Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to recognize the outstanding life of a friend from my hometown, Bonnie Kibbee of Alpine, California. Bonnie passed away last month and I would like to take a moment to commend the dedication this exceptional person had for her community. Born in New Hampshire, Bonnie came to San Diego with her family when she was a little girl. She was a small business owner, a real estate agent, a backcountry activist and an avid gardener whose own home garden became a popular fixture in the Alpine community. The Kibbee's, whose garden included various assortments of irises and day lilies, would set aside a day each spring to allow the public to come and visit. Upset upon learning that the Internal Revenue Service was intending to confiscate the savings account of a child to pay off a parent's debt, Bonnie quickly established herself as a government watchdog and community patriot by protecting and standing up for the rights of private property owners. Through her positions on the Alpine Community Planning Group, Paul Gann's Citizen's Committee, the Christmas Calling Committee and as President of California Taxpayers Network, Inc., Bonnie dedicated herself towards community improvement, reducing crime and promoting law enforcement. Among her initiatives included raising funds for the Alpine Community Center, finding a new home for the Alpine Chamber of Commerce, assisting congressional efforts to oppose overzealous federal acquisition of private property and working to ensure that human beings were provided the same protections afforded to birds, fish and insects. In a time when apathy is often chosen over public involvement, Bonnie Kibbee exhibited the true character of grassroots activism. As a Member of Congress, it is encouraging to see a private citizen who takes notice of what is taking place around them and works to change their community for the better. Thank you Bonnie for all your hard work. You were a natural leader, a great American and will be truly missed.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, on August 6th of this year the State of California and specifically the communities of Imperial County within my district suffered a great loss with the death of Mr. Wesley E. Bisgaard. Throughout his life, Wes was dedicated to his family, church and community. I rise today to recognize his remarkable dedication and contributions to all of us. I met Wes in 1979 during my first campaign for Congress when he was serving as the Republican Party chair for Imperial County. I still remember the look in his eye when he first shook my hand, it was as if to say ``this is what I have to work with?'' From that day forward, he was always ready to lend me a hand and offer advice that he gleaned from years of working through the various systems of government, whether it was the State of California or the U.S. Congress. One thing about Wes, he never left you wondering what his opinion was. Wes led a remarkable life that reads like a John Steinbeck novel. After the dust bowl the Bisgaard family moved from their farm in North Dakota to California where they eventually began a new life in Holtville, California, where they remain today. During World War II, while Wes worked for Douglas Aircraft, he met and married Mildred ``Millie'' Eppleman. In 1952, Wes and Millie, along with their two children, Karen and Christopher, moved to Imperial Valley to join his brother and once again take up his first love: farming. The Bisgaard Brothers farmed 1,000 acres of alfalfa, lettuce, cotton, sugar beets, barley, cabbage, and later wheat for seed. Agriculture is the mainstay of not only Imperial Valley, but California as well and Wes played a very active role through his memberships on many local and state farming advisory boards and commissions. In fact, when he finally retired at the age of 79 he was the Manager of the Imperial County Farm Bureau, completing a 45 year career in the industry. Wes and his wife Millie lived their lives with a strong work ethic, unimpeachable ethical standards, a central place for God in their lives, an abiding sense of charity towards others and a compelling degree of commitment to the wider community. Those of us lucky enough to know Wes will forever be grateful for that opportunity. Imperial County and the farmers there are better off today because of his dedication and commitment to his community: for that, all of us are grateful.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to say goodbye to a dear friend, Ada Hess of El Centro, California. Ada passed away this past summer and I would like to take a moment to recognize the friendship given to me by such a good and beautiful person. Ada was born in Buffalo Gap, Texas and after marrying John Hess in 1968, she moved to El Centro where she worked as the secretary/ treasurer for their various geological businesses. With a lot of hard work and dedication, their businesses grew abroad and Ada and John soon became world travelers. Following John's death in 1987, Ada continued running these businesses as the sole proprietor for nine more years before selling them in 1996. When I was a young lawyer starting out during the 1970's, I remember how John would always be willing to offer his engineering expertise to assist with my cases. My family and I always knew we could stay with Ada and John at their home in El Centro where we would often go on camping trips to the Colorado River and pan for gold. While my boys and I were trying to strike it rich, Ada would be making sure that everyone had their shovels, pails and a good lunch. After my election to Congress, I always treasured the times when John and Ada would visit me in Washington, D.C., somehow we would always end up exploring Northern Virginia. John and Ada Hess were great advocates of conservative principles and the Republican party. At one function, I remember how proud John was to show me a bull-moose handkerchief that had been given to his grandfather by Teddy Roosevelt. At other times, Ada would often thank me for helping her with the opportunity to attend a presidential inaugural ball. When I think back upon our fun times together, I realize that I am the thankful one, for having John and Ada as friends.