Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Kingston, I want to thank you as a good friend and a person who really has the interest of the United States at heart. Even though you are doing a lot of other important things and you are not a member of the Committee on Armed Services, we all thank you for your interest in national security, because that is one of the primary reasons for our existence, this House of Representatives, and you serve your people well by exhibiting that interest and supporting a strong national defense. Thank you for being with us.

Mr. HUNTER. Let me talk for just another minute or two about the missile defense programs, because Secretary Perry went over that the other day and he has a word that he likes to use. It is called robust. Robust is a pretty subjective term, and something that is robust to one person may not be robust to another, so I want to talk about the real funding levels that President Clinton put out on the table in today's budget, this year's new budget, with respect to missile defense. We all know missile defense is important, both theater missile defense, that is when you shoot down the slow-moving missiles before they come into your troop concentrations, like the Scud missiles coming into our barracks in the Middle East during the Desert Storm, and you also want national missile defense that will shoot down fast-moving missiles that are coming into your cities, whether by accident or by design. Mr. Speaker, the President's request for missile defense in this year was $2.9 billion. That sounds like a lot, and that has been described by Secretary Perry as robust, and I guess compared to the rest of the President's defense slashes that may be robust, but this is the lowest amount requested since fiscal year 1985, which was the very first year that we started the SDI program, that is, the missile defense program. Mr. Speaker, regarding national missile defense, the President asked for around $500 million. That is $371 million for the ballistic missile defense office and $120 million for the Brilliant Eyes program in the Air Force, about $500 million. That amounts to about an 80 percent cut over what President Bush recommended in spending on missile defense, because President Bush recommended spending about $3 billion, so President Clinton has cut this program by four-fifths, even though his intelligence agencies tell him we live in an age of missiles. You had better be able to shoot missiles down, not only coming into your theaters, but coming in by accidental or designed launch by Third World adversaries into your population centers. At some point these nations are going to have the capability of delivering ICBM's into the United States, and several adversaries besides the remnants of the former Soviet Union have some ICBS's right now. China, for example, has ICBM's right now. North Korea is working at a feverish pace to develop ICBM's. Mr. Speaker, a lot of people say wait a minute, we don't have to have these theater defenses or these national defenses yet, because Korea doesn't yet have a missile that can reach the United States. The point is, it takes us a while to build these defenses. You want to make sure that the missile system you are going to send up to shoot down the incoming ballistic missile is ready for deployment before the ballistic missile that is going to come into the United States is ready for deployment. The point is, it takes us about 10 years to build these systems, so it does not make sense to not get started. defense system, and he recommended spending this year $3 billion. President Clinton has cut that by four-fifths, by 80 percent. Those are real facts. Mr. Speaker, regarding theater missile defense, this President requests approximately $2 billion. That represents a cut of $800 million from the spending level that was recommended by President Bush. Again, he recommends only $30 million for what is known as the Navy Upper Tier Program. That is this very effective, high altitude program that can be used to defend Americans by using Navy ships with their standard missile tubes and with their existing radar. You turn that into an SDI system, and you shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. That is a very promising system. When the President did his own bottom-up review, his experts, his reviewers, said ``We should move toward this Navy Upper Tier Program. It is an important program for acquisition.'' They called it at one point a core program, an important program, and he has killed it, because the $30 million that he has allowed for the Navy theater missile defense system is only about enough money to close up the shop. It is about enough money to close the doors, pay off the contractors who have existing contracts, and forget that system. Why is the President abandoning the defense of our troop concentrations around the world? Because that is exactly what you are doing when you give up one of your most promising technologies. Mr. Speaker, one other thing the President is doing that is very disturbing is this. Right now the ABM treaty does not limit the production of American theater missile defense systems. Yet, his negotiating team is now working with members of the former Soviet Union to limit the theater defense systems that we can set up around the world to protect our troops. That does not make a lot of sense. I can simply say that, without naming names, that I have talked with a number of our military experts, people in the service and out of the service, who are very, very worried that this President, in his haste to make deals, is making a deal that we are going to regret because it is going to stop programs cold that could have defended Americans in time of war. Therefore, the President should review this Navy Upper Tier Program which he himself, which his own analysts have said is a very, very important program. Mr. Speaker, finally, when the President did this bottom-up review program, he went through all the requirements, or his experts went through all the requirements of things we would need for a strong defense establishment in the coming year. One aspect of that review covered ammunition. Ammunition is kind of important. You need ammunition in time of war, and you need lots of it, because you have to sustain your troops. A three-month or a six-month or a nine-month war is a lot different from a two-week war, and you expend ammunition sometimes very quickly. According to the Army's own study, the amount of money that this President is going to spend on ammunition is about 50 percent of what we need. According to the Army's own study, we are seeing the collapse of