Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Reclaiming my time from my B-2 friend, let me tell----

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, I would say to my friend he has raised excellent questions, that this is a subject that we need to sit down and discuss with the Secretary of Energy, and I would say that I can assure him that I will ask our chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence), because this is a very important area to him also, to participate with us and with the gentleman and with the Secretary of Energy and have some discussions during the conference to make sure that we have two things: the highest professionalism, and, No. 2, the best standards. If those best standards fall in the area of government-given polygraphs, and perhaps they are not in the private sector, then let us go with the best standards if they are in the government. If the best standards and the best science has been developed on the outside, let us use that capability, but certainly let us make sure we have the best.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I want to strongly support the base package and strongly oppose the Obey amendment for this reason. We did an analysis and asked the Department of Defense under the Clinton administration how short we were in basic ammunition compared not to some Republican standard, not to some think tank standard, but compared to the President's own two- war requirement, how short we were in everything from cruise missiles, right on down to M-16 ammo. The answer is, $13.8 billion short. Even passing this supplemental, even passing the fiscal year 2000 budget, we are going to be short. We asked the services how short they were in terms of near-term war- fighting capability. We did not ask contractors. We did not ask Members of Congress. They gave us a list of $28.7 billion. That includes ammunition and equipment. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) says, ``Well, why didn't you spend more money on readiness? '' Well, the reason, Mr. Chairman, is because we lost 55 aircraft last year crashing because we have got old systems. We have got 40-year-old CH-46 helicopters instead of the new V-22. So, we have been forced to choose with this limited amount of money between bullets and having safe platforms for our people to fly. Now the gentleman said, ``Well, what have you Republicans done with this $27 billion that you added? '' Mr. Chairman, I think the Commandant of the Marine Corps gave the best answer when our chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence), asked him, ``Where would you be right now if we hadn't added the 27 billion over the last several years?'' The Commandant of the Marine Corps said, ``You wouldn't have had a 911 force, the U.S. Marine Corps. You would have had a 91 force.'' So we have done good things with the money we added. This thing should have been a lot bigger. I would have liked to have seen a supplemental with $20-$25 billion in it. Every dollar of that could have been justified by matching the two MRC requirements against what we actually have. I commend the committee. Let us pass this thing.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, let me say to the gentleman who put together this Guard and Reserve package and does it for the Armed Services Committee, the gentleman has always acted with total integrity and has always met the needs of the services. Unfortunately, we have always had to cut what the services need, cut the supply of resources that we are going to give those shortages by about 50 percent. There are lots of things that the Guard and Reserve need right now on their equipment and in their training and in their ammunition and spare parts to be able to go off and serve in a foreign theater.

Mr. HUNTER. Let me answer the gentleman. I can tell the gentleman that I sent over a request to the services to tell us exactly what they need. I did not ask any contractors what they wanted to sell. And I did not ask any congressmen what they wanted to get for their district. I think most of the congressmen that I have talked to just want to get what is right for America. They realize we have got to refill the ammunition coffers. This list, it represents a direct response from the services with respect to how much they have right now in terms of cruise missiles and all the other things that we need and how much the President's own analysis says we need and what the shortages are. So they sent over the shortages. We did not get them from anybody else. We did not set any new standards to try to embarrass the President. We just used his standards. That is what this is. Incidentally, the cruise missiles I am sorry to say, they used to be built in San Diego in my district. Well, about 10 years they moved out and they are now built in Arizona across the Colorado River, and so Arizonans have jobs building cruise missiles. I do not care. I do not care if they are built in the northeast, the Midwest, wherever. They save pilots' lives. I would like to have them come back to San Diego some day, but I do not think that is going to happen. But I think all Americans just want to see ammunition right now.