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk with my colleague the chairman of the R&D subcommittee the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and talk a little bit to our colleagues and those that are listening about some of the background with respect to the defense requirements that we just talked about with the Speaker (Mr. Gingrich). First, Mr. Speaker, let me talk about personnel shortages, because when we put together a defense budget, often the newspapers say the Pentagon got $300 billion, or the Pentagon got $250 billion or the Pentagon got this or got that. And the picture that they create is of just a big bureaucracy in Washington that takes up money, and that bureaucracy does not translate into real people who have real needs. Actually the Department of Defense is about 50 percent people. That means that not only the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen, the marines who serve this country, but also the many people who back them up. That means people who repair aircraft like those at North Island naval air rework depot in San Diego, California in my district or the people that repair the ships or the people that do the high-tech work or the teams that fly around the world as we project American military power to support a very complex military. Personnel is a very important part of our national defense. If you talk to folks like Commandant of the Marine Corps Chuck Krulak and others, you may come to the conclusion that actually they are the primary part of our national defense, they are the most important part, the good people, and they come from America's villages and towns and cities and farms and they serve in the American military often at great inconvenience and often at a pay scale that is much less than their civilian counterparts. Let us talk about personnel shortages that we have today. The United States Air Force is going to be short almost 800 pilots, a little over 700 pilots for this fiscal year that is coming up. Now, when you train a pilot, you put several million dollars minimum into his training, so we are losing not only those good people and all that experience but we are also losing the money that we put into their training. We are going to be very short on pilots. In the Navy we are going to be short 18,000 sailors and 1,400 recruits in this fiscal year. That means that when a guy comes back from a 3 or 4 or 5-month deployment, we have to send him out immediately to another deployment because there is nobody there to rotate with him, to fill his shoes and to give him a little family time. Marine aviators have been traditionally our most loyal people with respect to re-upping, taking that next jump of 5 or 6 years or 4 years in the service and opting to do that instead of being in the private sector, and yet our Marine aviators are now leaving the service at a rate of 92 percent. Even the Army, which has a limited air power but also has, obviously, a very large helicopter force attending its ground forces, is going to be 140 Apache pilots short in 1999. Now those Apache pilots you saw on CNN when they were doing such a great job on Saddam Hussein's tanks during Desert Storm. Those are the pilots that we will be lacking in this next year. Now I talked a little bit about mission capable rates with the Speaker, and once again here are the mission capable rates, and this is a chart that shows how they are going downhill very quickly. Mission capable is kind of like the Speaker described it. If you send out 10 aircraft or you have 10 aircraft on the line, how many of them can actually fly out and do their mission? Just like having four or five combines on your farm, and it is time to harvest the wheat, and the first thing you ask your foreman is how many of the combines are working. It may not be all the combines are working; maybe only half of them are working. Well, we have gone from a mission capable rate that, for example, for the Air Force was 83.4 percent in 1991; that is when George Bush led us in Desert Storm; to today to about 74 percent. We have gone with the Marine Corps from 77 percent to about 61 percent, and with the Navy from 69 percent, almost 70 percent, to 61 percent. That means 6 out of 10 aircraft are able to actually get off the ground and perform their missions. That is a good example of our declining readiness rates, and that means we have a lack of spare parts and we do not have enough components and enough people in some cases. That means mechanics and the people, the high-tech people that make these very complex weapons systems work, not enough people in the pipeline, not enough people on- station at that particular base to take care of those