[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 85 (Monday, June 24, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5923-S5924]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION BILL

  Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I would like to share a few remarks 
about the Defense bill that we will be back on in a few minutes.
  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, will the Senator yield for a unanimous 
consent request?
  I ask unanimous consent that this Senator be recognized for 10 
minutes following the Senator's remarks.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, we have had a good process in the 
Armed Services Committee, of which I am a member. Senator Levin is a 
marvelous chairman, and leads in a very skilled and wise way. Our 
ranking member, Senator John Warner, former Secretary of the Navy and a 
patriot, in many ways lends his wisdom to the debate. We have come out, 
except I suppose on national missile defense, with a bill with which we 
feel comfortable. I think a large amount of the credit goes to 
President Bush for stepping forward and providing leadership in calling 
for a strong budget.
  I thought I would just share a few remarks about my view of where we 
are, what we are spending, what we have been spending in the past, and 
where we need to go in the future.
  Many people may not know that 10 years ago, under the last budget of 
former President Bush, the appropriated amount for defense was $327 
billion. We started, since that time, a continuous downgrade movement 
in spending for the defense of this country, which has really put us in 
a bad position.
  Several years ago, one of our key witnesses said we are facing a bow 
wave of unmet needs. We know that since the late 1980s personnel has 
dropped 40 percent in our services. They are better trained and better 
equipped than before. They are doing a terrific job, but we are down 
about 40 percent from the height of our personnel at that time.
  So what is it that has really happened? We have had inflation. In 
many ways, we have had increased demands on us around the world. We 
have a demand that we have all agreed to in this body of which I think 
everybody is on board; and that is, we need to transform our defense. 
We need to reach our objective force. We have set an objective as to 
what we want our military to look like and be. We want it lighter. We 
want it more mobile. We want it more lethal, more scientific, and 
technologically based. That has been our goal, and we have been moving 
in that direction, but it costs money.
  But despite those demands, we have not done very well, until recent 
years, frankly, in our spending. In 1993, our defense budget was $327 
billion. That is what we appropriated, $327 billion. In 1994, it 
dropped significantly in one year to $304 billion. In 1995, it dropped 
again to $299 billion, falling below $300 billion. In 1996, it dropped 
again to $295 billion. In 1997, it dropped again to $289 billion. In 
1998, it hit the bottom, $287 billion.

  During this time, we had inflation, we had other demands, and we had 
salary increases for our people in uniform, but the defense amount was 
going down steadily.
  In 1999, we had the first increase in the defense budget from $287 
billion in 1998 to $292 billion in 1999--not enough, really, to meet 
the cost of inflation, but in real dollars, actual dollars, it was the 
first increase in many years.
  In 2000, we had another minor increase to $296 billion. In 2001, we 
got over $300 billion again, for the first time in many years, and 
appropriated $309 billion.
  That is not a very good record. It emphasizes how we began to lose 
sight and take for granted the forces that defend us around the world. 
It represented a dramatic reduction in real

[[Page S5924]]

dollars, adjusted for inflation, which is even larger than the amount 
that appears on paper because, as you know, the dollars were becoming 
always a little bit less valuable each year.
  So when President Bush campaigned on strengthening the military, he 
took action to do that. So in 2002, we hit, under his leadership and 
his direction--and I think he deserves great credit for this--we raised 
the budget to $329 billion, exceeding, for the first time in many 
years, the 1993 budget of $327 billion.
  Then, in the course of that, we have had the war effort that we have 
been carrying on now against terrorism, and there has been a 
supplemental defense budget of around $40 billion for defense this past 
year to help us meet those crisis needs.
  In this year's budget, President Bush has proposed--and we are pretty 
much on track to meet his request--$376 billion for defense. I think 
that is a step in the right direction.
  I am saying these things because a lot of people think we cannot 
afford anything, that defense is taking up all the money in the budget. 
But as a percentage of the total gross domestic product of America, 
what America produces--all the goods and services we produce--our 
budget today, for the year 2003, is much less than the percentage of 
the gross domestic product we had in 1993 when we had an only slightly 
smaller defense budget in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, as well 
as in terms of the actual drain on the economy.
  So what we need to do is ask ourselves where we are going. This 
budget does not call for an increase in personnel. It calls for, again, 
some pay increases, a cost for more training, bonuses for people in 
high-specialty areas whom we have to have in a military which operates 
with as much technological sophistication as we operate in today. That 
does not produce anything.
  We have risen to the challenge and have met the needs of our veterans 
for health care coverage for life, which they were promised and were 
not receiving. We have done that. We will do some other things in that 
regard.
  Military housing has fallen behind in its needs. Military health care 
has not been what it has needed to be. We have fallen off there.
  So all of these things, I guess I am saying, are unmet needs that we 
have had to fund out of the increases that we have had. And it has left 
us not as good as we would like to be in recapitalizing our military. 
It is not as good as where we would need to be to step forward to reach 
that objective we have for a future combat system that allows us to be 
agile, mobile, and hostile, as Eddie Robinson said, to make our 
military able to project its power wherever the legitimate interests of 
the United States are threatened around the globe.