about 80 percent of our industrial base that makes ammunition. Now, doggone it, you have to have ammunition in time of war. The fact that you have got smart, sharp, well-trained troops doesn't mean anything if their guns are empty. And yet this budget that was presented today by Secretary Perry gives us about half the level of ammunition that the Army's open study says we will need in times of war. That is the President's open review, this so-called Bottom-Up Review board. So in this very important area of sustainability, the President is deficient, and his Secretary of Defense, while he is an excellent manager and he has taken this little shrinking pot of money that the President has given him and he has tried to manage that reduced amount of money as effectively as he can, he is giving up American capability. You have to have capability to keep your troops, to have quality of life, to equip them well. That means have modern equipment. We are not giving them modern equipment, because we are putting off modernization of Army and Air Force and naval systems. You have to be able to lift them. That means you have to be able to carry them into a theater in times of combat with either ships or aircraft and you have to be able to sustain them until they win the war for you, and that means they have to have lots of ammunition. They have to have stand off missile systems like the ones that the President is canceling to keep your pilots from being at risk. You have to have fairly modern aircraft so that they do not break down on you when you need them the most; you do not have to retire them off the carriers leaving gaps in those carriers. And this President, on the whole, is failing to provide that capability, and in doing so, he is doing a disservice to the American people who look to Congress to provide for the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps to protect this Nation. But he is also doing a disservice to the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, because ultimately in a conflict, their ability to stay alive and come home, as the vast majority did in Desert Storm, is a function of our modernization, our sustainability, our readiness, our airlift, and our national will. I would look to this Congress, and especially look to the Republican leadership in this Congress, to restore some of the cuts that this President has made in a prudent manner so that in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and into the next century we remain by far the superior force on the face of the Earth.

Mr. HUNTER. I thing the description of the expenditures that were made by the National Endowment for the Arts service people if they knew that that was keeping them from having a higher quality of life. Let me just say, this Secretary, Secretary Perry, gave a very even and I thought a very smooth press conference. I like Secretary Perry. I think he is a fine gentleman. He gave, he has given a series of briefings about the defense budget and said we are ready, our readiness levels are good and I am good to spend, he said, and I am quoting him, ``I am going to spend enough money to provide for quality of life for our armed services families.'' What the Secretary did not say was that he is providing this new quality of life because Republicans have rolled the administration in past years. Last year, when President Clinton did not provide a pay increase for military families, the Republicans saw to it that he did. So this year the President is anticipating that and they are going to provide a pay increase for military personnel. But they are going to do that by taking out these very important modernization programs which could save the lives of those young people in battle. So they are serving them in one way, they are disserving them in another way. But let me tell the gentleman that the cavalry is here. The Republican Contract With America, which was successfully passed out of the Committee on Armed Services with a good bipartisan vote, and I might compliment the Democrats on that committee who really have the interest of the country at heart, because we passed it with the vote of a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans, but that H.R. 7, the National Security Act, that legislation provides for something that is very critical to the United States. It says that the United States shall deploy at earliest opportunity theater missile defense systems to stop those ballistic missiles from coming into our troop concentrations where they exist around the world. It also says that we shall deploy missile defense systems against ICBM's that may come in and strike portions of the United States. Now we are doing this because we have listened to all of our intelligence agencies, we listened to CIA director James Woolsey, who talked about the growing ICBM threat and missile threat. We live in an age of missiles. One thing that was not lost on all these Third World countries, including countries like Korea and China, was that with all of our superior military capability in Desert Storm, the one place where Saddam Hussein was able to get the attention of the world and make an impression was when he used ballistic missiles against American troop concentrations. So you have the North Koreans building the taepo-dong missiles, some of which, at the end of this century, will begin to acquire the capability to go several thousand miles and to hit American troop concentrations a long ways from Korea, and ultimately hit some of the United States positions in the Pacific, that will be able to threaten our allies. We see North Korea doing that. We see engineers and scientists from the Soviet union being hired by Middle East countries to develop missile systems for them. We see China moving ahead with ballistic missile systems. We have to develop the ability to stop those ballistic missiles. It makes sense-- a lot of Democrats say ``We will stop them in the theater, but we do not want to have a national ballistic missile system.'' We passed out of the Committee on Armed Services, or now the Committee on National Security, H.R. 7, the Republican Contract with America, that said ``We shall deploy a national defense system.'' That means if a missile is launched intentionally or by mistake at the United States, we want the ability to shoot it down before it hits New York or San Diego or Houston or Detroit or any other part of the United States of America. And we are going to be building that missile defense system, even though this President this year has cut national missile defense funding by 80 percent in this budget. I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina.