problems. Let us go to equipment shortages. We had almost a 600-ship Navy when Ronald Reagan left office. Today we are down to about 330 ships. We actually had about 546 ships in 1991. Today we are down to about 330. But we are losing a lot of those ships, we are retiring a lot of them. A lot of them are getting older, and, as you know, it takes a long time to build a ship. In fact, it was remarked the other day by one of our assistant secretaries for shipbuilding that actually when we started World War II, all the keels for the battleships had already been laid, meaning we had actually started to build these battleships knowing that there might be a problem. When FDR knew we would probably have a conflict with Adolf Hitler, he started a pretty good shipbuilding program in the late 1930's, and those ships got completed and got put to sea during World War II in the 1940s. But the point is you have to start ships early. If you are going to field a ship in 1997, you need to start it in 1993 or 1994. Well, in this case we are building down to a 200-ship fleet by 2020. That means we are not replacing the ships in a 1-for-1 fashion. That means every time you retire three old ships, you only replace it with one young ship, one new ship. That means that we are going to have a 200-ship fleet by the year 2020 if we do not increase shipbuilding. Ammunition shortages; we are $1.7 billion short for the basic ammunition supply for the Army. Now I would say that we have a couple of duties to the people that wear uniforms who still carry rifles in the field and still fire artillery and do those very things that are very, very difficult in this modern world where you have bio warfare, biological warfare, chemical warfare threatening them, surface-to-surface missiles threatening them. Well, one of the basic things you do for your soldiers and your marines is you give them enough ammo. We do not have enough ammunition for the so-called two regional contingency that we are supposed to plan for. That means if Saddam Hussein starts a fight in the Middle East, and North Korea takes advantage of that by coming down the peninsula, you have to have enough ammo to handle both those wars, both those contingencies. We are short right now, we are short $1.6 billion in basic ammunition. Now that is not money for the Pentagon, that is money for people in the field who carry weapons in defense of this country who need to have ammo. There is nobody here who would send out a police force in a very difficult area without giving them ammunition for their guns, and yet we are preparing to do that with our people who wear the uniform in the Army and the Marine Corps. Age and equipment; this is a pretty good example. The CH-46 is kind of our workhorse helicopter in the U.S. Marine Corps. We are trying to replace that. But the average CH-46, and if you look at the crashes that have taken place in the last 5 years, you are going to see a lot of these CH-46s there because a lot of them have crashed and taken the lives of the young Marines flying those airplanes and attending those airplanes as crewmen. But the average age of that CH-46 right here, about 40 years old. We owe those people new equipment. They have a tough enough job as it is. The assault vehicle; that is the amphibious vehicle that comes out. If you watched Saving Private Ryan, that is a vehicle that comes out, hits a beach and makes the assault from there; that is called an AAV. The average age of those vehicles is 26 years, so they are getting old, and we need to replace them with a new assault vehicle. We do not have money for it because this budget has been handed down to us by the so- called budget deal pressed by the Clinton administration to cut defense. Now my Republican colleagues have added $21 billion to the defense budget over the last 5 years, and I am very proud of that, and, as the chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, I am really proud of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence) who is our chairman of the full Committee on National Security, and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) who is chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, because they tried to swim against a tide that was being handed down to them by the White House, and we put $21 billion extra to try to meet some of these shortages. But even after we put that in, the services finally came forth the other day, and they gave us a list of what they are short. They are $80 billion short in what they call unfunded requirements. That means ships that we planned to build that we cannot afford to build, it means ammunition we cannot afford to buy. That means flying hours for our pilots, and we cannot afford to send them up because it is too expensive to fly the planes for those hours. That means spare parts and a lot of other things. Well, the Speaker, when he put together this, our side's position on the negotiation on this emergency supplemental spending plan that we just made the deal with President Clinton on, argued for a strong national defense, and he said I have got to have extra dollars for defense. He said we have got to have extra dollars for intelligence. We put $2 billion into intelligence. That is so that when somebody is planning to blow up an American embassy, we have a network of people who are in key critical places in that particular country, wherever it might be, who have their ear to the ground with the terrorist networks. It was