Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, does this side have an additional 5 minutes as a result of the request of the gentleman?

Mr. HUNTER. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I think the gentleman saw the results of the amendment that was just offered and saw the number of folks on both sides of the aisle who opposed the support of that amendment. I think that sends a message. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, I would simply like to ask the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) to explain his modification. I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) for that purpose.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, let me take back my time for just a minute. I appreciate the gentleman's intent, he is my good friend from Missouri, but the President committing to do it is another step that goes beyond the gentleman's intent. If the gentleman from Missouri had his way, we would be spending an additional $20 billion in defense this year. If I had my way, and I think if most people on my side of the aisle had our way, we would be spending an additional $20 billion in defense this year. The commitment from the President to come with a supplemental is, I think, a very important thing. And I understand the gentleman now has a letter from the President that assures that?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend for having yielded this time to me. And he has pointed out, pointed to the language in his bill that the bill refers to 2000 money, and that would not necessarily keep the President from spending dollars that are presently in the 1999 accounts; and so I want to apologize to the gentleman for misconstruing his amendment and saying that it would immediately paralyze all air operations. It would not stop for 4 months. I still oppose the gentleman's amendment, but I do want to let him know that that statement was in error.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), the distinguished Navy ace.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman and I also want to compliment the gentleman for his laying out of the goals that the United States as well as other western nations must be interested in. Mr. Chairman, I would ask how much time we have remaining?

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

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. The answer to that is I would say to my colleague that giving polygraph tests is a science that has been built up over the years. The Department of Energy, because this is such an important area, and the gentleman from Indiana has mentioned this, we have had actual failures of polygraph in the past who register a positive when in fact it should have, but because this is such a critical area, I think we can expect the Secretary of Energy to adopt, A, the highest standards, and, B, use the best trained professionals to do this, because this is so serious. And I think we should ensure that that occurs, but I think we can.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. HUNTER. I know the B-2 did very well in Kosovo. Let me say why the Ryun amendment makes a lot of sense. It is for this reason. I understand under both provisions we establish a counterintelligence office. That is, of course, a must. It is a mandate. But the issue should go beyond how we establish the counterintelligence operation. It should also include the issue of this: Does it make sense for us to have visitors and to allow Algeria, Cuba, and I am looking at the GAO report on foreign visitation to our nuclear weapons complex, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and China in our nuclear laboratories at all? What advancement is Cuba giving us to our nuclear weapons program? What is the reasoning whereby we feel that we need to make, and I have added them up here, six visits by the states of Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and China to our nuclear weapons laboratories? I think, and I say to my friend in all sincerity, I think we have missed part of the debate. I think when we do counterintelligence background checks on people from Iraq, you know what our counterintelligence people are going to give us on these particular agents and scientists? They are going to give us blank pieces of paper, because it is very difficult for us to get background information on those folks. Now, I do not think that people from those states and many of the other controlled access states have anything to give to our nuclear weapons complex that helps us either build nuclear weapons or do stockpile stewardship on nuclear weapons, which is our primary purpose. I would simply say this to my friend: The Secretary of Energy can execute waivers, but this is all about accountability. Under both provisions, the Ryun amendment and the base bill, the Secretary of Energy can execute waivers. I think if you look at this list of people from controlled countries that had no business being at our national labs, and you see the percentage of people that, in the cases of Iran and Iraq who were even given background checks, and it is down to 10 and 20 percent of people from Iraq were given background checks to come into our nuclear weapons complex, I think it is appropriate for us to say to the Secretary of Energy, listen, for the next two years, you can have people come in, and if it is the Nunn-Lugar program that affects the Soviet Union, if it is one of our missile control regimes, if it is a fissile material control regime, all you have to do is sign a piece of paper and you bring those scientists in. But we want you to look at these applicants for admission to our national weapons complex. The Ryun amendment does that. I think, in light of that, the two-year moratorium makes a lot of sense. These people have not been paying attention. I think the gentleman would agree with me, when you let people come in from Algeria, Cuba, Iran and Iraq, and they are supposed to be contributing to our nuclear weapons development or stockpile stewardship, it makes us realize the leadership in DOE has not been reflecting on these admissions. We want to make them reflect. Lastly, I would say what Leo Thorsen has said, the great Medal of Honor winner. He said in areas of national security, he said, go with strength. Go the extra mile. We are going the extra mile with the Ryun amendment.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This amendment expands and I think makes somewhat more concise the polygraph provision in the umbrella Cox-Dicks amendment that was just passed. We are all concerned obviously with the losses that have been categorized before us throughout the media, that have been the subject of this major piece of legislation, and one answer to that, of course, is to do more polygraphs, do them on a regular basis. In looking at the language that was proposed by the special committee, that language directs itself to what are known as special access programs. What my amendment does is expand that to include people who have access to nuclear weapons design, which is the very subject of the technology that was stolen, and fissile material, that is nuclear weapons material. So people who have access in those very important areas are similarly subjected to polygraphs. The other aspect of our amendment is that the amendment also designates that these polygraphs should be given every 5 years, no less than every 5 years, which we think is a reasonable rate. That is the difference. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman, and let me just respond that I will work also to see that we have uniformity. I think that is a key. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. HUNTER. Of course, there is a certain discipline and a certain structure to polygraphs that are directed to people who have access to highly secret material. And, of course, one very important point, and I know the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer) is concerned about this, too, is that the polygraph and the polygraph examination and the people who undertake it do so with a high degree of integrity, that is, that they limit it to intelligence areas that will give them information, only information as to whether or not the subjects may have been subject to a security breach. And, secondly, that the polygraph is given in a very professional manner and is given by very professional people with a high degree of integrity. I know that is a concern, and I think that is something that we simply have to monitor very closely. But again the Secretary of Energy is charged with this program. He is charged with it and he carries it out through his director of the Office of Counterintelligence of the Department of Energy. So you have the President's Cabinet member overseeing this particular program. I think we should pay a great deal of attention to make sure that it is administered with a high degree of integrity but I think we can achieve that.

