 
     EP-3 incident various pinheads furthered the impression of an 
     American naval cordon off the Chinese coast. Though in 1944 
     the navy kept 17 major carriers in the central Pacific alone, 
     not long ago its assets were so attenuated by the destruction 
     of a few Yugos disguised as tanks that for three months there 
     was not in the vast western Pacific even a single American 
     aircraft carrier.
       What remains of the order of battle is crippled by a lack 
     of the unglamorous, costly supports that are the first to go 
     when there isn't enough money. Consider the floating dry 
     dock. By putting ships back into action with minimal transit 
     time, floating dry docks are force preservers and 
     multipliers. In 1972, the United States had 94. Now it has 
     14. Though history is bitter and clear, this kind of mistake 
     persists.
       Had the allies of World War II been prepared with a 
     sufficient number of so pedestrian a thing as landing craft, 
     the war might have been cheated of a year and a half and many 
     millions of lives. In 1940, the French army disposed of 530 
     artillery pieces, 830 antitank guns, and 235 (almost half) of 
     its best tanks, because in 1940 the French did not think much 
     of the Wehrmacht--until May.
       How shall the United States avoid similar misjudgments? Who 
     shall stand against the common wisdom when it is wrong about 
     deterrence, wrong about the causes of war, wrong about the 
     state of the world, wrong about the ambitions of ascendant 
     nations, wrong about history, and wrong about human nature?


                           the prudent course

       In the defense of the United States, doing too much is more 
     prudent than doing too little. Though many in Congress argue 
     this and argue it well, Congress will not follow one of its 
     own. Though the president's appointees also argue it well, 
     the public will wait only upon the president himself. Only he 
     can sway a timid Congress, clear the way for his appointees, 
     and move the country toward the restoration of its military 
     power.

[[Page S3826]]

       The president himself must make the argument, or all else 
     is in vain. If he is unwilling to risk his political capital 
     and his presidency to undo the damage of the past eight 
     years, then in the fire next time his name will be linked 
     with that of his predecessor, and there it will stay forever.

  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the 
order for the quorum call be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask consent I be given 10 
minutes to address the Senate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________