Mr. HUNTER. I would say there is no sight more gratifying I think to the member of a military family, to a spouse and the kids, than to have their dad get off of that airplane or get off of that ship in the good old United States and welcome them with open arms to come home. Bringing our pilots home is very important to us. And the thing that allows them to come home alive is for them to be able to keep their plane a hundred miles from the target, launch a standoff weapon that can go in and hit the target while they stay out of range of those surface-to-air missiles. And I think one of the greatest agonies that we ever endure is when we have POWs and when we see what happens to some of them. And we have listened their stories when they come home. We have had some great ones on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans. Smart weapons, standoff weapons, cruise missiles save lives. It is an absolute disservice to our uniformed people to not give them the very best. They deserve the very best. They are not getting adequate pay right now. We all know that. They are 13 percent below the domestic sector. We are trying to ramp that up. I know the gentleman is leading that charge and he is going to get some fruition to his efforts. That is one reason why the gentleman from California (Chairman Lewis) and the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young) and the other members of the Subcommittee on Defense and the full Committee on Appropriations sat down and added ammunition to this supplemental, they added a lot of smart weapons. Mr. Speaker, I am going to offer an amendment that I hope is approved by the Committee on Rules that allows us to restart the Tomahawk missile lines, because I think we have got to have a lot of Tomahawk missiles because we cannot tell how fast we are going to have to use them. And I think we should build at least as many as President Clinton's own analysis say we need for the two-war requirement. But to answer the gentleman's question, standoff weapons mean that Air Force families get to see their daddy. And having to fly over a target and drop a gravity bomb on that target with all that anti- aircraft fire and all of those very sophisticated surface-to-air missiles shooting back means that we of going to have dead pilots and we are going to have prisoners of war.

Mr. HUNTER. Yes. Mr. Speaker, to answer the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), and he has made such an eloquent presentation and made a great case for increasing our national defense funding, if we do in fact come up with this money, one thing we can do is go to the vendors. If we have an ammunition line or a spare parts line or a missile line, you may have 25 or 30 major suppliers, companies that used to make little parts for that particular unit. You have to go get them and say, hey, you have to go back into business, because we are low on ammo and we need to get this ammo turned out quickly. We can work with them, with a partnership of business and government. We can get in there and accelerate those lines and get them up and get producing. I think we can start turning out, for example, cruise missiles and other things a lot faster than the Pentagon thinks we can. I think when the Americans really want to do something, they can do it. With respect to the senior citizens and their concern about social security, my feeling is, I have no qualms about using this money for an emergency. Lack of ammunition is an emergency. The generation that saved Private Ryan is going to want to help save this country. I am reminded that without national security, there is no social security. With respect to the other programs, the tax cuts and social programs, whether you are a liberal who loves social programs and thinks tax cuts are terrible, or you are a conservative like myself who thinks that tax cuts increase the economy and increase jobs, no matter where your position is on the political spectrum, we should all agree that ammunition comes first. Let us have ammunition before we have tax cuts and before we have social programs. I do not think anybody would disagree with that.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman is exactly right. Because every time we have had one of these contingencies where the President wants to send troops, whether it is an operation that we consider justified or not, every time we have one of those operations, to fund the operations initially they take money out of the ammunition accounts. They also take money out of the spare parts accounts. That is why our mission capability rates are dropping below 70 percent on average. They have dropped more than 10 percent, meaning a plane, out of 100 aircraft that take off that are built to do a particular mission, only about 70 of them now can do that mission. So the President takes that money, or the military looks around for money, Congress is not giving them any extra money to fund an operation where the President said, you steam over here and do this mission, so they take it out of ammunition. They were going to buy that ammunition, but they will buy it next year, right, when they get the money back? All of a sudden, they do the mission, they get a little money back, maybe in a supplemental funding bill, but they never get as much as they took out, so the ammunition accounts get lower and lower. They say, when they appear before us, and the gentleman always asks that great question, and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Floyd Spence) asks that question, as well, our great chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, he says, what is going on here, Admiral? What