Mr. HUNTER. No, the director of the Office of Counterintelligence of the Department of Energy shall administer this program for the Secretary of Energy.

Mr. HUNTER. I would say to my colleague, yes, that is the intent of the amendment and the amendment very clearly states that the counterintelligence polygraph program shall be administered to each covered person who has access to these high-risk programs. And those high-risk programs are, of course, the nuclear weapons design programs, special access programs, and access to the material that we make nuclear weapons out of. Very clearly this is totally ethnic neutral, it is race neutral, it has no reference to the backgrounds of these people. If you qualify and are given a clearance under one of these high-risk programs, you have to take the polygraph test. So it is very fairly in this particular amendment, very fairly delineated to apply to all people who have to get those particular clearances.

Mr. HUNTER. First, I think obviously that is a very important part of the integrity of the polygraph examination. It has to be given in a way that is fully communicated to the person who is the subject of the examination and once again that is a part of the professionalism of the examination. Of course if you have a person who does not communicate fully in English, it must be communicated in the language that they are conversant with. We will certainly expect that that is the way that it would be administered. I think we can have conversations with the Secretary of Energy to make sure that that occurs.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Chairman, I want to rise in strong support of the Ryun amendment, and I want to say at the outset that I very much respect the position of folks on the other side. I know the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson) is very dedicated, very bright, and has the best interests of our country at heart and serves her constituents very well. I have though a difference of opinion on this issue with the folks that limited the scope of the foreign visitors cutoff.