some of the state sponsored terrorist organizations, and they find out about the plan, for example, to blow up an embassy or to do something else in a terrorist fashion, and they relay it back to our people here, and we are able to take action to keep it from ever happening in the first place. We need a strong intelligence force more than ever. You know, the Soviet Union was big and it was strong, but it was very predictable in the so-called Cold War. We could see a lot of what they did, they moved in a very traditional fashion, and we knew where to go to get information. Today we live in a world in which the CIA Director, Jim Woolsey, once said is full of poison snakes, although we have killed the big dragon of the so-called Soviet Union, and that is very true. There is a lot of small organizations that are terrorist organizations that want to kill Americans, and we need to have a good intelligence operation to cut them off at the pass. That means to find out what is going to happen before it happens and stop it. And to those ends, after a lot of behind-closed-doors briefings about the world situation, the Speaker fought for 2 billion extra dollars in intelligence funding. We also fought hard for missile defense, and let me tell you what the problem is with missile defense. The North Koreans have just launched a missile, went out over the Sea of Japan which surprised us. It surprised us just like the two nuclear blasts in India and Pakistan that our intelligence people did not know about, did not predict. We thought that the North Koreans would not achieve this ICBM capability for about 10 years. We thought that would not happen. But actually they have achieved it now. The missile that they launched, which is a so-called Taepo DONG I missile with three stages is capable of hitting parts of the United States. Now, if you couple that with the ongoing program that the Koreans, the North Koreans have followed, sometimes with greater exposure to us than other times, but nonetheless they have historically followed of trying to achieve nuclear capability and biological and chemical capability; that means the ability to throw a biological warhead with nerve gas in it, for example, that will kill civilians on contact; that program, married up with their missile program, will give them very soon the capability to reach some of the United States with missiles. Now the problem with that is we have a military that is designed to stop tanks, it is designed to stop ships, it is designed to stop planes, it is designed to stop infantry. We have nothing, nothing that will stop an intercontinental ballistic missile from hitting a city in the United States, and that is a question I ask President Clinton's Secretary of Defense every time he appears before us: Could we stop a single incoming ballistic missile. And he always has to tell myself and other members of the National Security Committee, no, not one. So we have to build a defense against incoming ballistic missiles. We live in the age of missiles. We have to understand that, we have to acknowledge it, and we have to prepare for it. We do not at this point have a missile defense, but we need to have one, and the Speaker put almost a billion dollars into missile defense and got the Clinton administration to agree with it. That alone, with a lot of the things in this bill that I do not agree with that the Clinton administration pressed for, the President's agenda, the fact that he gave us that extra billion dollars for missile defense, that we got that, that alone is a compelling reason to vote for this emergency supplemental, because having a missile defense, of all the things in this package, is probably the one that I would deem the greatest emergency. I want to close by going back to what we call the growing pay gap because this may tell you a little bit about what I started with. What I started to talk about, of course, was personnel, people. Why are they leaving the military after we put 1, 2, 3 or $4 million into training a young man or a young woman to be a pilot? Why are they getting out? Why are our sailors leaving? Well, I will tell you why. Since 1982, and I can remember being a Republican freshman in 1982, one of the first things that Ronald Reagan did was put in two bills that brought up our military to where they were level, they were even, with civilian pay, and that gave great morale to the people that were already in and it also gave a great incentive to young people that thought about joining to come into the military. Since then, and that is 1982 on this chart, you can see this big pink area which is now the difference between military people and civilians in the same type of work. So that means if you have got an electronics technician on the inside of the military, he is working in the military, and he looks outside and sees his friend who has the same schooling, same capability, that young person is making 13\1/2\ percent more than he is on the average. And so when you ask a young person to come into the military, and they look at that job level and the job description inside the uniformed services and the job description on the outside of the uniformed services, they come to the conclusion that it is best to stay on the outside, and that is what has been happening. So we need to address this pay gap between the civilian sector and the uniformed sector, and we are going to be doing that. Now, there are a couple of other things in the defense