Mr. HUNTER. It is this year, I would say to my friend, we are going to spend about $257 billion. The President's people made a great thing about the fact that he was adding $2 billion to his glidepath. So it was 255. It is going to 257. And the gentleman is right. That is down almost $40 billion from what it was in 1991. But let me put it another way: If you look at what we spent in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, and really we had the highest spending level in 1985, but if you look at what we spent in 1988, in real dollars, that means not adding inflation or adding inflation each year, in real dollars, and you compare that to what we will spend in 1998, that is 2 years from now on this glidepath that President Clinton has taken us on, the annual budget in 1998 will be $100 billion less than it was 10 years ago. That is the annual budget. So when President Clinton stands up and talks about how he is taking a knife to all these programs across the board, you have to understand that actually almost all of his cuts, real cuts are coming out of national defense.

Mr. HUNTER. Let me give the gentleman the numbers that come right from the Personnel Subcommittee chairman, the gentleman from California, Robert Dornan, who issued this statement today of active duty end strength. It has gone from, the gentleman is right, from an excess of 2 million personnel to about 1,400,000. So it has been cut not quite in half but not too far away. Now, let me just read what the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] has said: ``End strength reductions for this year are slightly accelerated over what DOD projected in last year's budget submission. DOD will end fiscal year 1995 about 2,300 below the end strength authorized by the fiscal year 1995 DOD Authorization Act.'' That means that this glidepath that the President has us on that is going to end up going from 18 Army divisions to 10, from 24 air wings to 13, that we are on that glidepath, we are cutting sharply, but this year's reductions cut even more sharply, 2,300 personnel, more sharply than what we have projected last year. It says that the fiscal year 1996 DOD request projects an end strength loss of 40,790 from fiscal year authorized levels, so that is how fast we are going down. We are going to have 40,000 less people this year than we had last year. That means that we are losing people at a very high rate, at about 1,700 young people a week are being cashiered out of the uniformed service.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman is absolutely right. You know, when young men and women join our service, they do it under an understanding there is some risk involved, and they do it with an understanding their mission will be to engage in conflicts on this Nation's behalf, and win those conflicts. And I think a lot of them do not want to sign up to be peacekeepers, to spend their time away from their families nursemaiding folks in other countries. While Americans do not mind sacrifice, and I think that is the key, and I remember Desert Storm and I am sure the gentleman has not only a lot of active duty people but reserve people who volunteered for Desert Storm because they thought it was worthwhile, I think a lot of those people have second thoughts when they are told that the mission is ``peacekeeping.'' In some cases that means ``nation building,'' trying to impose our structure of government on a country that is very resistive to that imposition. I think that Americans, American troops, have experienced a cut in morale because of this new mission that they see this President giving them. And I think what bothers them most is he is not giving them everything that they need to carry out this tempo of operations. They know that that is making them a little less ready to have to carry out those operations.

Mr. HUNTER. In fact, the gentleman has opened up another area that I think is very important, and that is that we have utilized our Armed Forces, the remaining Armed Forces that we have, as world policemen. And these peacekeeping operations in Haiti, in the Bosnian theater, I think we have carried on now the Bosnian airlift longer than we carried on the Berlin airlift. In Africa and around the world, we are using our military forces, but not so much in sending them out with a military mission to win a war or battle and come back, but as peacekeepers. I think when the final bill is in, we will have spent about $1.7 billion until Haiti just on that peacekeeping operation.What that does to the gentleman's Rangers is it stretches them thin. It keeps your Rangers from spending as much time as they should at home. It also uses up the money that they have for training and for equipment repair and for spare parts and all the things that amount to readiness, it uses that money up. And let me tell you what Secretary Perry has said, to go through this analysis he has been giving for the past several days. He has been saying, you know, we are not going to sacrifice readiness. He was a little embarrassed by the three Army divisions last year to be found to be in less than a complete state of readiness. He said it is true money used for peacekeeping missions comes out of the hide of the military. That means you do not get to train your top gun pilots, go out to the rifle range as much, get those spare parts, so you become less ready because you are using all your money to go off on peacekeeping operations. He said we are going to see to it we do not use up our readiness money this year. What he did not tell you is this: What he did not tell you was he was not going to add that much money, because we are only adding $2 billion this year, and we have a $6 billion shortfall by the President's own estimate of what we would need, the estimate he made last year. So we are still $4 billion short. What Secretary Perry did not tell you is he was going to cancel all these modern weapons and equipment programs to pay for this year's readiness. So what he has been doing, in the old axiom, is robbing Peter to pay Paul. So the problem is we are going to have less modern equipment for these young men and women when they need it.