  So I think we do have some good increases. We are going to have 
increases for smart munitions, the kind of precision-guided munitions 
that proved exceedingly valuable in Afghanistan. Sixty, almost 70 
percent of the munitions we expended in Afghanistan were precision-
guided munitions.
  We can drop a 2,000-pound JDAM from an airplane, and it can hit--
precision guided with global positioning systems--within 10 meters of a 
target. That is a precision weapon of extraordinary capability. We need 
to have plenty of those. We have an increase in what we have expended 
for that. Frankly, I am not sure we have quite enough yet there. We dog 
gone sure don't want to be in a war and not be able to call down 
sufficient numbers of those kinds of weapons that are so effective 
today. So we have done that.
  We made a tough call--the Defense Secretary did--on the Crusader 
artillery piece. It is an $11 billion item. It was not considered part 
of the objective force but an interim weapon system before we could get 
that. It was going to drain us of $11 billion. For example, it would 
not have been deployed by the Army in Korea. It would have been kept in 
this country in the counterattack force.
  The Secretary of Defense and the President concluded we could not 
afford that new weapon and that we need to leap forward to a new type 
of artillery piece that had precision-guided capability. We have those, 
really, right now. If we work and develop them, we could bring those 
in, and they would be part of that new combat system we are looking 
forward to having.
  So the President and Secretary Rumsfeld had to make that tough call. 
A lot of people wanted that system. They had invested a lot of years in 
it and developing it. They testified in favor of it, and they voted in 
favor of it. But I think the President did the right thing. I supported 
him on that. It will free up $11 billion for increased investment in 
smarter munitions that will help us better in the future.
  So the other big conflict I guess we have had--and I believe it is 
very significant, and I hope the American people will be engaged on 
it--is the question of national missile defense.
  We know, from unclassified testimony by professionals from the 
Director of the CIA, George Tenet, and from the Director of the Defense 
Intelligence Agency, who studies these things exceedingly closely, that 
Korea will have an intercontinental ballistic missile from which they 
can deliver weapons of mass destruction to Alaska and Hawaii and the 
United States proper very soon.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator has used 10 minutes.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I see my friend in the Chamber, Senator Dorgan.
  I will just finish up, if I can, and say that we are making progress. 
We will have a debate on national missile defense. If we can get the 
money back for that, I believe we will have a defense budget of which 
we can all be proud.
  I thank the Chair.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, my colleague just mentioned national 
missile defense. I think we will have a robust, aggressive debate on 
that subject in the Senate. We all agree that we need a defense of some 
sort against rogue nations or terrorists aiming a missile at our 
country.
  But we need to look at the broad range of threats that this country 
faces. We have 5.7 million containers come into our ports every year on 
container ships; 100,000 of them are inspected; the other 5.6 million 
are not. Almost anyone will tell you it is far more likely that a 
weapon of mass destruction is going to come in on a container ship, 
coming to a dock at 2 miles an hour to threaten an American city or to 
be put on an 18-wheel truck and moved out to the middle part of the 
country. Almost anyone will tell that you the low-tech approach to 
threatening America with a weapon of mass destruction is much more 
likely than a terrorist having access to an intercontinental ballistic 
missile and putting a nuclear tip on that ICBM.
  I have supported billions and billions of dollars on research and 
development of missile defense. But that is not the only threat we 
face. We face so many other threats that are largely ignored. I just 
mention the one with respect to port security: 5.7 million big 
containers come in every single year, and 5.6 million are uninspected.
  In the Middle East, a terrorist put himself in one of these 
containers. He had fresh water, a heater, a GPS, a computer, a bed, and 
he was shipping himself to Canada in a container.
  It is likely that terrorists will threaten this country not with a 
high-tech weapon but by putting a weapon of mass destruction in a 
container on a ship coming up to a port at 1 or 2 miles an hour, not an 
ICBM.
  So we need to have a debate in terms of how we use our resources. Do 
we put them all in one pot, or do we evaluate what is the most likely 
threat? How do we respond to that threat?

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