Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me just say a couple of things here. First, the devil is in the details. Mr. Milosevic has burned every village in Kosovo, or almost every village, and the simple fact is that he is now going to stop burning, now that there is nothing left, is not necessarily a victory. I have two staff members who, as volunteers, have delivered some 20,000 packages of food and medicine to the refugee camps. They report to me that massive numbers of men are missing. By British estimate, I believe it is, 100,000 men from the Kosovar peasant population. We need to know what has happened to those men. Have they been executed? Are there mass graves? Are they in the custody of Serbs? So the Serbs are moving back, in theory, or moving back into Serbia, but many questions remain. But a very important thing has happened here, Mr. Chairman. The ranking member has informed me that the President has called just a few minutes ago and said, in response to our concerns, that he is not going to spend any readiness money on reconstruction or on peacekeeping operations, but that he will come to us with a supplemental appropriations request. Mr. Chairman, I yield, and I would like the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) to make that clear.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I will work with the gentleman over the next couple of weeks, and I hope all the other leaders and Members who have spoken on the Democrat side will use their influence to get this funding executed.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I think that makes very, very clear the point of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence), which was that the President had put nothing for peacekeeping in this defense bill. So the logical deduction was that any peacekeeping, absent a supplemental, had to come out of ammunition, had to come out of readiness; and that is something that would have disserved the country. I appreciate the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) for explaining the President's recent statement.

Mr. HUNTER. Will the gentleman make a pitch to the President to do that?