Mr. HUNTER. I would say, to be fair to the President and the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Bill Perry, the Marine Corps forces have not been reduced. they have only been reduced by a few tens of thousands. They have not been reduced as drastically as the Army has been reduced and as the Air Force has been reduced. I think that that makes a lot of sense. So that is one area where this administration has not reduced drastically. But one thing that this President has done with respect to the marines is run them ragged. And my information is that the marines who came out of the Bosnian theater, who had to come back after 6 months, were given about 12 days of time with their families, and then they went right back into the Haitian theater. That is called stretching people thin. And that is one reason the Commandant of the Corps said at one time he only wanted single people to apply to the Marine Corps, and that is because there are not a lot of wives, except maybe some congressional wives, who will put up with these husbands being gone for such long periods of time.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about something that was important to Ronald Reagan and important to the American people and at the heart, I think, of our success as a Nation during the 1980's and very much at the heart of whether or not we will be successful in the 1990's, and that is national security. Today the President unveiled his defense budget and, Mr. Speaker, to be charitable, it is a budget that slashes national defense. To give you some idea of the magnitude of the cuts that have been made by the Clinton administration, it is important to understand that in 1990, President Bush, then President Bush, got together with the Democrat leadership of this House, and he established a defense line below which we would not cut, and Democrats and Republicans agreed that that was an important line to keep, an important mark to keep if we were to maintain America's interest and maintain the security of our people. Now, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the commencement of the breakup of the Soviet Union and in light of that, in 1992, President Bush got together with his Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, his then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and they put together an other defense budget, and because of the breakdown of the Soviet empire, they decided that they could prudently cut $50 billion over 5 years below the agreement that the President had made with the Democrat leadership in 1990, and they started to engage in those cuts, $50 billion. Well, when President Clinton was elected, he put together a 5-year defense plan cut $127 billion below even the Bush cuts of $50 billion. That means about $177 billion below the agreement that had been made in 1990. I want to talk tonight a little bit about what this installment, this year's installment of the Clinton defense cuts will mean to the armed services of the United States and to the security of the American people. You know, last year the President's people projected what this year's defense budget should be. And what is very interesting, and I heard Secretary Perry give a very well-ordered speech yesterday in description of the defense budget, but it was interesting to see that Secretary Perry and President Clinton have cut $9 billion in new weapons systems, new equipment systems, out of the budget that last year they felt were important systems. And it is also interesting to see that President Clinton understood last year that he was about $6 billion short with respect to this year's defense budget. He knew he would have to get the money somewhere. And yet he only added $2 billion to this year's defense spending, meaning he knew that he was going to be going in the hole about $4 billion. Well, Secretary Perry says, and I am paraphrasing his theme, he says that our country will be ready to fight even with these reduced forces. Let me tell you how low our force structure is going to be under the Clinton defense plan. We are going to go from about 18 active army divisions to 10, almost cut 50 percent in our army divisions. We are going to cut from about 24 fighter air wing equivalents to about 13, and we are almost there. That means we will have to cut from America's air power almost 50 percent.That means we are cashiering young people at a rate in excess of 1,500 young people a week out of the military, and I am reminded of what George Marshall said at the conclusion of World War II when we were demobilizing at such a radical pace, and when he was asked how the demobilization was going, he said, ``This isn't a demobilization, it is a rout,'' and I would assert what we are undertaking right now is not a demobilization, it is not a drawdown, it is not a prudent reduction, it is a rout. President is cutting this year, that last year he said he needed. First, the first item on this list is called the TSSAM, TriService Standoff Attack Missile, and very simply, for those folks that watch CNN and watched our aircraft in Desert Storm approach various strategic institutions of Iraq like bridges and roads, command bunkers, and for those people that watched those precision-guided munitions leave an aircraft some distance from the target and be guided in by a laser spotter or other means, they watched those munitions guided in and hit those targets precisely. I think we all remember when CNN showed the depiction of Iraq's luckiest taxicab driver. He was a guy that got about all the way across that bridge, just barely got across the bridge before a precise munition hit that bridge and destroyed it. Very simply, in these days when the other side, the bad guys, have some missile systems that are very accurate, that is surface-to-air missiles, that can kill your planes, knock down your planes and kill your pilots, you need to have standoff missiles. Those are systems you can launch from many miles away. You can turn the airplane back. You can get the airplane safe, and your missile will follow on. It will hit that bridge. It will hit that antiaircraft position. It will hit that command bunker with precision. We need precision-guided systems. Now, the interesting thing is that after he canceled this new precision-guided system that we desperately need, the President also canceled some other classes. He canceled the air-launched cruise missile, which is a very accurate system and which could have filled in for the standoff missile that he was cancelling. So, he canceled the air-launched cruise missile also. We were going to purchase between 75 and 100 air-launched cruise missiles, and the President canceled that system. Now, with respect to Cobra helicopters, the Cobra is a gun ship. It is one of--in light of the fact that we have not developed a new helicopter lately, we have not moved forth on the Apache program. It is an important helicopter for our ground troops and works in close support with our Army and with our Marine troops in ground assaults. The President canceled nine of those. With respect to the Comanche helicopter, which is a new scout, armed scout, helicopter that the Army says is very important to their mission and that the President's own review, the so-called Bottom-Up Review, said was important to the Army's mission, the President has entered an order of no production. We are going to be building a couple of prototypes, but we are not producing as of now. With respect to the DDG-51 Aegis destroyer, we are coming down from a Naval fleet that was close to 600 ships, between 500 and 600 