is going on here, General? Can we win these two wars? They say, well, we can win those wars, but we now are taking on a higher risk. When we ask them to translate what risks means, it means risk of casualties, heavy casualties. Because we cannot win a war now with overwhelming force, like Norman Schwartzkopf did in Desert Storm, where you just crush the enemy, bring all your body bags empty to the United States. There are no dead Americans to put in them, and they all come home fairly quickly. We no longer have that overwhelming force. What we have is the ability, like two fairly evenly-matched fighters, to slug it out, taking a blow for every blow that we give. That means taking dead Americans for every casualty we inflict on the enemy. And hopefully in the end, because we have a superior industrial base and because we have a democracy with a strong economy, we overwhelm the enemy at some point, maybe the allies come in and help, and we finally win. But when we win, it is like one of those boxing matches where the sportswriter said that after looking at the faces of both of the fighters, it was hard to determine who the winner was. Instead of looking at the faces of the fighters, we are looking at body bags stretched out in front of us of dead Americans who ran out of ammunition. Right now the Marines are $193 million short of basic ammunition, and the Marines are the 911 force. The Army is $3.5 billion short of basic ammunition. That is not a standard that I created, and that is not a standard that the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer) created or the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Floyd Spence) or the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bill Young), who is chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, who has done such a great job, along with the gentleman from California (Mr. Jerry Lewis), chairman of defense appropriations, of putting this supplemental together. We did not go out and set some standard and say, we have decided that instead of 100 million M-16 rounds, we want 200 million, that is a Republican standard. We took the President's standard. We wrote in to the services and said, how many M-16 bullets do you need to be able to fight that two-war contingency that we might have to fight? How much should we have in reserve? They answered back. In fact, they answered back across the total line of ammunition. I have a summary of that here. In total ammunition across the board, and I have two pages here, but I will show Members just a summary page, we are $13.8 billion short, according to the President's standard. That is according to President Clinton's own standard of how much ammunition we need. So when the President says, I do not want you adding extra things to this defense bill, he means that he does not want to give the full load of ammunition to his troops that his own clerks and auditors and generals and admirals have figured out they may need in an extended battle. Somehow, ammunition is no longer a prerequisite to having a strong military. I would say if there is anything that is an emergency it is ammunition. If I had my way, let me tell the Members, we would have a supplemental tomorrow of not $13 billion, but one that was $28.7 billion, because that is what the services told us they could use right now in ammunition and spare parts and equipment. Because we not only want to have enough ammunition for the soldiers' ammunition pouches, we also want to have planes that can take off and lift off the ground. Today, as Members know, our mission capability rates have been dropping like a rock.

Mr. HUNTER. That is exactly right.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman is exactly right. In fact, we will have to wait for next year's funding, so we will have to wait at least 4 or 5 months before we can even enact the bill and have next year's funding levels start. That means having the Pentagon ready to start making contracts. And then most of these ammo lines, some of them are closed, so most of these ammo lines will have to be reassembled, the assembly lines. By the time the soldier actually gets the bullets in the field or the airplanes get the cruise missiles or the Navy gets its particular missiles, 18 to 24 months can go by. Do Members know what is interesting, some of the administration people have argued, well, we cannot execute this contract in the next 12 months, so we do not think we should do it now. They are saying, it takes a long time to get ammunition, so let us not start now. Well, when do they want to start? Do they want to start when we have a conflict and we discover that we are out, we are empty? And I think our enemies should make no mistake about it, we still have an enormous nuclear arsenal, but I do not think anybody in this Chamber wants to rely on a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent. In 1950 we did. One of the arguments for drawing down the force, we had 9 million people under arms in World War II. We just stacked arms. We got out of the military so fast and drew those units down so fast, because Americans wanted to come home and have babies and work on their farms and get jobs and enjoy the prosperity of America. We stacked arms. General Marshall was asked, how is the demobilization going, in 1948? He says, this isn't a demobilization, it is a rout. We are just throwing our guns away. A few years later the Koreans marched down the Korean peninsula, a third-rate military, and almost pushed us into the ocean past the Pusan perimeter. We were pretty sure that the Chinese would not mess with us. In fact, we didn't think anybody would mess with us