[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 16412]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                            NATIONAL DEFENSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to talk for just a couple of 
minutes following the eulogy and the little memorial discussion that we 
had with respect to our old friend Floyd Spence who really represented 
the idea that you needed to have a strong national defense to maintain 
all of our other freedoms and who dedicated his career as a member of 
the Committee on Armed Services and ultimately the chairman of the 
committee to national defense.
  I thought that the best service we could render to Floyd right now 
would be to remind our colleagues that we still have a lot of work to 
do with respect to national defense. We are still short on ammunition, 
measurably short. We are $3 billion short in terms of the Army's 
requirements and several hundred million dollars short with respect to 
the Marine Corps. We are still vastly short on ammunition. Spare parts, 
we have now cannibalization taking place across the array of front line 
aircraft, the front line fighter. I am talking about F-15s, F-15Es and 
F-16s. Their mission-capable rates are dropping off the cliff, meaning 
that they now are not as ready as they used to be to be able to go out 
and do their mission and come back.
  We still have personnel problems. We are still some 800-plus pilots 
short in the United States Air Force and across the services. We have 
lots of personnel shortages.

                              {time}  1945

  So we have a need, Mr. Speaker, to spend about an additional $50 
billion per year on top of what we are spending right now. I would 
remind my colleagues we are spending roughly $125 billion a year less 
than the Reagan administration did in the mid-1980s in real dollars.
  So I think that the best service we can do to Floyd's memory is to 
carry the flag that he carried, which is to remind our colleagues that 
we need to preserve a strong national defense.
  I would yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), a good 
friend, a former member of the Committee on Armed Services, a veteran, 
and a veteran of the Gulf War, and a person who believes in defense.
  Mr. BUYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  When the gentleman comes up with his $50 billion number, what he did 
not mention, and I ask him to elaborate a little built, is on the 
question of deferred maintenance. When one looks at this past decade of 
the 1990s, in the post-Reagan buildup, we began to use a lot of the 
equipment, use those maintenance facilities, and now the bill is coming 
due, is it not?
  Mr. HUNTER. That is absolutely right. I think the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is going to speak later on on this trip that 
he took across the bases in this country and reviewing all of the 
deferred maintenance, the potholes on the runways, the repair on 
aircraft, but also the infrastructure maintenance, just keeping our 
buildings in good shape, keeping military housing in good shape.
  When we would have to go to a mission, let us say to a Bosnia or 
another place, another operations area, instead of the administration, 
then the Clinton administration, asking for more money from Congress, 
they would simply reach into the cash register and take out money that 
was going to be used for maintenance.
  So having used that money and not replaced it, when the services 
looked for money to be able to repair their old buildings, repair their 
runways, furnish spare parts, it was not there.
  Mr. BUYER. When I look back now at the 1990s, I say as Congress 
sought to react to some of the personnel problems, we repealed the 
reduction, we reformed the retirement system, we made reforms in the 
pay tables, we increased military pay, we addressed the health care, we 
addressed the food stamp issue, so we focused a lot on personnel and 
people.
  Now we need to focus on all that deferred maintenance that is going 
to come crashing down upon us. And shame on us if we do not focus on 
it, because the gentleman is absolutely right, it is the water lines, 
it is the pipes, it is the roofs, it is the equipment, it is the 
automobiles, and the list goes on and on. I am most hopeful that it is 
something that the administration will be leaning forward on.
  Mr. HUNTER. I hope the administration works with the gentleman from 
New Jersey (Mr. Saxton), who is chairman of the Subcommittee on 
Military Construction in the Committee on Armed Services to come up 
with some new ways to buy military housing for military families, 
because, as the gentleman knows, a lot of that housing is 20, 30, 40, 
50 years old; and in a lot of places around the country our young 
families do not have housing available on the bases. There is not 
housing. They have to go out on the economy, and in places like San 
Diego you are looking at $1,000, $1,200 a month for the smallest 
amounts. So we have some major problems to fix, and that means money.
  Mr. BUYER. The gentleman is bringing a defense bill to the floor next 
week. What are the major themes of that defense bill?
  Mr. HUNTER. We are going to try to do a lot of things with what we 
have, with the $18 billion in extra spending that we anticipate this 
year above and beyond what we call the ``Clinton baseline.'' But that 
$18 billion, once again, does not come close to solving the equipment 
problem, which is about a $30-billion-per-year problem, solving the 
ammunition problems, the people problems, the other problems we have 
across the board. We are going to do as much as we can.




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