ships, and we are coming down to less than 375 ships, and the DDG-51 Aegis destroyer is a very important ship because each one of these ships carries what I call a little SDI system. It is a system that allows radar to track a missile that is coming in, or an aircraft that is coming in, and shoot out a standard missile, one of our surface-to-air missiles, ship-to-air missiles, and destroy that incoming missile, and this ship has a potential of being developed as a theater ballistic missile defense system. Now what that means is, for those of us that watched those Scud missiles, which are ballistic missiles, zeroing in on our troop concentrations in Desert Storm, Aegis destroyers off the coast of Iraq, had he had this new theater missile ballistic missile system developed at that time, it could have shot down those missiles in mid-air, much as your Patriot missile systems did with varying results on the ground. So, this is a system--this new ship maintains an air defense system, which could blossom into a theater ballistic missile defense system that will protect American kids, our men and women in uniform who are concentrated in various areas of the world. So, it is a very important system. The President is canceling this new production, this production of a single new ship, in this year's budget. He is also canceling this LPD-17 amphibious transport dock. Now that, according to the bottom-up review, is an important part of our ability to take a beachhead, and the President is going to cancel that. F/A-18 C/D's; those are our new fighter slash attack aircraft that are based on our carriers which are supposed to take over the roles of two aircraft, our F-14's and our A-6 attack aircraft. Now the interesting thing is we actually purchased about 27 fighter aircraft last year in the entire American inventory. That means that the United States of America bought fewer fighter aircraft than the country of Switzerland. Now, just to keep our fleet modern, because we lose a few aircraft all the time, our aircraft are always exercising, they are always training, they are often on deployment. Just to keep the fleet modernized so we do not end up with a bunch of 1965 Chevy aircraft, we have to buy about six times that number of aircraft each year just to keep our fleet modern so the young men and women who are flying those aircraft have a good chance of coming back alive. The President this year is going to buy 12 aircraft. That is less than half of what Switzerland purchased last year. Now with respect to E-2C's, those are the AWACS aircraft that our Navy uses, and those aircraft can detect adversary aircraft. That means that, if we have a ship or a battle group that is off the gulf in the Middle East, and we have aircraft, adversarial aircraft, that are launched by Iraq or Iran, and E-2C aircraft is your early warner. That is the aircraft that has a guidant pod on top of it, a radar system, and it can tell you what is coming in, and when you scramble your own aircraft to meet that threat, it helps direct them in for the kill. We are canceling one of those this year. The Tomahawk missiles I already mentioned; we are canceling 97 of those. Tomahawks are tried and true missile systems, and I cannot give you the absolute number of standoff weapons because that is a classified number, but I can tell you that we are short on standoff weapons. We could expand in a real conflict like a Desert Storm conflict all of our standoff weapons in a fairly short period of time, and it makes no sense, even if you are downsizing people and you are cutting the number of ships and the number of aircraft you have, it makes no sense to cancel your standoff weapon systems and cut down those numbers. Those are bullets in your gun, and just because we have enough troops and have enough bullets right now to go out and engage in a very fast firefight, you also have to have sustainability. That means the ability to fight for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months, and that means you have to have a big enough stockpile of ammunition and missiles to do that job.And finally we have the Trident II D-5 missiles. That is considered to be very important part of the remaining part of our nuclear deterrent. Those are nuclear missiles, strategic missiles that are mounted on our submarines, and while we are cutting out almost all of our land-based missiles, we are alshing our bomber force, we are relying more and more on our submarines, and yet the President is cancelling this most modern program in our strategic submarine-launched ballistic missiles. So this President interestingly is not just cutting $127 billion below what George Bush thought was prudent. He is cancelling his own systems. He is cancelling systems that he said last year we would need and that his own experts said we would need, and I see the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] has risen. I yield to my friend.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman from Georgia is absolutely right. We have, as I recall in this city, in Washington, DC, we have what I guess military would call headquarters personnel, because all of the agencies do not carry out functions in this city but they have their headquarters people here who issue orders and demand reports that come in from all over the Nation. So we have all these agencies like Agriculture and all the rest of them, HUD and many others, headquartered here in Washington. So I guess our line troops would refer to these as headquarters staff, and we have over 450,000 headquarters personnel in the social agencies right here in Washington, DC.Mr. KINGSTON. It is interesting, everybody does like to jump on the Pentagon, wasteful spending and talk about the $400 toilet seat and $200 hammer and so forth. We want to know about these things. We want to ferret it out. We think that is what the mission is about, defense of the country, survival of the country, and protecting your son or your daughter who may need to have the most high-technology airplane or tank or ship or whatever. Here is something that we spent, as taxpayers, your taxpayers in California and mine in Georgia, $30,000 on this poem. I am going to read this to you. Suddenly, masked hombres seized Petunia pig and made her into a sort of dense Jello. Somehow the texture, out of nowhere, produces a species of Atavistic anomie, a melancholy memory of good food. It was written by Jack Collom of Boulder, CO. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded $30,000 for that poem. And yet we are telling our American service personnel that they cannot get a raise. We are rolling the COLA's of veterans so that they cannot get what we contractually obligated to them. I have met in Hinesville, GA, service personnel who can qualify for food stamps and other public assistance benefits. Some of them are taking them, some are not. But it is very hard to tell somebody who is on his way to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, wherever, we have got $30,000 for poems like this and your tax dollars are paying for it. I think one of the things that we are about in this Congress right now is to go back and try to find things like this so that we can spend our dollars smarter, cut where we need to. But where we are going to spend, let us spend it appropriately.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Let me just say I hope the gentleman from Missouri writes a book. And I think as one Member when he writes it I am going to purchase that book and read it, and I will ask the gentleman from California to yield to him.