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

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her excellent leadership of this very, very important rule. I want to thank the ranking member and all the members of the Committee on Rules who did struggle to put together a rule that was laid against a background of a number of very strong concerns by Members of the House. They have done an excellent job, and I urge all Members to vote for this rule. My colleagues, let us take a look at the state of defense. That is the situation that this rule and this bill address. The state of defense is that we have a force structure, meaning an Army, a Navy, an Air Force and a Marines that are a little more than half the size that they were just a few years ago. In 1990, we had 18 army divisions. Today we have been cut down to 10. We had 24 fighter air wings, active air wings. Today we are down to 13. We had 546 navy ships. Today we are down to 325 and dropping. Now, the gentlewoman that just spoke talked about things that we could do with the money that we could cut from defense. I am here to tell her we have cut an enormous amount of money in defense. This bill is roughly $150 billion less in real dollars than the defense bill that this House passed in 1985. We have slashed defense. The state of defense is this: We are short on ammunition. Across the spectrum, starting with cruise missiles and going down to the smallest M-16 bullets, we are short even after we passed this bill; and considering the full amount that was put into the supplemental, we will still be short, by our analysis, about $13 billion dollars below the two-war requirement that was laid out as the responsibility for this government to fulfill so that our fighting people would have enough ammo in their bandoliers should we have to fight a two-contingency or two-war situation. With respect to spare parts, we are down on spare parts. And every time we are told by a member of the Pentagon that spare parts are looking better, that the accounts are being filled, we go out to the field and we find that all the services across the board, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Army and the Navy, are down about 10 percent in mission capability. That means that if we asked the Navy how many of their fighter aircraft are able to do the mission, it is a little over 7 out of 10. That means 3 out of 10 cannot do the mission. With the Marine Corps and the Navy, actually it is down to about 61 percent mission capability. That means 4 out of 10 cannot do their mission. With respect to personnel, we are going to be about 800 pilots short this year in the Air Force, and that figure is rising. Remember, we do not have a draft. We cannot force people to join the military and serve this country. I know Members of this House and members of the country, our constituents, are also amazed when they travel abroad or they go to a military base or they talk to our military, our men and women in uniform, and they look at the very difficult jobs that they fulfill every day, jobs that are much less convenient, much less comfortable than most of the jobs on what they call the outside; that is, the civilian economy. And yet they do that because they have a dedication to this country. We are low on military pay. Since 1980, we have allowed that pay gap between the civilian and the military sector to widen to 13\1/2\ percent. That means an electronics technician in the Navy gets, on the average, 13\1/2\ percent less than if he was working on the outside. And that is one reason why we are 18,000 sailors short right now and 800 pilots short in the Air Force. And we are short Apache helicopter pilots. And we are seeing a bigger and bigger separation rate even in Marine aviation, which has also had the highest retention rate. We have lost a lot of aircraft in the last year. One of the best examples of the best reflection of how old our force is and our equipment is, is how many of them fall down in peacetime and crash. We lost, by our calculations, in the last 14 months, 55 military aircraft crashing in peacetime operations, with 55 fatalities involved, 55 men and women in uniform dying as a result of military aircraft going down in peacetime operations. We are not replacing aircraft as fast as we are crashing them because we have an inadequate budget. Well, let us go to the budget and what we do with this defense bill. We do increase defense spending a very small amount. We do not come anywhere close to starting to close that $150 billion gap, that cut between what we spent in 1985 and what we spend today, but we are starting to turn the corner. We put in more money for ammunition, more money for spare parts. We are putting in a little more money for modernization. That means replacing some of those old systems that are crashing on us now with new systems, with new platforms. We are trying to address this problem with respect to the national labs. Let me just say with respect to the Cox report and the Cox-Dicks package that is going to be put into place, I want to applaud my colleagues for putting that together. I do want to say, with respect to the Ryan amendment, that would give a 2-year moratorium on foreign visitors to the laboratory. I think that is much more reasonable than the 30-day moratorium that has been offered in the report. In that sense, I think there has been some watering down of what I know some of the leaders of the report on both sides of the aisle would like to see. I do not see any reason to have Iraqis and Iranian nationals coming over from their countries and go into laboratories in our nuclear procurement system, in our nuclear development system, any laboratory in the U.S. So we have an excellent bill before us. I do commend our colleagues for putting together a package with respect to lab security with respect to foreign visitors. I think we need to go with the Ryun amendment. I also see the hand of industry to some degree in neutralizing a tough supercomputer transfer to China amendment; that is, we are still going to allow supercomputers to be transferred to China even though we have done no end use verification to speak of in the last couple of years. Mr. Speaker, this bill starts to turn the corner on rebuilding national security. Let us vote for the rule and vote for the bill and get on with our work.