[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 102 (Friday, July 20, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H4374-H4377]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MILITARY NEEDS MORE FUNDING
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kerns). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter)
is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I have taken the floor a number of times
over the last 8 years during the Clinton administration strongly
criticizing the Clinton administration for what I consider to be a
weakening of our national security. We had budgets that annually were
short in terms of equipment being replaced, low pay for our military
personnel, substandard housing for our military families, a lack of
readiness, spare parts and training for our forces that might have to
move around the world on a moment's notice, and overall shortchanging
of national security by substantial amounts each year in the budget.
I want to go through the facts that I have laid out over the last
several years with respect to what was then the Clinton
administration's defense budget. First I pointed out that we have cut
our military forces since 1991-
[[Page H4375]]
1992, the days of Desert Storm, by about 50 percent, and I pointed out
that we had gone from 18 Army divisions to 10, we had gone from 24
fighter air wings to only 13 active air wings, we had gone from 546
Navy ships to 316, now down to less than that and going toward a 300
ship Navy.
I pointed out that we had declining mission-capable rates for our
frontline aircraft. A mission-capable rate is if I called up a neighbor
who has two cars and I ask him what his mission-capable rate was, and
he said wait a minute, Duncan, and he went out to try to start them and
only one started, he would say 50 percent; one out of two.
The mission-capable rate is the ability of an airplane, whether it is
a fighter plane from a Navy carrier deck or an Air Force aircraft from
an air base, to be able to fly out, take off, go do its mission,
whether it is reconnaissance or escort or fighter duties, and return
back to that base and land. Can it do its job? That is a mission-
capable rate.
The mission-capable rates of all of our front-line fighters have been
dropping dramatically during the last 8 years of the Clinton
administration. I pointed out that they have gone down, and this chart
represents that fall in mission-capable rates. They have gone down from
an average of about 83 percent to 88 percent back in the early nineties
to only about 73 percent today. So that means that this small Air Force
that we now have, these 13 air wings, actually are less than that,
because each of those air wings has fewer aircraft that are ready to go
than the air wings of the force of 1992.
I pointed out during the last 8 years of the Clinton administration
that our shipbuilding rate was falling; that instead of building the 9
to 10 to 11 ships that we needed each year to maintain at least a 300-
ship Navy, we were consistently building only four or five or six or
seven ships, building toward a 200-ship Navy. That is compared to
Ronald Reagan's 600-ship Navy of the 1980s. I criticized that strongly.
I criticized the fact that the Army, by their own admission, by their
own statement from the Chief of Staff of the Army, was $3 billion short
of basic ammunition. One thing you do not want to run out of in a war
is ammunition; yet we were $3 billion short. I criticized the fact that
the Marine Corps was $200 million short of basic ammunition.
At the same time, we criticized the fact that the U.S. Air Force was
at one point 700 pilots short. That got up in the Clinton
administration to as high as 1,200 pilots short. The last time I talked
to Secretary Peters, then-Air Force Secretary under the Clinton
administration, right at the end of the administration, at that point
it had gone from 700 pilots short to 1,300 pilots short. It had gone
back a little bit. We were still 1,200 pilots short in the U.S. Air
force.
So, Mr. Speaker, I strongly criticized the Clinton administration as
the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Procurement of the
Committee on Armed Services for what I consider to be an inadequate
budget that did a disservice to our men and women in uniform, and, more
importantly, did a disservice to national security.
Well, today we have a new administration. It is the Bush
administration, and it is headed by George W. Bush, a President whom I
admire, a President of great personality, great vision, good common
sense, and a President whom I think most Members of this House, whether
they are Republican or Democrat, have a deep respect for.
But, Mr. Speaker, facts are stubborn things, and if we are going to
maintain intellectual honesty in this body, and I think all of us try
to do that as much as we possibly can, we have to be consistent. I have
looked at this budget that this President has sent over to Congress,
and this budget, which is seeking right now to plus-up defense, to add
to defense $18 billion, which would take it up to a level $18 billion
ahead of the last Clinton budget that was submitted and voted on and
increased by this Congress, I find that that budget is still totally
inadequate.
Facts are facts. We still have only 10 Army divisions, down from 18.
We still have only 13 Air Force divisions, Air Force air wings, down
from 24. This year, under this administration's budget, we are only
going to build five ships, which is building at a rate that would lower
the U.S. Navy to less than 200 ships.
We still have the $3 billion ammo shortage in the U.S. Army. We still
have the $200 million ammo shortage in the U.S. Marine Corps. We still
have a major gap in pay between our military personnel and the civilian
sector.
I checked the other day, Mr. Speaker. I asked the Air Force, where is
the pilot shortage now? Are we down from the 1,200 in the Clinton
administration? The answer was no, we are still at 1,200, and we might
even be shorter over the next several months.
Spare parts, have we got the spare parts that we need? The answer is
no. We started something in the Clinton administration, Mr. Speaker,
that I thought was an important tool of accountability, and that is
that our great chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr.