Mr. HUNTER. Let me just say to my friends almost every book that is published by a major figure is published through a major publishing house.

Mr. HUNTER. I will. Just finishing my thought, I thank my friend for yielding.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I just want to say that I stayed on the floor because I really appreciate the words of the gentleman and the wisdom of the gentleman, my great friend from California. This is a house of mechanics, word mechanics. That is what legislation is. There is probably no one more proficient in reminding us that we are not just mechanics, but we are holders and transferrers, if you will, of values, the values of our constituents. And in this area, this area of pro-life, there is a great, great need for people who have voices as articulate as the gentleman who is speaking right now, the best speaker in the House of Representatives. I want to thank the gentleman. I have to go back to our beloved State of California, but I want to thank the gentleman for all the time he has taken over many, many years in talking about this issue. I am also reminded when he put 40 hours in an airplane going to Somalia and back to give a full report to every family member who had a beloved one who had been killed in Mogadishu, and performed such a wonderful service in doing that. I have to take off, but your words are very eloquent today. I hope that Americans listen.

Mr. HUNTER. Most books that are published by a major publishing house are published with a book advance. I understand there is not going to be any advance. Most of them are published with an advance. I would say the gentleman is stating we should presume that there may be a problem because there may have been influence wielded because a Member of the House leadership has followed the American tradition of writing a book and publishing it with a publishing house, a fairly large well-known publishing house in the United States, somehow has something wrong with it, so that we should go out with absolutely no evidence of any impropriety and investigate that because someone is going to write a book. Now I would say that the one thing that we deal with, our tools that we use in this business are words, written words and spoken words. There is nothing more natural for a public figure whether he is Democrat or Republican than to write a book. And so the idea that the gentleman has now established a new presumption of guilt for people whose stock in trade is words, that when they put these words into books and sell them to the public the relationships that they have with publishers have to be examined I think does a disservice to this House and to all public figures who would write. I want to give that person on the street a chance to buy that book, and if he pays $4 out of the $20 cost of that book to the person would wrote it, if that is the Speaker of the House, then I think that is not influence. remembering thomas: guilt, responsibil- ity, and the child who never was

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. I am happy to yield to my friend, the gentleman from California.

Mr. HUNTER. I am going to return his book. I have one of his MacArthur books that I promised to return for several years, and I promise, once again, that I will return that book soon.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Missouri, in just a second. Let me just say with respect to remuneration, in terms of what you can do to make money in this world, there is probably nothing more democratic, nothing more open, nothing more populist than to make your words available to millions of people, and if a person wants to buy your book, he pays through the book-purchasing process $5 or $6 to the author, and there is nothing that is less of a special interest than an average American purchasing a book to read because he wants to see someone's ideas. And I think it does a disservice to the House, and I will tell the gentleman that he is going to have leaders on his side of the aisle who want to share their ideas with the world.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I would hope that the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Volkmer] would listen to my response to his special order a few minutes ago with respect to the Speaker of the House and the Speaker's intent to write a book. I think the gentleman from Missouri, in continuing to raise accusations, clouds over the Speaker, because of the fact that he is preparing to write a book and publish that book, does a disservice to this House, and I think a disservice to the tradition that we want to have leaders in this Nation who not only have ideas and thoughts and wisdom and insight but also express those ideas and those thoughts and that wisdom and insight in books and make them available for the American people and for the people of the world. I thought, as I walked down here, when I listened to the gentleman complain bitterly that the Speaker of the House might write a book, I thought about the great leaders in the West who have written books, and I thought about Winston Churchill, who wrote ``The History of the English-Speaking Peoples,'' written when he was in office and who wrote following World War II ``The History of World War II,'' a multivolume book, that has been the source of wisdom for many of those who came after him, and I thought of our great President, Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote many books, who wrote ``The Winning of the West'', ``Trails of a Ranch Man'', ``The Naval War of 1812'', ``Through the Brazilian Wilderness'', ``The Strenuous Life'', ``The Rough Riders'', who was a prolific writer and, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, of all of the, and I disagreed with the Speaker the other night when he said that Franklin Roosevelt may have been the biggest figure on the political stage in this century, the biggest political figure. I think the other Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, was the biggest political figure of this century, and Teddy Roosevelt left his energy and left his imprint on succeeding generations up to and including this generation of political leaders, because he wrote. He wrote, and he made his words available to the American people. He made his words available to Europeans and to Asians and to people around the world. I think in many ways Teddy Roosevelt's words and his books were such ambassadors of what this country is all about, as his speeches and his career. Missouri, this Member, speaking for himself, says this: I want to have leaders who write books. I would like to see leaders on the Democratic side of the aisle write books. I think that whether you agree with it or do not agree with it, Vice President Gore's book that he wrote and received remuneration for provoked thought, provoked response, across the political spectrum, and for that reason was a very useful instrument in ginning up this mill of debate of the national forum.