[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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