[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6741]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, as we are dealing with the defense 
authorization legislation, we should step back and look at the big 
picture. Are we taking tough stands dealing with escalating personnel 
costs, procurement issues, excess facilities? Are we honoring the 
responsibility of the military to clean up after itself? One of the 
best examples is a failure to deal with the rightsizing of our military 
facilities.
  It is no secret that our nuclear triad, which includes our land-based 
missiles, nuclear submarines, and bombers, are wildly in excess of 
anything we need for deterrence.
  The Pentagon's 2013 report on nuclear employment strategy declared 
that ``we can ensure the security of the United States and our allies 
and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrence while safely 
pursuing up to a one-third reduction in deployed nuclear weapons from 
the level established in the New START Treaty.''
  Other experts, including a commission chaired by former Vice Chairman 
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright, suggest we could 
go even lower without jeopardizing security.
  Yet we are on a trajectory to spend over a trillion dollars in the 
decades to come on weapons that are largely irrelevant to the 
challenges of today: ISIS, 9/11-type attacks, military activities in 
Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian aggression in the Ukraine.
  We should be addressing what is an appropriate level for the nuclear 
deterrence. But until we face up to the fact that we ought to at least 
know what we are getting into, one simple step would have been to tell 
Congress what the longer term costs are going to be.
  In the last legislation, I had an amendment that was successfully 
approved to require the CBO to publish every 2 years a 10-year cost 
estimate of our nuclear modernization. It has already proven extremely 
valuable to provide a set of numbers we can compare to the Pentagon's 
estimates. Unfortunately, more and more of these expenses are being 
pushed outside the 10-year window.
  I had an amendment that would have at least required our being able 
to have a 25-year cost of modernization, an estimate the Pentagon said 
they can do and one that we already have for the National Nuclear 
Security Administration.
  One other area that was equally puzzling was the failure to allow a 
bipartisan, fully offset amendment to upgrade our Air National Guard F-
15s. The radar they are using dates to the 1970s. In fact, it went out 
of production 30 years ago. We had a simple, bipartisan, fully offset 
amendment to allow the Air Guard to at least get 10 planes modernized 
on an ongoing basis.
  It is frustrating. We are failing to tackle the big issues. We are 
not even given an opportunity to guarantee Congress knows what the 
longer term costs are, and we are shortchanging small investments that 
would make a big difference for our Air National Guard.
  I hope we are going to have an opportunity as the legislation moves 
forward for Congress to do a better job balancing our priorities, 
meeting the needs of our men and women in uniform, and protecting our 
long-term budget.

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