bill that are in the emergency supplemental before us, this big omnibus bill, that are defense-related. We have the Y2K problem. We devoted some money to the Y2K problem. We have to solve that, because a lot of military activities are related to computers and could be badly damaged if we have a Y2K problem. That is this idea that in the Year 2000 many of the computers are not predictable with respect to what they are going to do. So we are going to solve that Y2K problem. We have to do that in national security, as well as in the domestic area. Also some of this money is devoted to paying for Bosnia. Let me tell you, that tells us where some of the money went that should have gone to pay, some of the money that should have gone to equipment, some of the money that should have gone to spare parts and training, and some of the money that should have gone to personnel retention bonuses. That money instead went, among other places, to Bosnia. So now we are paying for the money for the President's Bosnia operation, without taking it out of ammunition, without taking it out of training, without taking it out of readiness. What we did in the old days, the President just said you military folks go look at your other areas, like training and people and ammunition, and pull some money out of those accounts, and we will use that money to go to Bosnia on. That is called taking it out of hide. Well, we stopped that in this emergency supplemental, so even that money going to Bosnia does not directly help us with respect to modernization or pay rates or spare parts. At least it takes the pressure off the defense budget so we can buy ammunition, so we can pay our personnel more and give them some retention bonuses and we can buy those spare parts. We spent about $1 billion in this emergency supplemental on readiness. Most of that is going to go to parts. That means if you are working on a carrier and you need a certain part now for an aircraft, and a week later you may need another part, instead of having to fly that in with an airplane from some parts depot in the United States to halfway around the world, hopefully we will be able to buy enough of those spare parts so you have a couple of them on the shelf in the plane or on the ship, or, for example, have some of those components for the air crew that works that particular plane. So that will solve some of our readiness problems. So we have devoted over $1 billion to that so-called readiness account in this emergency supplemental. Let me just make the case again that there was a lot of negotiation that took place in this bill, but the important national security problems that the Speaker and his negotiating team took care of far outweigh any concessions that we might have had to make to big government and to the President.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. That is exactly right. Let me mention something else that I know struck the Speaker and Jerry Solomon, chairman of the Committee on Rules and many others who are concerned about national defense. We have been looking at accident rates. I have one member on my staff who just cares about the people that fly aircraft, and he gives me the weekly accident rate. That means helicopters and aircraft that have just crashed during the year. We now have had 43 of them crash, at least according to my estimates and my reports, this year. That is almost more aircraft than we are building but it also claimed about 70 lives. The Navy reports that they have more crashes this year per thousand flying hours than they had last year, roughly twice as many. Now, last year we had what was considered to be a very good year in the Navy in terms of a safety record. But they mentioned when they came over and briefed the defense committees in this body and the other body that this is something that they are very concerned about. So at a time when we are trying to get pilots to do two things, one we are trying to get our experienced pilots to stay in and they are not staying in. The rate of leaving the services for senior pilots who could stay in, who could opt to stay in in the Marines is now 92 percent. That means 92 percent of them are leaving. Only 8 percent are staying who are eligible. But the way to instill morale and to instill a desire to stay in the service is to show that you are buying the absolute best aircraft for these people and that you are giving them all the training hours that they need, which we are not now doing, and that you are giving them all the spare parts that they need that they are not now doing. This brings me back to my point. The Speaker and his negotiators got 9 billion extra dollars for national security, for this vital national security function which is inadequate right now, which is being abandoned. I know you did that at great pain, and I realize the President is half this process. And the President got some of the things that he wants in this bill. I would simply say to every conservative and every Republican or Democrat or independent who believes in a strong national defense for America is that the money that you got to restore these readiness accounts, the money that you got to restore our program for a national missile defense which we still do not have, even as North Korea builds an ICBM, the money that you got for the other problems with the military far outweighs any concessions, in my estimation, that were made to the Clinton administration.

Mr. HUNTER. That is exactly right.