Spence), always asked the military to give their honest answer after we
had the Clinton budget. He would say, what do you really need? What is
your unfunded requirement? What is that you need in terms of ammo,
spare parts, pay, training, that your budget did not give you? They
would send over a list.
Well, this year we have continued that practice with my President in
the White House, George Bush; and the answer this year is close to $30
billion short from the military.
We had GAO do a report for us, and we asked them if you take all of
our ships and tanks and trucks and planes and you figure out about how
old they are and how old they will be when they have to retire, figure
out how many we have to replace each year so we have a fairly modern
force. Could you do that for us?
That is like telling a guy that owns 100 taxicabs, figure out how
many taxicabs you have to buy each year. If each of your taxicabs has a
10-year life, how many taxicabs do you have to buy each year so your
taxicabs average about 5 years old, so they are not too old, so you do
not end up with a bunch of '56 Chevys. The answer is you have to buy
about 10 each year to keep that taxicab force fairly modern.
So we asked the GAO, do the same things for our tanks, trucks, ships
and planes; and they came back with an answer, and their answer to us
was the United States of America needs to spend an additional $30
billion a year to have modern equipment for the people that wear the
uniform of the United States to operate in training and in war.
We also asked them to tell us how much more money they thought we
needed to spend on training if we wanted our pilots to have enough
flying time and our people that operate our ground equipment to get
enough training time. They came back with an answer of about $5 billion
more a year we have to spend.
We said what is it going to take if we full up our personnel and give
them pay that is commensurate with the civilian sector? The answer was
it is going to average about $10 billion a year.
We said how much more do we need for missile defense if we really
want to have a robust missile defense? We asked a lot of experts that.
We figured out we need to have between $2 and $5 billion a year more.
We asked how much for ammunition, because we are about 50 percent
short. Along with the Army $3 billion shortage and the Marine Corps
$200 million shortage, all the services are short in what we call
precision munitions.
That is what Americans watched in the Desert Storm war against Saddam
Hussein when they watched the guy that the news stations called the
world's luckiest taxicab driver, the car going across a strategic
bridge, and we were coming with an aircraft to knock that bridge out,
and we launched not a lot of bombs like we had to in the old days, the
carpet bombs, and hoped to knock the bridge out; we launched one bomb
at one of the struts under that bridge, and we could see on a camera
that bomb going in, a laser-guided bomb, hit precisely at that strut
just as the taxicab driver got to the end of the bridge, and it blew up
that bridge.
That is called a precision munition. It is very important in
warfighting. We used it in the Kosovo campaign. So instead of having to
carpet bomb with a lot of dumb bombs, you send one in that hits
precisely the right point, and you get the same capability.
[[Page H4376]]
Well, we are about 50 percent short in those precision munitions
across the board. So if you add money for the ammunition account and
the munitions account, that is about another $5 billion a year we have
to spend.
Mr. Speaker, that adds up to over $50 billion for equipment, for
people, for training, for spare parts, for ammunition. I wanted to be
able to stand here today and say my President, George Bush, provided
that, just like my President Ronald Reagan came in in 1980 and rebuilt
national defense and brought down the Russian empire under a motto,
under a program that was called Peace Through Strength.
If you are strong, you can help the weaker nations in the world. If
you are strong, you can help people to become free. If you are strong,
you can protect your own people. If you are strong, you may be able to
convince your adversary, which was then the Soviet Union, that the
right way in this world is to go to the bargaining table with the
United States and make a peace agreement. That happened under Ronald
Reagan.
This budget this year submitted by this administration is more than
$100 billion less than Ronald Reagan's budget in real dollars in 1985,
$100 billion less. Now, it is true we do not need as much money as we
needed in 1985, when the Soviets were ringing our allies in Europe with
SS-20 missiles, when they were developing high combat-efficient
capability in the air and on the land, and when they had a massive ICBM
force threatening the United States.
{time} 1130
We needed to spend more, but we have cut too much. We cut too much in
the Clinton administration, and I am sad to say that this defense
budget does not do much above the Clinton administration's level. It
does a little, but it does not do much.
That takes me, Mr. Speaker, to my next subject, which is China. I
spoke yesterday during the vote to give China Most Favored Nation
trading status. That means we are going to give them the same
privileges in trade with the United States that we give our best
friends around the world.
I argued that, in 1941, we were sending American steel to Japan to
build the Japanese fleet, we were sending petroleum to Japan to fuel
that fleet, and we had one Congressman, Carl Anderson, who said 6
months before Pearl Harbor: If we have to fight the Japanese fleet, we
are going to fight a fleet that is built with American steel and
powered with American petroleum. Six months later, we had thousands of
Americans dead, lots of planes shot down, lots of ships destroyed by a
Japanese fleet fueled with American petroleum and built with American
steel.