because we had nuclear weapons. In fact, in those days we had the only nuclear weapons. One reason that we allowed our forces to get so small, and incidentally, the Army was 10 divisions, just like it is today, we had drawn it down that small, but we figured that nobody would mess with us because we had nuclear weapons. We had this high technology that everybody was afraid of. All of a sudden we discovered this third-rate military pushing our people down the Korean Peninsula. They overwhelmed the 25th infantry division, captured the commanding general, William Dean, our bazookas bounced off the T-64 Soviet tanks, because they had not stood still, they had continued to make and develop their weapons systems, and we lost a lot of people. In my cousin's home in Fort Worth, Texas, we have a picture of my second cousin, Son Stillwell. Son was a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, First Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps who died in Korea. Lots of us in America have pictures on our mantles of people who lost their lives in wars which we were not prepared to fight. Probably nobody today knows or can remember what social program took priority over a strong military in 1950, when so many of us lost relatives in the Korean War. But everybody that looks at those pictures on their mantles remembers who they lost. I would say that our number one obligation as Members of the U.S. Congress to our people, and we do lots of things for people that the Constitution never mandated, we know that, and we all participate in it. But our number one obligation is to defend our people. We have allowed the military to be bled down so low that we can no longer look our constituents in the eye and say, we can defend you and we have a real good chance of your youngsters coming home alive.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), for yielding me this time and for making such a superb presentation on the inadequacies of military funding that exist right now. I have to protest that I did nothing special in Vietnam. I simply showed up, but I did serve with a lot of great people. I want to commend my friend for his participation in Desert Storm. I think a good point here that the gentleman made very strongly is the fact that, while the military has shrunk by almost 50 percent, and most people do not realize that but some people realize that, they realize it is smaller, the natural tendency is to feel that since it is 50 percent of the original size it has been cut back so dramatically, over 200,000 people in the Navy and 200,000 people in the Army and so on, the team that is left has to be well paid, well armed and well trained. One would think, boy, the residual people that we have there after we pared it down from this huge military that we had, a lot of people think we had in 1990, 1991, this military has to really be just in great shape, with lots of new equipment and ready to go. The tragedy is, we have cut the military almost in half; and the half that we have left is not well paid, number one. The gentleman has really done wonders working as chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, and he has been pushing hard to get compensation, and we know that the average military personnel today are making about 13.5 percent less than their civilian counterparts. That means if someone is an electronics technician in the Navy, they are making about 13.5 percent less on the average than the guy who is working for a private company out in industry. The real tragedy of that is that, at the end, the bottom line is we have today about 10,000 military personnel on food stamps. As I watched the stock market go through the roof the other day, I thought about that. Here we are in one of our most prosperous times and people are commenting on the endurance of this prosperity that we have had, the longevity of this prosperity. We have a military that is half as big as it was a few years ago, and the men and women in that military are underpaid, and 10,000 of them are on food stamps. So, wrong, the first instinctive reaction is this must be a well-paid military since it has been cut in half. Answer, no. Second, people must think, well, my gosh, it is half the size it was, it must be really well trained since it is pared down to this smaller force. I think of Colonel Rosenberg, who was one of the national trainers at the National Training Command hearing that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Bateman), chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Readiness, held at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada. Colonel Rosenberg said, and I paraphrase him, he said, it is a real tragedy that this military that we built out of the ashes of the Vietnam War, that won so overwhelmingly in Desert Storm, is being destroyed before our very eyes. When we asked for particulars from Colonel Rosenberg and others who were testifying there, these are the trainers at the National Training Center, it is kind of like the military college where the infantry goes and the armor goes and the artillery units go to get their upper level training. Once they have graduated from high school, so to speak, they go to this military college, which really is a big training ground out in the desert in the West, and they have to perform against a mock enemy, and they are given points. The trainers said, among other things, the troops that we get often do not know anything about maneuver with armor. They do not know anything about the basics of calling in artillery fire. They do not know how to handle many, many procedures that have to be handled on the battlefield. In other