Mr. HUNTER. The Speaker is exactly right. That means out of 10 aircraft that are on the line when you call for them to do their mission operation to carry out their mission, only about 60 percent, a little over 60 percent of those aircraft are capable of doing it, and that is after we have cut our air wings from 24 to 13 fighter air wings. So we have roughly half the air power that we had during Desert Storm. And even those aircraft, those reduced squadrons, are becoming very unready.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the Speaker for the opportunity to talk a little bit about what has happened to defense under this administration. We are going to be about 800 pilots short in the Air Force this year. We are already about 18,000 sailors short in manning the ships. When I talk about the ships, it is not 600 ships anymore, it is only about 330 ships in the United States Navy. We are about $1.6 billion short in basic ammunition for the men and women of the United States Army. We are about $193 million short of basic ammunition for the United States Marine Corps. Our aircraft, which have a certain mission capability rate, that means if you have 10 airplanes in the hangar or 10 airplanes on the carrier deck, how many of those planes will be able to fly out if they are called for a mission. Our aircraft mission capability rate has fallen from about 72 percent on the average, Navy, Marine and Air Force, to about 61 or 62 percent, a massive fall in what we call mission capability.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the Speaker for yielding. I was watching his remarks over the last several minutes. I want to thank him and all the others who worked for a strong national defense in this emergency supplemental. It is very, very critical. I would simply ask him to talk a little bit about the fact that the North Koreans now have an ICBM capability.

Mr. HUNTER

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

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thought this might be an appropriate moment, too, to reflect on the fact that today we do not have a lot of World War II veterans in the United States Congress. At one time we had a lot of them but we now have very few. I know the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hall) is a World War II veteran, I believe a pilot, and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Sisisky) is a World War II veteran. I know on our side, on the national security side, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Stump) is a World War II veteran. He claims he joined at the age of 11. I think he is trying to keep his age down there. I just want to express my thanks to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hall) for all of the great service that he has given this country, long before he came to the House of Representatives. I believe we only have a handful of World War II veterans right now serving in the U.S. Congress. Is that accurate?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Procurement of the Committee on National Security, I rise in support of H.R. 4519. This bill would consent to the third-party transfer at no cost to the U.S. Government of the ex-U.S.S. Bowman County, a World War II era tank loading ship, to the U.S.S. LST Ship Memorial, Incorporated, a not-for-profit organization. This organization would operate the vessel as a memorial to the veterans of World War II amphibious landings. The ex-U.S.S. Bowman County is currently the property of the government of Greece. It was transferred to Greece in 1960 under the Military Assistance Program. Today, Greece wants to dispose of this vessel and is willing to transfer the ship back to the U.S. Government, who would then transfer it to the LST Ship Memorial, Incorporated. That is the state of play, Mr. Speaker. We support this particular bill very strongly on the Republican side of the aisle and in the Committee on National Security. We want to commend, of course, not only the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Sisisky), the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Military Procurement, but also the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hall), who has been the prime mover of this particular bill. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 4519, the bill under consideration.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4519) to authorize the President to consent to third party transfer of the ex-U.S.S. Bowman County to the U.S.S. LST Ship Memorial, Inc.

Mr. HUNTER

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

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California, my good colleague who came in with me in 1980 and somehow went wrong, but he is my great friend. Mr. Speaker, one of the first rules in business is one does not give financial power to bad businessmen. The negotiators on the Clinton trade team are bad businessmen. That is, they have a bad record. NAFTA took us from a $3 billion surplus in trade over Mexico to an annual $15 billion loss. It took us to an increased trade loss with China that brings us close to a $40 billion annual trade loss. The trade agreement with Japan under the Clinton administration has broken down. The Clinton team consists of trade losers. Do not give power to trade losers. Not this President, not this time.