    [Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 10, 2018)]
    [Senate]
    [Pages S116-S118]
    From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                              Funding Our Military

      Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I admit I wasn't here during the entirety
    of the comments from our friend, and I saw his to-do list. The only
    thing missing from that to-do list was to fund our military--or at
    least I didn't see it on there. In all fairness, maybe he mentioned
    that in his comments.
      We now have 9 days to reach an agreement to keep the government
    funded, to keep the lights on, to keep paying the salaries of our
    government employees, and, of course, to fund our military, which ought
    to be our No. 1 priority. If we think about things that government must
    do, funding our national defense is the only thing that we can do and
    that government can do. There are a lot of other things that government
    does that are optional or maybe things we would like to do, but funding
    our military is the No. 1 priority--or should be.
      As the Senate majority leader mentioned earlier this week, our
    Democratic colleagues persist in the notion that we should only
    increase defense spending if we increase nondefense spending by the
    same amount. The parity that the minority leader and the other
    Democrats call for doesn't make any sense, though. It is apples and
    oranges. They act as though all government spending is exactly alike
    and enjoys or should enjoy the same priority, and that is just not
    true. We know that from our own family budgets or from a small
    business. There are things we must do, things we want to do, and things
    we will do if there is money left over. But our friends across the
    aisle, who are obstructing our ability to get to negotiated budget caps
    and fund our military, act as though all of that is the same, that must
    do, want to do, and what you will do if you have money left over--that
    those are all exactly the same, and that is just not the case. It is
    not the case in our family budgets, in our small business budgets, nor
    is it the case for the Federal budget. Not everything is a priority.
    But we do know that the No. 1 priority must be the safety and security
    of the American people by making sure our military is adequately
    funded.
      The Budget Control Act signed into law in 2011 was what I would call
    a necessary evil. The Budget Control Act provided that we would have a
    bipartisan, bicameral negotiation and try to come up with a grand
    bargain.
      That was what President Obama liked to talk about a lot--the grand
    bargain. But some people suggested that was kind of like a unicorn,
    something that people describe but no one has ever seen--a grand
    bargain. I wish it weren't true.
      The Budget Control Act said that in the absence of a grand bargain,
    we would have budget caps or sequestration imposed on discretionary
    spending above certain levels. It proposed separate budget caps for
    defense and nondefense, and if the budget caps are exceeded, there is
    an automatic enforcement mechanism called sequestration which imposes
    across-the-board cuts, which I mentioned a moment ago.
      The purpose of this sequestration--or these across-the-board cuts--is
    to do something in the absence of us doing what we should do; in other
    words, we should take it upon ourselves to figure out what the
    appropriate spending levels should be for defense and nondefense, and
    then we should act to appropriate that money. But this is basically a
    fail-safe mechanism, which operates as a result of our failure to deal
    with this in a proactive way, and it has hit our defense spending much,
    much harder than domestic spending.
      As we know, neither our defense spending nor tax cuts are the cause
    of our deficits and debt. It is the 70 percent of spending that happens
    in the Federal Government on autopilot. It is the entitlements that
    have been going up well in excess of 5 percent a year and are causing
    instability and unpredictability in those important programs, such as
    Medicare and Social Security, but at the same time racking up huge
    deficits and debt that future generations are going to have to pay
    back. Somebody is going to have to pay it back, and it won't be the
    present generation because we won't be around then. It is simply
    immoral to continue to see this happen without trying to deal with it.

      But back on the matter of the Pentagon, as one op-ed writer put it in
    the Washington Post last month--he said:

           The Pentagon and the welfare state have been locked in
         brutal combat for decades, and the Pentagon has gotten
         clobbered. . . . Welfare programs--Social Security, Medicare,
         food stamps and other benefits--dwarf defense spending.

      In the 1950s and 1960s, defense spending was roughly 8 to 10 percent
    of our economy. In 2016, it was just 3 percent. That is a huge change.
      James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, said
    that in his 50 years in the intelligence community, he had never seen a
    more diverse array of threats confronting the United States around the
    world--never in his

    [[Page S117]]