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I and a lot of other members of the Committee or Armed Services have been looking forward to listening to the gentleman from Maine talk about national defense because he has a special background of expertise, having been a Marine, having worked in Iraq during the post-Desert Storm period. He understands operational requirements and problems, he understand systems and he understands people, especially the people of the U.S. military. I look forward to listening to him tonight. I might just say with respect to the dollars that are spent on national security, I saw an interesting fact when looking over the defense budgets that this House and the other body and the President have passed over the last 10 years or so. If you take President Clinton's defense plan and look at the 1998 projection and you compare that to the 1988 defense budget, the annual budget, and you compare them in real dollars; that is, in 1987 hard dollars, so you discount inflation, the national defense budget of this country, the annual budget in 1998 will be $100 billion less than the budget was in 1988. So it is clear that this President has taken most of the budget cuts from national security. I know the gentleman is a historian of sorts, that he has looked at military history and understands that after every conflict in recent times, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and finally the closure of the Cold War, we have cut deeper and in worse ways than we should have. We have cut the wrong systems in many cases, and we have cut too deep and too soon. I am reminded of General Marshall's words after World War II when he was asked how the demobilization was going. He said this is not a demobilization, this is a rout. A few years later in Korea we were unable to stop a third rate military from marching right down the peninsula. So I look forward to the gentleman's words. I think they come at a very important time in our history.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will continue to yield, the base closing process, to answer the gentleman, was supposed to be a process in which we cut military infrastructure. By cutting down the overhead in the rear, just like a business, if you have a lot of people out there making products and you have a lot of people in the back offices who are executives, if you close down some of your overhead, that is all the white collar workers, then you become more efficient and you are able to make more products for the amount of money invested. The idea with our base closure was, in pulling down this massive force structure that won the cold war for us and won Desert Storm for us, by reducing divisions from 18 to 10, by reducing our fighter air wings from 24 to 14, and on down the line, that what we needed to do at the same time was reduce a lot of these bases in the United States because we did not need all that overhead, just like a company does not need a lot of overhead if it reduces its operations. That is true in many cases. We had bases in this country that were designed to hold off attacks from the Apache Indians. Those bases just managed to stay around because, even after peace was entered into between native Americans and our Federal Government, there was a good old Congressman there who wanted to keep that bastion of Federal soldiers with that payroll in his district, so we did have bases that did not perform a strong military mission. We did need to close those. However, what we have done now is we have gone beyond closing those bases that are truly useless. We have started closing bases which have a real military requirement, but beyond that, we are not closing the bases effectively. What has happened is that in closing bases, we have bought ourselves massive environmental problems and massive environmental costs, and we now see that it is costing us a ton of money to close the bases, much more than we ever anticipated. What that means is like an uncle who has a string of condominiums. He just wants to give them away to his nephews, but his nephews tell him, ``Uncle, before you give those condominiums to us, free of charge,'' like we want to give a lot of our bases away to States and counties and cities, ``we want to charge you $1 million apiece to clean them up.'' So we are spending a lot of our military money paying lawyers who are involved in lawsuits and administration of environmental laws with respect to our bases. We are not moving a lot of dirt, we are not really doing a lot of real substantial cleanup work. We are basically paying now a massive bureaucracy which shoves paper back and forth to its various members and gets paid for it, and at the same time keeps the bases from totally closing, and all that money comes out of the military budget. I would say to the gentleman now that instead of spending as much money as we should on fuel, on flying time, on steaming time, on ammunition, we are now spending an extraordinary amount of money with lawyers and environmental regulators in the base closure business, so we have become ensnarled in a massive bureaucracy. We are going to have to cut off some of those environmental costs. I think we are going to have to defer them to a later time and simply, in some cases, put a padlock on those bases that we have closed, but stop spending our readiness money that keeps our troops ready to fight. Does that answer the gentleman's questions?