I analogize that to China. We are sending $80 billion a year more in
China than they are sending to us, so they end up with $80 billion more
American dollars than we end up with dollars from them. They are taking
those dollars, Mr. Speaker, and they are buying and building a war
machine that one day may kill Americans on the battlefield. They bought
the Sovremenny class missile destroyers from Russia. Those were
designed with Sunburn missiles for one purpose: to kill American
aircraft carriers. And they bought those after they had been
embarrassed over the Taiwan issue by the United States, and they vowed
never to be embarrassed again.
So they bought the Sovremenny class missile destroyers. They are
buying air-to-air refueling capability from the Russians. They are
buying high-performance SU-27 fighter aircraft from the Russians; and,
yesterday, as we walked out of the vote giving China Most Favored
Nation trading status and guaranteeing this flow of American dollars to
China, we walked out to look at a headline in the Washington Post and
the newspapers around the country saying China completes $2 billion
deal with Russia to now buy 38 SU-30 aircraft. Those are attack
aircraft, from Russia. And we also noted that they are now Russia's
biggest customer for Russia's war machine.
So we spent trillions of dollars offsetting Russia's war machine
during the Cold War, and now we are rebuilding that war machine with
American trade dollars in China.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I would like to close on a good note. Hopefully,
there is a good note here. One hope, and I think this is the hope of
all Members who understand the plight of America's military today,
Democrat and Republican, I think certainly all members of the Committee
on Armed Services, we need that $18 billion. We are told we might not
even get the $18 billion above the Clinton budget that we thought we
were going to get and which we made a place for in the budget a few
months ago.
If we do not get that $18 billion, Mr. Speaker, we are going to see
more planes that cannot get off the ground; we are going to see more
empty ammo pouches with the Army and Marine Corps personnel who have to
defend this country; we are going to see more spare parts shortages
throughout the services; we are going to see more substandard housing
for military families; and we are going to see a continued decline of
America's military strength.
Now, we did do something very phenomenal last week; and we recognized
this in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. That was that we did
shoot down a bullet with a bullet in a national missile defense test.
Now, I have put up here, Mr. Speaker, the results of the last eight
Patriot 3 tests. That is our smaller defensive system that handles
Scud-type missiles, and I put it up here to show that, in fact, we are
now hitting a bullet with a bullet with missile defense. We can shoot a
Scud missile that goes faster than a .30-06 bullet, that is a high-
powered rifle bullet with a Patriot 3 missile that also goes faster
than a .30-06 bullet. We have had now eight out of nine successful
intercepts.
Mr. Speaker, at about 11:09 on Saturday night last Saturday, 148
miles above the earth in the mid-Pacific, we hit a Minuteman missile
launched out of Vandenberg, California, going some 11,000 feet per
second. That is about four times the speed of a .30-06 bullet. We hit
it with an Interceptor from Kwajalein Island, 4,800 miles from the
west. We launched that Interceptor, and it also had a speed about four
times faster than a .30-06 bullet, and they collided 148 miles above
the earth.
That utilized radar capability, the Beal Air Force station in
California, also our ex-band radar on Kwajalein, also radar at Hawaii
with hundreds and hundreds of Navy and Air Force assets monitoring that
test. And with some 35,000 Americans, whether they were members of the
Army that helped develop the radar or the Air Force team that launched
the missile from Vandenberg Air Base or the Navy and Coast Guard that
provided security, some 35,000 plus Americans, engineers, scientists,
technicians, blue collar workers, participated in making that test a
success.
It was a great day for the United States, but it was a chart along a
very difficult road of trying to achieve missile defense.
The Bush administration has the right idea about missile defense.
They know it is necessary because we live in an age of missiles. We
found that out when we had a number of our personnel killed in Desert
Storm by a ballistic missile launched by Saddam Hussein at an American
force concentration. We can defend today, even though we have a
weakened defense, we still have defenses against ships, tanks,
aircraft. We have no defense against an incoming ICBM coming into this
country.
So that is why the administration is working with the Russians to try
to develop a cooperation that will allow us to deploy defenses, and it
is why also the Bush administration has the right idea, that if we
cannot make an agreement with the Russian, it is in our national
interests to build a missile defense system, because it is the United
States Government that has a constitutional responsibility to its
people to provide for national security. National security must now and
forever on include defense against incoming ballistic missiles.
So, Mr. Speaker, I would hope that the administration would work
overtime to try to increase this defense budget. Let us not look back
on this era of relative prosperity when the American people are doing
well as an era that was similar to the era immediately preceding Korea,
when we decided that there would not be any more wars and that we did
not need to have a military that was ready to go. Then, on June 6 of
1950, we found ourselves pushed down the Korean peninsula by a third-
rate military; and when the dust
[[Page H4377]]
had cleared, over 30,000 Americans lay dead because we had
underestimated the danger of the world; and we had also underestimated
the drawdown of the American military that took place after World War
II.
Mr. Speaker, we must keep a strong military. That is the
underpinnings of our foreign policy, which is ultimately the
underpinnings of our economic policy. So let us try to get that $18
billion, Mr. Speaker. It is crucial to everybody that wears a uniform
in the United States, and it is crucial to every American.
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