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I talked yesterday about the problems with national security that are now becoming acknowledged, not only by Members of the Congress, but also, for the first time in four years, by the President himself. Now that the President has admitted that there is a shortfall in funding for national security, the services themselves are coming forward and testifying, as they did today, and telling us what the problem is. They now feel that they are not circumventing their commander-in-chief if they lay their cards on the table before Congress. And let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, I was pretty shocked by the numbers and the situations that were described today by the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Air Force, and I want to share those numbers and those shortfalls with you. First I want to point your attention to what is known as mission capable rates. Mission capable rates mean when we have an aircraft carrier off the shores of the Middle East and we have planes on that carrier. We make an analysis as to whether or not its planes can fly out, hit their targets and return safely to the carrier. That is a pretty important part of our power projection with the U.S. Navy. Our mission capable rate, that means the ability of the airplane to fly off the carrier, wheels up, move that two or three or four hundred miles to its target, drop its ordnance and come back, that rate has gone down from 69 percent in 1993 to 61 percent today. With the Air Force, the mission capable rate of their aircraft has gone down from 83.4 percent in 1991 to 74 percent today. That means 25 percent of their aircraft are not mission capable. They cannot do their job. With the Marines, we have gone down from 77 percent in 1995 to only 61 percent mission capable rate today. Mr. Speaker, the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Army also talked about other aspects of their equipment that are now in shortfall. You know we had a 600 ship Navy a few years ago under president Ronald Reagan. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we decided we could bring that Navy down some. But this president, President Clinton, is building ships at such a slow rate that we are building to a 200 ship Navy. We are going from a 600 ship Navy to a 200 ship Navy, and we cannot accomplish our responsibilities around the world with a fleet that small. With respect to ammunition, the service chiefs told us that our ammunition shortfall now is 1.7 billion for the Army and 193 million for the United States Marine Corps. Ammunition is pretty basic, and we do not have what we need. With respect to equipment, this CH-46 helicopter is right now the mainstay for the United States Marine Corps until they get the V-22. That aircraft, which has had a number of crashes in the last several years, is over 40 years old. Their attack vehicle, their amphibious vehicle that they ride out of the ships on and go right up on the beaches when they have to make a front-on assault, that vehicle is an average of 26 years old. With respect to personnel, the United States Air Force is going to be 700 pilots short this year and the United States Navy is going to be 18,000 sailors short this year. The U.S. Marine Corps aviators are having a separation rate, that means the rate where they come in and tell their unit I am leaving; I could reenlist, but I am leaving; I am going to go into private enterprise. I may be a pilot for an airline, I am leaving. Only 42 percent of them separated in 1995. Most of them stayed on with the Marine Corps. Today, 92 percent of our pilots are leaving. They are getting out of Dodge. They are going into the private sector. That leaves us short. So, Mr. Speaker, I will continue over the next several weeks to talk a little bit more about the shortages we have in defense, and lastly I will talk a little bit about what we are going to have to do in terms of putting resources into defense to rebuild our military.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I have a graph here that shows the G7, that is the big nations of the world, the big western democracies and their net exports to Mexico before and after NAFTA. That includes the United States. We call this chart ``Find the dummies,'' because it is apparent that, after NAFTA, every one of the big nations, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, UK and Japan, all continue to do well with Mexico with respect to trade, except the United States. The United States immediately fell into an enduring $15 billion trade deficit. The first rule of business is one does not give their money to poor business managers. The Clinton trade team consists of poor business managers. Not this President, not this time.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. My friend makes a great point, and there is one other thing that we have done for every union worker and every nonunion worker in this country, and it was done by Presidents Reagan and Bush, and that is that we built a military that was strong enough. Besides providing those millions of jobs, one million of which have been cut by the Clinton administration, but besides providing those jobs, we fielded a force, a military force, which, since 1991, has been cut roughly in half, but which was so strong in 1990 and 1991, that when we took on Saddam Hussein in the sands of the Middle East, even though we sent over, in my understanding, 40,000 body bags, that is where they put the bodies of the dead Americans after they have been killed in battle, we sent over 40,000 empty body bags, only a very few Americans came back in those bags because we were so strong that we won overwhelmingly without many casualties. If we had to fight that war today, having cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions, our air power from 24 air wings to only 13, and our navy ships from 546 ships to about 333 ships, we could not win overwhelmingly. We would lose more Americans. The gentleman knows how great it is when we go to a union picnic and we see, like during Desert Storm, all those bumper stickers saying, ``I support our men in Desert Storm'', ``I support our troops,'' ``I support our soldiers.'' The best service we can do for working men and women is to see to it that they come home, when they are of service age; that they come home alive, with all their faculties. And if they are retired and they have a couple of kids out there, to see to it that their kids come home alive, with all their faculties. That is why we need a strong defense. I thank my friend for bringing that point up. Mr. Speaker, let me just close on this pending fast track, and why I think it is a bad idea. I think we have established that trade deals are business deals. And if we look at the trade lobbyists and some of the proceedings that are now