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to tell the gentleman that when you are forced to use your money for the peacekeeping operations, if that is what the gentleman is talking about, these new missions the President gives Bosnia, my understanding is they were given 12 days with their families after being away for many months, and sent immediately into the Haiti theater. When that happens, and when the military has to use its money for operations, that means that they have to stop training exercises in many cases. That is why three Army divisions, three of our top Army divisions, were given C ratings that were less than combat ready. That means that they do not have enough money for training. That means that they do not have ammunition for training, perhaps. That means that their equipment is not kept up to speed. Last year we did about 64 percent of what we required in terms of depot-level maintenance. That means our big equipment that we needed to take into the shop and get fixed so we could take it out on the next operation, we only did about 64 percent of what we had to do. That means that some equipment was 64 percent ready, and that means, in shorthand, if you had 100 tanks, you fixed 64 of them, not 100 of them. What it does is make our military less ready to be able to respond to a national emergency. That is bad. Does that answer the gentleman's question?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to mention one other thing that the Republican leadership placed in this National Security Revitalization Act, H.R. 7, that is related to the safety of the American people. We stated in this act that we shall deploy national ballistic missile defense systems and theater missile defense systems. We live in an age of missiles. Dozens of countries now are developing ballistic missiles. We cannot avoid that, we cannot deny it. We cannot say, ``That is war in the heavens, and we are not going to participate,'' because those missiles go up into the sky but they come down and they land in cities, they land on military bases, they land in the theaters where our young people in uniform serve. We live in an age of missiles. We have to realize that, just like our forebears learned at the start of the century that we had entered the age of machineguns and we had entered the age of tanks and armor, and we had to adapt to that. We still had a few old generals who wanted to keep the cavalry because they loved the cavalry. We had cavalry training operations up into the 1930's. Some of them said, ``Boys, we just want to get faster horses, that is the answer.'' But that was not the answer. The Democrat leadership has been reluctant to acknowledge that we live in an age of missiles. I will never forget watching Walter Mondale standing at the Democrat Presidential nomination convention in San Francisco and saying of the Republican idea of defending ourselves against incoming nuclear missiles, ``That is war in the heavens, and I will never participate in that.'' I cannot help but think, because Mr. Mondale is a fine gentleman, that if he was watching CNN and watched American Patriot missiles shooting down incoming Scud ballistic missiles--that is a slow ballistic missile, but a ballistic missile nonetheless, made by the Soviet Union--I am sure that when Mr. Mondale saw that incoming Scud coming into an American troop concentration, young men and women from the United States stationed in Saudi Arabia, and he saw a Patriot missile shoot up just like a bullet hitting a bullet and destroying that Scud, I am sure Walter Mondale, who said ``I will never participate in war in the heavens,'' probably said ``Thank heavens.'' On that line, we now have to come together, Democrat and Republican, and concede that we live in an age of missiles and we have to do two things. We are going to have to have a capability of shooting down Scud missiles, the new missiles that North Korea is building and proliferating in the Middle East, Soviet missiles that are being sold by out-of-work generals in the former Soviet Union to Middle Eastern clients, to terrorist nations, and we have to have the ability to shoot those missiles down when they come into our troop concentrations in the Middle East or elsewhere. Those are called theater ballistic missiles. They are kind of like the Models T's of missiles. They crank along a little bit slower than ICBM's. Second, we have to be able to shoot down ICBM's, because other nations than the former Soviet Union are making ICBM's. Red China is making ICBM's. Those are missiles that can Korea is making ICBM's. They are trying to develop ICBM's that will be able to reach initially at least Alaska and later on other parts of the United States. So we have to have a system that can deter, can beat, just like that Patriot missile going up and shooting down that Model T ballistic missile, the Scud, we have to have a system that can go up and shoot down one of those Cadillac ICBM's made by the former Soviet Union, made by red China, made by North Korea. And as our intelligence leaders have told you, the people we pay in our intelligence agencies, all of these nations, some of them led by very unstable leaders who want to get a piece of the action, who want to be superpowers, who want to have leverage in world affairs, are using as their weapon of choice, they envision their weapon of choice to be the intercontinental ballistic missile. So we have to embark on a program to develop a national missile defense and a theater missile defense and this H.R. 7, the National Security Revitalization Act that was passed by the House Committee on Armed Services, and I probably say, passed by about 40 some votes to 18, I think, Democrats and Republicans passed this act. This act says it shall be the policy of the United States to develop and deploy a national missile defense and a theater missile defense. That is the first time a body in either House has made such a strong commitment. I am proud of my colleagues who joined with us, myself, the gentleman from Maine; our great chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, Floyd Spence, who led that bill through the markup process. I am glad so many Members of the other side of the aisle joined with us to see to it that American is well-defended. You cannot defend America if you do not defend against missiles.

Mr. HUNTER. Would the gentleman continue to yield, Mr. Speaker,?