[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
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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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