[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 114 (Wednesday, September 5, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H5375-H5376]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          FOREIGN POLICY AND OUR NATIONAL SECURITY OBJECTIVES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Cantor). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, earlier the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Hunter) and I spoke on the issues of national security. I want to touch 
on an issue we do not really talk about much on the House floor, and it 
is the issue of foreign policy and how it relates to our national 
security objectives, i.e., our military strategy to fight and win our 
Nation's wars, as the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) likes to 
refer to, with overwhelming force.
  We went through the 8 years of the Clinton administration and we had 
a foreign policy of engagement. The President has the responsibility of 
outlining what are the vital interests of a Nation. Then he turns to 
the Pentagon and says what is your military strategy now to protect the 
interests of a Nation that I have outlined?
  President Clinton, what he had done in his foreign policy of 
engagement, took 275,000 of America's finest and spread them over 135 
nations all around the world. What that did was create an expectancy by 
our allies and our friends that the United States will always be there. 
So when you looked at Germany, or the United Kingdom, other allies 
began to decrease their defense budgets relative to their GNP.
  Time out. You are going the wrong way. So now we have had a change in 
administrations and a change in direction, so I give some counsel now 
unto the administration: when the United States has provided for the 
peace and the stability of two major regions of the world, the Pacific 
Rim and Europe, I believe the United States as a superpower, we can 
act. Whether it is unilaterally or in concert with another nation, if 
there is instability upon a region of the world, then we can act.
  Take, for example, the continent of Europe. If there is an 
intercontinental conflict that poses no threat to destabilize the 
region, then our allies need to step up to the plate. We can provide 
assistance through our architecture of intelligence or through our 
airlift and our sealift, but we need to ask of our allies that they 
begin to accept greater burdens of peace and responsibility.
  Now to the issue of our military force structure and how that relates 
to that foreign policy. There is a debate in the town about do we move 
away from the military strategy of being able to fight and win two 
nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts. I have never endorsed 
that two-major-regional-conflict scenario, but I think what is 
important and what I have heard the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Hunter) say is it is in our interests, this Nation of ours, to not only 
protect our interests and that of our allies; when they need our 
assistance, we need to be

[[Page H5376]]

highly mobile and volatile. I mean, it has to be lethal. It has to be a 
force that can respond rapidly.
  So we can have debates, and the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Hunter), I want to yield to him, to speak about the discussions he is 
presently having on the Committee on Armed Services about what should 
be the proper force structure as we move to the 21st century.
  Mr. HUNTER. I am glad the gentleman is speaking today, because he is 
one of our Desert Storm veterans and was over in the Gulf and watched 
what then was an overwhelming use of force against Saddam Hussein. I 
believe you have to be prepared. I think ``be prepared'' is the key 
position that the U.S. should take, because if you look at the forces 
that we used against Saddam Hussein, many of those forces came out of 
Europe.
  Those were forces that were lined up initially in Germany and other 
parts of Europe to offset what we thought then would be a conflict 
perhaps with the Warsaw Pact, that is, with Russians and Russian 
allies, the Soviet Union.
  But that did not happen. In the end, we moved those forces into that 
theater in the Middle East, and we used them with devastating effect 
against Saddam Hussein's own military, which was much touted as the 
fourth largest army in the world.
  So I think the lesson there is that unusual things happen. If we had 
gone back over the last century and the 619,000 Americans who died in 
the 20th century in conflicts, most of those conflicts arose in ways 
that we in no way anticipated, whether it was December 7, 1941, or this 
last event with Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait.
  The gentleman and I sat there on the Committee on Armed Services and 
asked our intelligence people, Which of you anticipated this invasion 
of Kuwait? One of the gentleman actually said, Before or after the 
armor started moving? We said, No, before. And none of them had 
anticipated it.
  So the key here is to be prepared. If you have force, you can move 
it, just as we did the forces out of Europe. If you have the air power, 
you can move it around the world. That is what that gentleman 
illustrated when he fought in Desert Storm.

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