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to ask the esteemed ranking member and anybody else who wants to speak on this, we have heard a number of statements about how much you love the troops. I do not have any influence with the President. The President is sending budgets down that do not pay for ammunition, do not give adequate pay to our troops, keep them on food stamps, do not give them spare parts and do not give them planes new enough to avoid a 55 crash a year crash rate. We all know what we are trying to do. We are trying to keep our money in the ammunition coffers so we do not spend that on other things and have empty ammunition coffers when the next war comes around. I want to ask the gentleman, will the gentleman work to get the $13 billion ammunition shortage plussed up to where it is at parity with what we need to fight the two wars?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, let me respond briefly to my friend from Missouri with respect to depriving us of what he calls victory in this war. The war that I am concerned about, Mr. Chairman, is the next war, and I am concerned about the stocks of ammunition that are now very low. I am also concerned about those young men and women who have served us so well in the air war that has taken place over the last 78 days or so. The best way we can serve those men and women in uniform is to see to it that we get a large number of them off food stamps. I am talking about the 10,000 military families that currently are on food stamps. Another way we can serve them is to see to it that we have the spare parts to get our mission capability rates up above 70 percent and to get that crash rate which last year was 55 aircraft crashing resulting in 55 deaths during peacetime operations down to a lower level, if not an acceptable level. All of that is going to take money. Mr. Chairman, this war will be a disaster if we pay for it out of the moneys that would have gone to increase our munitions back to the two- war requirement, that would have gone to raise the pay of our military people up to the level where they can make more than the food stamp rate, if the money is taken out of the spare parts coffers where it has been taken in the past to leave 40 percent of our aircraft grounded because they are not mission capable. I just say to my friend from Missouri, let us not pull money out of operations in this new euphoria that he thinks we should be engaged in, out of operations and out of the spare parts supplies and out of the ammunition coffers and out of the personnel benefit coffers. Otherwise, the next war will be a disaster for us. I hope that he will work with me to see to it that money is not taken out of the defense budget for Kosovo.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. HUNTER. No, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HUNTER. No, Mr. Chairman; I would be happy to have the other side proceed. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the 30 seconds remaining. Let me just put the playing ground where it is right now. At this point, we have in this bill a provision that makes the President come to the Congress for a supplemental instead of taking Kosovo money out of ammunition accounts, out of spare parts accounts. The gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) has advised us that the President has now made that commitment to us. I think that is something that the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) and the chairman should take up shortly and discuss.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his expression of concern and for his leadership in this area. In discussing the chemical agents and munitions weapons destruction program, the committee report notes and has emphasized the increasing practice of meaningful involvement by State and local jurisdictions in the development of programmatic and policy decisions that are specific to their local stockpile storage sites. We will work with the gentleman in this area.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me just say to my colleague, as a Member who did vote to support the air operation, and who has a number of members of my staff working as volunteers to try to help the people who have been oppressed, who have been moved out of Kosovo, that we are not home free; that this is a very, very difficult situation; that it can be argued very strongly that Mr. Milosevic has accomplished most of his foreign policy goals, if in fact those goals were to destroy the homes and the livelihoods of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Very clearly, that has been almost entirely accomplished. I have not gotten the latest reports, but my understanding is that most of the villages, and which a substantial majority of Kosovo is ethnic Albanian, have in fact been burned. There are not many villages, if any, left to burn. Now, my friend talked about the troops and about the wonderful performance of our men and women in this air war. Let me just reiterate this point, because I do not think it can be reiterated enough. I do not think many of those folks watch us on television, and I do not think many of them read the Congressional Record. I think the place where they see the manifestation of our support or lack of support is in several ways: One, when they sit at the breakfast table with their wives and their children and they look at their paycheck and they notice that their paycheck is now 13 percent on the average less than the paycheck on the outside. That means if they are an electronics technician in the Navy that they are making 13 percent less than if they were working in the private sector. I think that says something to them about how important they are to us. Secondly, when they go out on operations and they discover that they do not have the right type of preferred ammunition, and in some cases they know the ammunition stocks are almost gone, that says something to them about their prioritization within this House of Representatives. And lastly, when they have to climb into that piece of equipment, whether it is the B-52 bomber that the Clinton administration now says we will fly until they are 80 years old, instead of new equipment, instead of a B-2, for example, or even a B-1, that says something to them also. I think whether a person works for a trucking company or whether they work for the U.S. Air Force, the age of the equipment that person is supplied with to work with has a large effect on their morale. Now, we all know now that this budget that the President submitted for this year did not put a dime in for the Kosovo operation, so that led us to the inescapable conclusion that if the President was going to start a peacekeeping operation, he was going to start doing what he has done in the past, which is dipping into the cash register and taking ammunition money and taking pay money and taking readiness money out of that cash register to pay for an ongoing operation. We want to make sure that does not happen. And I think the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) wants to make sure that does not happen also. So let me say a couple of things. First, the devil is in the detail with respect to the Kosovo operation. I want to know what has happened to the 100,000 men, and I believe that is the British estimate of men who are missing from their family groups. And my own staff stood there at the Albanian border and watched thousands of women and children come across with no men, and almost all those families had stories of the men being separated and taken off to an undisclosed destination by Serbian troops. What has happened to those people? Have they been taken up into Serbia? Are they at camps? Have they been executed? Secondly, what is left of the infrastructure inside Kosovo with respect to its ability to accommodate anybody, now that Mr. Milosevic has burned most of those villages? Is there anything left for them to go back to? We need to look at that very closely. Lastly, I think we need to look at the European Community and make sure that the European Community, which has budget problems just like this community has, the American community, is not looking at a way to make the Americans pay for the majority of the restoration of Kosovo. Because very clearly we have paid for the majority of the air campaign and we know it is very important for our allies to participate in this.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Davis) had to leave, but he was concerned about the multipurpose processor program, a program that was developed in his district in one of the premier high-tech companies in the country, which is located in Northern Virginia, that has reinstated to a large degree the superiority of American submarines, giving us some 200 times the capability we had in the past with about one-tenth of the cost. It has really been a great breakthrough. The committee likes this program. We want to apologize to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Davis) and to the Navy because due to a technical error, the program fell out of our budget. The other body does have it in their budget. And so, when we go into conference, we are going to make sure that we work to restore that. It is an outstanding program. It provides enormous leverage for the U.S., and we will work during the conference to restore it.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield further, yes. And I want to thank both gentlemen from California for their interest in this important discussion. It is my understanding the Secretary is currently exploring all options to modernize our air mobility forces, including the need to acquire additional C-17s. With respect to selling some of these to our allies, often the answer given to us by them when we ask for their support in operations like the air campaign that is currently being undertaken where we are doing the lion's share of the work and paying the lion's share, that often the answer to us is that we have the resources, we have the aircraft. And if we can sell some of these C-17s to our allies, with that, along with the possession of high-capability aircraft, will go the responsibility to use them in joint operations and take some of the burden off American forces. I think that is a good thing.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I want to thank my good friend from California, who happens to have the March Air Reserve Base in his district, I want to thank him for involving me in this important discussion of the future air mobility needs of our military. I also agree with him that the C-17 is a very vital tool for our Nation's air mobility needs. In fact, it has performed beyond the high expectations of the committee and the Department of Defense. With our increased reliance on Reserve components, coupled with technological advancements, we will become further reliant on flexible, multipurpose aircraft, such as the C-17.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, of course, this is a conversation, too, that I know the chairman of the full committee is very interested in; he is a very important part of this, and I appreciate this opportunity to respond to this inquiry. As many Members with Reserve components in their district know, such as the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert) with March Air Reserve Base, the Nation's Reserve components currently play a very key role in our Nation's air mobility capacity. We could not be involved in the air campaign right now without that Reserve component. As has been displayed in this recent conflict, the Reserve units are being heavily utilized both in air mobility and other key areas. I believe that this trend of relying on Reserve components will only continue to increase. But we should ensure that these units are outfitted with the most technologically advanced resources available. And once again, the C-17 has done a great job.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I know the gentlemen from California, Mr. Calvert and Mr. Horn, want to engage me in a colloquy.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working with the gentleman on this matter.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to assure the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Stump) that the purpose of section 151 is not to delay the acquisition of needed communications or to impose new and unnecessary regulations. Our military forces rely very heavily on GPS signals for navigation, precision munitions, and other purposes. This section is intended to assure that communication systems using the spectrum close to that used by GPS do not interfere with GPS receivers.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence).

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I offer a motion.