words, this is like getting people in their first year in college and one realizes that they never should have graduated from the 11th and 12th grades in high school and one feels like they have to send them back for a refresher course. We have fine young people in the military. So why are not they getting the training that is necessary, at least to get them into the upper training level? Well, the answer is, those dozens of deployments that the gentleman just talked about, that the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer) just talked about, where the President has pulled people out of school, and a lot of these military schools are very technical, they have to sit there in a classroom and really learn to know their job, but these people are pulled out of their schools before they can finish it. They are kept from going to their schools. It is like a kid who is in high school. He is supposed to get good grades his last year in high school. His dad has a farm, and his dad pulls him out of class 3 days out of 5 in the week, so he is only going to class about half the time he should have gone to class in his senior year, and all of a sudden he figures out he is not ready for college. That is what this President has done with this downsized military. He has stretched it all over the world. The average person will say, wait a minute. Those people that are in Bosnia, that is training. Well, it may train them for deployment, but it does not train them with the simulators. It does not train them with the test ranges that we have. It does not train them with the classroom work that they need. So the second fallacy most people believe is that this smaller force is well trained, and it is not. One last example, talking to the Marines, we talk about the V-STOL aircraft that goes straight up off the ground, the jet aircraft, that the Marines use, instead of going down a runway and lift off; very, very difficult aircraft to fly. When one asks the Marines, how many hours do these pilots really need to maintain proficiency in this very difficult aircraft, they will always say, over 20, 22, 24 hours a month. They have to have that to maintain proficiency. What are they getting? They are getting about 12. They are getting about 12, because there is no money for training. That is just one of the many, many examples of inadequate training. So that second fallacy that these people are well trained is, in fact, a fallacy. Lastly, one would think, my gosh, if we have an Army that is 10 divisions today instead of 18 divisions, we have a Marine Corps that has been cut back, we have a Navy that has been cut back, and I noticed the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer) is more precise than I am, we had 546 ships when we started, when we did Desert Storm. When we made up our chart last year, we had 346. When I gave my last briefing, it was 325. Now it is down to 315. We are dropping like a rock. One would think when this Navy has been compressed to such a small fleet those ships that are there must be bristling with armaments. Wrong. It is not well armed. The reason is, we have starved our ammunition accounts. If anything qualifies, if we are talking about this emergency supplemental, and I hope every single Member of Congress, Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, I hope we all vote for it tomorrow. Because if there is anything that is an emergency, it is an inadequacy of ammunition. We have a shortage of ammunition. One of the most important ammunitions that we have a shortage of is cruise missiles, long-range missiles, like Tomahawks, like conventional air launch cruise missiles. Because what we see today is a very complex and difficult to penetrate air defense in most of the world where we have to operate. We see that in Kosovo right now, but it is not limited to Kosovo. We are seeing the Iraqis continue to strive to build an air defense that is going to be able to take down American aircraft. They have not done it yet, but they import SAM missiles. We see that with the North Koreans. So anyplace we go, we figured that the air defense over North Vietnam was more intense than it was over Berlin in World War II because of surface-to-air missiles. So we devised a way to allow our pilots, our neighbors who are pilots, to go out there and fly their mission, release a payload and return to their carrier deck or the tarmac of their runway without being killed. The way we were able to do that is with cruise missiles. That is stand-off missiles. That means a B-52 does not have to fly into all that flak like they did over North Vietnam in December of 1972 when, as I recall, about 10 were shot down the first day. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Johnson) recalled sitting in his prison cell and watching a B-52 get hit in midair by a SAM missile and just explode before his eyes. We are flying those same B-52s today, but we have missiles on them that are launched from many miles away from the target. The cruise missile takes off, it travels like an unmanned airplane itself, and it hits a target. And, meanwhile, the pilot is hundreds of miles away from that antiaircraft fire; and he returns safely to his base. We are short on those missiles. It does not make any sense that this country, as prosperous as we are, as devoted to human life as we are, and especially the lives of our service people, should have a shortage in cruise missiles. I want to tell my friend, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), who has made just an eloquent presentation tonight, we are short on cruise missiles. We are short several billions of dollars' worth of cruise missiles.