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to start by thanking our chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Floyd Spence) for his great leadership. The gentleman is a very interesting person and a very unique person. He is a guy who has us put together this defense bill without ever making requests for his own district, only giving to us the direction that we do what is right for America. I think under his leadership we have done that in this particular bill. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina for all his friendship and leadership. I want to thank my friend, too, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Sisisky), my compadre and partner in putting this bill together, along with the rest of the members of the Subcommittee on Military Procurement. The gentleman from Virginia is a person with a lot of wisdom. He has a great service background of his own, and he understands the military, he understands people, and he understands systems, and most importantly, business practices. He has injected a lot of those business practices and that philosophy into his work. I want to thank him for that. I would also thank my good friend, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Ike Skelton), who has fought long and hard especially to give this country long-range air power capability. That challenge is still before us with respect to stealth capability, and I want to thank the gentleman. I know he has been monitoring the success of the B-2 bomber in its recent flights. I know it has done only a fraction of the sorties, yet it has knocked out a very large percentage of the targets. That stealth capability, married up with precision weapons, is a very important thing. Mr. Chairman, we had a couple of themes a couple of years ago when we realized that we were not going to be building more B-2 bombers. We decided to try to arm as best we could the ones that we have. We put a lot of money, additional money, up against this challenge of arming the B-2 bombers, giving our long-range air wing what it would take to strike targets and to return safely. We have another theme that we have embarked upon. That is to build and buy as many precision weapons as this country needs, and hopefully actually to produce a margin, a safety margin in our weapons bin so we do not run out of these precision weapons, and especially precision standoff weapons. Now, everybody knows that for those standoff weapons, they are weapons you can launch from an aircraft. For example, if you are talking about an air launch cruise missile, hundreds of miles before you reach that heavily protected target with your aircraft and put your crew and your pilots in jeopardy you can launch that missile, you can turn around and go back without having to enter that area of jeopardy. That saves pilot's lives, it saves equipment. We can only do that when we have a sufficient number of long-range standoff systems that are precision systems. I am here to inform my colleagues regretfully that we do not have enough of those systems today. Similarly, with the Tomahawk cruise missile, which can also launch from many hundreds of miles away and save that pilot that otherwise would have to fly directly over a target and drop an atom bomb. We are restarting that Tomahawk line. That will give us the power hopefully to maintain a standoff capability. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank all my colleagues who helped to put this bill together, and urge everyone in the House to vote for it. It is a turnaround for defense, it is a turnaround for rebuilding our weapons systems.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the two authors of the report along with all the committee members who participated in it. This amendment is very strong in a couple of ways. It gives at least a temporary review to the Department of Defense for militarily critical technology that could be sent to potential adversaries. That is a very important thing. It also tries to reinstate a structure, a multilateral structure where we can persuade our friends, other nations, our allies to join with us in restricting militarily critical technology from going to potential enemies. Now, let me just say there is unfinished business in this report and in this amendment. After this thing passes, we will still have supercomputers going to China where we have no end use verification. We will still be sending American satellites to China for launch by their Long March rockets which also is a mainstay of their nuclear and strategic assets. We will still, after a fairly short moratorium, be allowing visits to the 65 scientists who came from Algeria, Cuba, Libya, Iran, and Iraq into our national weapons labs. There is unfinished business. I look forward to voting for this amendment and moving ahead to complete the job.