being investigated with respect to this administration, I do not think we can give them a clean bill of health and say that they were not unduly influenced by some bad elements. I think that is putting it charitably. Secondly, I think they just are not smart enough or good enough to make good deals. After 4 years of making deals with China, we have now a trade deficit with Communist China that is over $40 billion a year. So we have lost in trade with China. The merchandise trading lost this year was a loss to the United States, according to our own statistics from the Clinton administration, of over $240 billion. So the first rule is, if we have a guy who is a businessman who always loses money, we do not trust him with all our money. That is pretty simple. That is a very basic thing. We have, unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, folks in the Clinton administration who are losers, proven losers with respect to making trade deals, and we should not entrust all of this power to them. So not this President and not this time. Mr. Speaker, I will be back with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and other members of the Committee on National Security to talk a little bit more about the need to rebuild national defense over the next several weeks.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman makes an important point. I know he is on the select committee, the special committee that is looking at this administration's transfer of technology to Communist China with respect to satellite technology and missile technology. I saw what I thought was a great cartoon the other day. Some cartoons really hit close to home. It had a truth to it. The first question in the cartoon was, which country's missile technology has the Clinton administration most improved? And the second part of the cartoon was, Communist China's. And the gentleman, I would ask him to make any comments that he can make at this time because I know he is on the special committee, but basically this administration allowed the top engineers and scientists in this country, people who can go out and examine a missile and tell what is wrong with it, they allowed them to interchange and meet with and send papers to the Communist Chinese rocket scientists who were having real trouble making the Long March missile work. The Long March missile is a missile that the Chinese Communists use for two things. One is they put up satellites with them. Some of our satellite companies in the United States hire them to shoot our satellites up on their missiles. But the other use of the Long March is they have nuclear warheads on some of them aimed at cities in the United States. It is not in our interest for the Long March missile to work. Especially if it is launched at Los Angeles. However, our engineers, under the permissions or the negligence of the Clinton administration, were allowed to engage for months at the request of the Chinese Communists, after they had some failures with the Long March missile launching a satellite, to engage with them and show them what they were doing wrong and after that series of interchanges, their most important type of Long March missile, as I understand it, has not had a failure. That means we helped them fix whatever was wrong. That reminds me about the joke about the three guys who were caught by Khomeini and they were going to be guillotined, and the first one got under the guillotine and Khomeini ordered pull and the guillotine came halfway down and stuck. Khomeini said, that must be a message from Allah, let this man go. The second guy gets under there and he says, pull, and they pull it, sticks halfway down. Another message. Let him go. The third guy gets under and says, I think I see your problem. That is kind of what we did with the Chinese and the Long March missile. Here we are, the target of those missiles carrying nuclear warheads, and our engineers are over there in China showing them what is making the missiles crash after they have only gone a few miles. We want those missiles to crash.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman because our conference report, and that is supported by the chairman and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), supports the gentleman's goal of vigorously pursuing the radar improvements that the gentleman has accurately noted are needed. The $50 million increase to the Navy Theater Wide program is specifically dedicated to accelerating these radar improvements and to ensure that the radar can support the full range of Navy requirements, including cruise and ballistic missile threats. And, once again, this is a very imperative program.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the chairman of the full committee also for working the missile defense issue, especially in light of the fact that the North Koreans are now very close to having an ICBM, that is intercontinental ballistic missile, capability. This provision is absolutely imperative.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. I have already made a statement during the rule debate, but let me just say again that this bill need to be passed. It is a bare minimum. It is a starting point. Today, after years of our committee telling the President that we are underfunded in defense, he has announced that he believes we are underfunded in defense. With respect to fixed-wing aircraft, rotary aircraft, our shipbuilding program, our missile defense program, and lots of what I would call ham and eggs items, those are the generators and the small trucks and the heavy trucks, and all the things that make our military move, we are shortfunded. We are building today, once again, to a fleet of 200 ships in the U.S. Navy. I think the stability of the world depends on a strong America and our ability to project military power. We have lost a great deal of that ability over the last 4 years. It is time to rebuild, and the first thing we can do, and every Member can do to contributing to that rebuilding of defense, is to pass this conference report. Everyone should vote for this report.