[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3467-3468]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       THE STATE OF THE MILITARY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gutknecht). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, I just a left a meeting with Secretary 
Cohen, Chief of Naval Operations, and General Shelton. I know people 
are talking about Social Security, they are talking about education, 
they are talking about Medicare, but I want to read something to my 
colleagues, and I want to quote.
  Quite often our military leaders have been remiss in stating what the 
actual needs are so that they do not get in trouble, and I would like 
to read this to my colleagues. This was taken from a hearing in Las 
Vegas, Nevada. It said, ``Displaying unusual candor, the commanders of 
combat training centers for the Army, the Air Force, the Marines, the 
Navy and Coast Guard described poor training conditions, outdated 
equipment held together `by junkyard parts', and an underpaid, 
overworked cadre of service workers who cannot wait to get out and find 
a better job.''
  What is happening is our overseas deployments are 300 percent above 
what they were at the height of Vietnam. We

[[Page 3468]]

are driving our military into the ground but not using the reinvestment 
into the parts, the manpower, or even the creature comforts for our 
military folks.
  This goes on to say, ``We have a great military filled with terrific 
soldiers who are suffering from an inability to train at every level 
with battle focus and frequency necessary to develop and sustain its 
full combat potential.''
  Mr. Speaker, we are maintaining only 23 percent of our enlisted. If 
my colleagues go out in any military division today and ask our sailors 
or our troops of any branch how many of them have been there within the 
last 8 years, every hand will go up; about 90 percent of them. They 
have not seen anything else but a de-escalation of military spending 
and/or support, which is denied.
  We only have, today, 14 of 23 up jets at Navy Fighter Weapons School, 
known as Top Gun. They do not have engines. There are 137 parts 
missing. The 414th for the Air Force, the same problem. They do not 
have engines or parts to fly their aircraft back here in CONUS. We had 
4 of 45 up jets at Oceania. What does that all equate to?
  Why they are down is because we are taking the parts to support 
Bosnia, to support our off-loads and our carriers and our air force out 
of Italy, to put those parts in those parts of the world. We are 
killing our training back home. When we only have 23 percent of our 
enlisted and 30 percent of our pilots in all services, that means our 
experience is gone. Captain O'Grady, who was shot down, was not trained 
in air combat maneuvering.

                              {time}  1430

  That lack of training. When you only have four up jets in a training 
squadron back here in the United States, that means all your new pilots 
are getting limited training so when they go over, whether it is just 
handling an emergency or handling a combat situation, they are not 
trained for it. We lost about 50 airplanes this year, Mr. Speaker. We 
are going to lose a great number of aircraft and pilots over the next 5 
years, even if we invest in those spare parts and so on today.
  Now, the service chief will tell you, we have just put money into the 
spare parts and it takes delay. But that money they took and put into 
spare parts came out of other military programs. The chiefs have told 
us we need $150 billion. That is $22 billion a year. The President's 
new money is $4 billion. Last year when they say they needed 150, the 
President said, ``Well, I'll give you a $1 billion offset,'' which 
means it has to come out of other military programs, which is a zero 
gain, zero net for the military.
  We are in bad shape, we are losing our troops, the economy is high, 
but the number-one reason why our troops are getting out, yes, pay 
raise is important. But the number-one reason is because they are away 
from their families. They are going overseas, they are deploying, they 
are coming back, then they have to deploy here and they do not have the 
equipment, the spare parts that they use or take a part off of your 
Chevy and put it on another Chevy. That part is not going to last you 
very long and we are going to lose those numbers of pilots.
  It is said that we have more tasks for armed services than we do 
people. Now, we are asking our people in all services to do this 300 
percent increase of deployments. But we have one-half the force to do 
it with. That means that the ones that are left have to go and do twice 
the work than we had to do it before. We cannot sustain that kind of 
downsizing and leave our troops unprepared.
  If we look at Haiti, at Somalia and Aideed, Aristide is still there, 
it is still a disaster and we have spent billions of dollars. The 
already low budget that we have, all of those excursions come out of 
that low budget which even drives us further.

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