Mr. HUNTER. People need to know when an aircraft comes in on fire, and this is one thing I learned in San Diego watching our Federal firefighters who handle the jets out there, they have to have incredible training and great equipment to be able to put out those fires on the aircraft and save lives. So they have to carry a contingent of firefighters with them.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend, I thank him for that compliment. When I see the gentleman from Indiana up there in the Committee on Armed Services, I see a soldier who has a great integrity and devotion to his country and to his people that he serves with and to the people that are still serving. The gentleman has done a wonderful job. What I think is a great tragedy is that I do not think we are fulfilling our obligation. I do not think we as a body are fulfilling it. And if we get to a point where we have our Marines and soldiers or sailors or airmen coming up short of ammunition, short of spare parts and more of them die on the battlefield because of that, then we will have failed them. So I hope that every Member votes for this supplemental appropriation tomorrow and I hope they vote for the amendments. And it is going to be in two days. I hope they vote for the amendments that increase the ammunition supply. Even if we vote for those, we are still going to be about $12 billion short of basic ammunition. So we are not taking care of the problem, but we are taking care of part of the problem. I really thank the gentleman for his hard work. And maybe the gentleman could share with us his ideas too about how we are going to finally close this pay gap over the next several months and years.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Fowler) to address the statement the gentleman just made.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Callahan). (Mr. CALLAHAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the very distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), the Republican whip.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the very distinguished gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Fowler).

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the very distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling).

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Hefley), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities of the Committee on Armed Services.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from San Diego, California (Mr. Cunningham).

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I think we have had an excellent debate, and it shows a great division. And there is great division because we have several legitimate interests, and it is a matter of balancing which of these interests outweighs the other. One interest is a humanitarian interest; another interest, of course, is our NATO alliance and their military objectives; another interest that many people have expressed here very eloquently is our concern for the safety of our men and women in uniform. Let me just review my own position and the history of this Congress in the last 15 years or so. In Lebanon, in Libya, in Grenada, and of course in the Middle East, a number of us voted to give the President of the United States, President Ronald Reagan and President George Bush, great discretion and to attribute to them great presidential prerogative with respect to initiating conflict. And that accrued to our benefit, because the Presidents were able to strike swiftly and to move American force projection very quickly without asking for permission from Congress. We were able to achieve goals we could not have otherwise achieved. So one principle I followed was that the Commander in Chief must be able to act quickly, using a full range of military options short of total war. And my feeling is that total war is what we have conducted in the past in World War I and II, the last war ending when we reduced Tokyo and parts of Germany to rubble. I do not want to reduce Belgrade to rubble. I do not want to stand by and do nothing. So I agree with the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Bateman) that the range of options is a range of options that does not serve this Congress well. The second principle that I felt we were following over the last 15 years was that the Commander in Chief must be able to act with full military leadership authority when leading joint operations with our allies. Somebody commented once that if we were not in the NATO alliance, it would be like that church full of townspeople without Gary Cooper, all of them with different ideas but all of them too timid to execute anything. And I think that is probably true. So I am going to vote to be consistent with my votes that I exercised with respect to the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. And I want to say to all my Republican colleagues who voted with me on those votes and voted not to force the President to seek a vote before he could go in with military force, that I think those principles which accrue to the benefit of the United States and save lives will long outlive this presidency in which many of us have a lack of confidence. Now let me turn to my Democrat friends and simply say this: We have cut our military under President Clinton, almost in half. So to carry out this foreign policy that we are engaged in right now, whether it is in Kosovo or on the Korean Peninsula or in the Middle East, we now have 10 Army divisions instead of 18, we now have only 13 fighter air wings instead of 23, we are down almost 40 percent in Navy vessels, we are short $3\1/2\ billion in basic ammunition for the U.S. Army, we are short in almost all of our smart stand-off weapons that save lives, and we are going to have votes in the very near future to increase that ammunition, spare parts and equipment that will ultimately save lives of our military people, whether they are operating in this theater or some other theater. We need Democrats to vote in a strong defense. If we do not have them, we are going to go ahead with half empty ammo pouches in these wars, with our coffers of spare parts that are only half full, and we are going to repeat years like the one we just had in which 55 American military aircraft crashed in peacetime missions because of lack of training, lack of spare parts, and old equipment. So I am going to join and try to be consistent with the votes I have made in the past. I hope all my colleagues will vote for a strong national defense regardless of their vote on this issue.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), another distinguished veteran.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton).

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), our Top Gun from San Diego and a gentleman who won the Navy Cross carrying out America's foreign policy in Vietnam.