    50 years of experience. So we are simply asking our military and our
    national security personnel to do too much with too little.
      It is no surprise that Secretary of Defense James Mattis said last
    June that ``for all the heartache caused by the loss of our troops
    during [our] wars [abroad], no enemy in this field has done more to
    harm the readiness of our military than sequestration.''
      More recently, General Mattis said that so far our continuing
    resolutions have not done even greater damage to our readiness thanks
    to certain additional or supplemental funding that we voted on. But at
    the same time, he soberly cautioned that there could be real impact--
    and it won't be positive, it will be negative--if the problem persists
    and if the Department of Defense doesn't have a real budget sometime
    this month.
      His remarks echo that of practically every service chief. Together,
    their views mean we have to act. I don't know who else we would listen
    to if we are not going to listen to the Secretary of Defense and our
    service chiefs when it comes to national security because that is their
    job, and we ought to take their advice and heed their counsel.
      Cuts in defense spending have real consequences. Much less money is
    available for training and necessary maintenance, for example. The
    length of deployments for our troops grows, and our soldiers are
    stretched thin. Our military is forced to operate beyond its normal
    capabilities.
      The former Air Force Chief of Staff recently described the Air Force
    as the smallest, oldest equipped, and least ready force across the full
    spectrum of operations in our service history. Those are chilling
    remarks--or should be. More than half of all Marine Corps fixed and
    rotary-wing aircraft were unable to fly by the end of 2016. I have no
    doubt that we can turn that around very quickly if Congress were to
    step up to its responsibilities and adequately fund the military, but
    that is the status quo unless we act. The Navy fleet currently stands
    at 275 of the 350 ship requirement. Of our 58 Army brigade combat
    teams, only 3--3 out of 58--are ready for combat.
      Our enemies shouldn't take any comfort in these numbers because, as I
    said, the United States always pulls together and Congress always acts
    when they see a national emergency. But it shouldn't take an emergency
    for us to do our job and to make sure that our military is adequately
    funded and is ready to fight. As General Brooks in Seoul, South Korea,
    said, their motto is ``ready to fight tonight.'' That is the kind of
    world we live in.
      Last summer was the perfect example of why, when we draw attention to
    these numbers, we are not just blowing smoke. Operational accidents in
    the South Pacific exposed our readiness failures in a dramatic fashion
    and in a tragic fashion. Ten sailors died when the USS John S. McCain
    collided with a 600-foot merchant vessel off the coast of Singapore.
    Seven sailors died when the Fitzgerald collided with another vessel off
    the coast of Japan. And the USS Lake Champlain collided with a boat
    near Korea--although thankfully that time no lives were lost. This
    ought to be a wake-up call to all of us.
      Many have drawn credible correlations between these accidents that
    have taken the lives of our military servicemembers and our readiness
    failures, citing studies like the 2015 independent investigation by the
    Government Accountability Office. That study determined that the Navy's
    mandate to keep ships afloat in the Pacific was shortchanging crew
    training and degrading the condition of our ships--in other words,
    additional readiness failures.
      These accidents, by the way, are happening at the same time our
    national security threats are not going away, as General Clapper's
    comments would indicate.
      We have seen North Korea continue to improve its nuclear and long-
    range ballistic missile capabilities beyond the estimates of our
    intelligence community--much faster--and detonate what is widely
    considered to be a hydrogen bomb recently.
      We have seen large-scale protests in Iran--and I hope they continue--
    exposing the instability of a regime that continues to use its proxies
    to advance its aims throughout the broader Middle East; in other words,
    the No. 1 state sponsor of international terrorism--Iran. We ought to
    encourage the people of Iran to continue to rise up in protest and to
    change the regime there into one that does not prey on its neighbors in
    the region.
      We have seen a growing China--something that more and more people are
    realizing is a threat. I know that when we deal with countries like
    China, frequently we deal with them in the commercial context where we
    see a business that hires people and we see investments here in the
    United States. But what we need to recognize is that they don't do
    business the way the United States does business. Sitting at the top of
    every company in China, in the board room of every Chinese company, is
    the Communist Party. They operate on an all-of-government basis. And it
    is not just the government; it is also what we would consider the
    private sector. But, in truth, there is no private sector in China; it
    is all an arm of the government. It is posing a rising threat to
    American wages and labor as they erode our industrial base by stealing
    our technology. And because of loopholes in the Committee on Foreign
    Investment in the United States--the so-called CFIUS process--they are
    now able to tailor financial arrangements through joint ventures and
    others in a way to capture our dual-purpose, cutting-edge technology.
    They then copy it in China and erode our defense industrial base here
    in the United States, along with the jobs that go with it. So it is a
    very real and present threat to American wages and workers. It is a
    threat to our intellectual property edge and the innovation that we are
    the best in the world at, but they are all too eager to steal it, copy
    it, and to harm the jobs and the investment in those businesses here in
    the United States.

      Of course, when it comes to China, there is the threat to human
    rights in nondemocratic nations like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, which
    China often has no qualms supporting.
      With this diverse array of dangers, we simply can't afford to
    straitjacket our military by arbitrarily cutting the amount of money we
    appropriate to fund it. But that is what is going to happen unless we
    act--and act quickly. The current continuing resolution expires on the
    19th of this month.
      The truth is, even if we are able to come up with negotiated budget
    caps for defense and nondefense spending, we are probably going to have
    to have a short-term continuing resolution to give the Appropriations
    Committees time to put that into bill text. In other words, we can't
    just snap our fingers once the decision has been made. It is going to
    take some time to actually put it on paper.
      The bottom line is, if we want to return to having the strong
    military that we have always had, if we want to continue to lead in the
    world, if we want to continue to be a force for peace and stability, we
    have to maintain our military strength. That was the lesson we had to
    learn again during the last administration when we saw America retreat
    from its leadership in the world.
      There are countries, tyrants, bullies, and dictators all too willing
    to fill the void left by American retreat, and one way we retreat is
    when we don't fund the readiness of our military, when we are not
    ``ready to fight tonight,'' as General Brooks has said, and we need to
    start with ending this cycle of continuing resolutions and defense
    sequestration.
      So I come to the floor today to call on my colleagues from all across
    this Chamber, but specifically across the aisle, to quit holding our
    military hostage to other unrelated demands, and I urge this body to
    come together in agreement on new budget caps as soon as possible.
      I yield the floor.
      I suggest the absence of a quorum.
      The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
      The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
      Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
    for the quorum call be rescinded.
      The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). Without objection, it is so
    ordered.
      Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in
    morning business.
      The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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