Samuel Nunn

Mr. NUNN

Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, on behalf of Senators Heflin and Shelby, I offer an amendment which would expand the provision of the authorization bill which authorizes the Secretary of Defense to retain a number of civilian employees in any military base approved for closure by the 1995 BRAC round where an enclave is going to be maintained to support active and resserve training, and where the base is scheduled for transfer to the National Guard in 1997. Specifically, the amendment would remove the requirement that the base be scheduled for transfer in 1997. I believe the amendment has been cleared on the other side.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4307 (Purpose: To require a report on facilities used for testing launch vehicle engines)

Mr. NUNN. I urge the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4308 (Purpose: To provide an additional exception for the cost limitation for procurement of Seawolf submarines)

Mr. NUNN. I urge the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4310 (Purpose: To state the sense of the Senate on Department of Defense sharing of its experiences under military youth programs)

Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Kennedy and Senator Coats, I offer an amendment which would provide a sense of the Senate that military and civilian youth program coordinators could benefit from greater exchange of information and close relationship between military installations and the local communities that support them. I believe this amendment has been cleared by the other side of the aisle.

Mr. NUNN. This amendment has been cleared. I urge its adoption.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4313 (Purpose: Relating to the participation of the State of Oregon in remedial actions at the Hanford Reservation, Washington)

Mr. NUNN. I urge the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4314 (Purpose: To propose an alternative section 3158 relating to the redesignation of the Defense Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program)

Mr. NUNN. I urge the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4315 (Purpose: To require the Secretary of the Army to complete as soon as is practicable the previously authorized land conveyances involving Fort Sheridan, IL)

Mr. NUNN. For Senators Simon and Moseley-Braun, I offer an amendment which would complete the land conveyances at Fort Sheridan, IL. I believe the amendment has been cleared on the other side of the aisle.

Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, this amendment has been cleared, and I urge its approval.

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4320 (Purpose: To extend the term of the remaining transitional member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces)

Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, please notify me in 6 minutes so I know how much time I consume. I rise in opposition to the Wellstone amendment which reduces defense funding authorized in this bill by $13 billion. For several years I have been expressing my concern that the actual and projected declining defense budgets are not sufficient from force standpoints, one, to maintain the current readiness of our military forces, two, to provide the standard of living that military personnel and their families expect and deserve, three, supporting the force structure necessary to carry out the full range of missions that we expect our military forces to be able to perform, and, fourth, to provide for the modernization that is the key to the future capability and future readiness of these forces. Mr. President, modernization is our greatest deficiency. We are in effect living off of the capital of our previous investment in terms of the modernization account. Mr. President, while we all recognize you can live off your previous investments for awhile, you cannot do it forever. We cannot do it in our personal lives; and we cannot do it in our Government; and it certainly cannot be done in our defense budget. National defense is a continuing obligation of our Government under the Constitution, and the tools we need to do the job simply do not last forever. They have to be replaced. They have to be updated. They have to be modernized. We have to invest in new capital. In this age of rapidly declining technology, our previous investments can become obsolete even before they wear out physically. The men and women in the military continue to perform superbly every time they are called on. And we are calling on them all the time all over the world. We owe it to them to give them the support they need to do their job. We also have to ensure that the men and women who will be called on in 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years, will have the same advantages vis-a-vis our potential opponents that our military forces have today, including our technological superiority. I do not think we can expect our men and women who volunteer to defend our country to do so with obsolete technology. During the long defense drawdown, I think military services have done a remarkable job reducing our force in a way that was fair as far as possible to the men and women in uniform as well as the civilian employees of the Department of Defense and the defense industry. We have gone to great lengths with special incentives to ensure we did not break the force in terms of morale during the drawdown. With some limited exceptions, we have also kept the readiness high while accomplishing this drawdown. Readiness overall is in good shape today. But the problem is, we have been borrowing from the future to accomplish these other desirable goals: Protecting readiness, reducing the force structure gradually enough to keep the quality up, giving generous early retirement benefits to make sure that we treat our forces fairly, and keeping the turmoil in the force drawdown to a manageable level. I believe the defense spending levels included in the fiscal year 1997 budget resolution are about right. We do know we are going to need to bring our level down by a little over $1.7 billion to get it in compliance with the budget resolution. It is my view that we should do that on the floor. And we should make it clear, before it goes to conference, that we are in full compliance with the budget resolution. The bill is now slightly over. I believe we will have to cut about $1.7 billion from this bill now before us in order to get it in compliance with the budget resolution, which is the guideline that this committee is bound to live by. While the 1997 defense topline is an increase from the President's budget, it still is below last year's budget level in defense in real dollar terms. So when people talk about the increase in the defense budget in the budget resolution and in this bill, they are really talking about an increase relative to the President's budget, they are not talking about an increase compared to last year. I hope people understand that. Defense, even if the Wellstone amendment is defeated, will still be coming down in real dollar terms. I hope we will start moving towards stabilizing the defense budget by the end of this decade even though it will be at a much lower level than we had at the start of the decade. While I believe that the funding levels requested for readiness, military pay raises, and quality of life initiatives in the President's budget are about right, I think there are clearly insufficient funds going into modernizing our force. Modernization, for the most part, is delayed into the outyears under the current future years defense program. We all know from experience how illusory these projections become 4 years or 5 years down the road. The fiscal squeeze on the budget is already intense. As we seek to balance the budget, we should not make it worse by trying to enact tax cuts at the same time, which is what the overall budget resolution calls for. I do not agree with that. I think that is not the right way to go, but this is not the time for that debate. I hope, in the final analysis, we will understand that if we really want a balanced budget, we need to go ahead and get that job done and declare the dividend later, rather than declaring a dividend and having a celebration with a tax cut before we have even gotten the job done and before the U.S. Treasury is in decent shape. Anyway, that is another story. While outyear projections show funds for defense modernization increasing, I have great concern on that score because I do not think that is in the cards in light of the effort to get the budget balanced in 2002, a goal that I completely agree with. I think we need to remember, first of all, the funding differences between the administration and the budget before us are not that great. The budget resolution is 1 percent higher over the next 6 years.

Mr. NUNN. If the Senator will give me 2 or 3 more minutes.

Mr. NUNN. I thank the Senator. Mr. President, we need to understand that while the defense spending levels in the budget resolution are higher than the President's budget this year, they are actually lower than the Clinton administration's defense plan in terms of budget authority starting in the year 2001. In other words, the administration is lower than the Congress this year, but higher in the outyears. I think the administration's outyear defense plan for 2001 and 2002 is about what we are going to need in terms of the defense budget, but I think the budget resolution is probably more realistic in terms of what we can afford for defense if we really are going to drive for a balanced budget in 2002. However, I feel that both the President's balanced budget plan and the Republican budget resolution, which is also aimed at balancing the budget, both of them assume unrealistic cuts in the outyears in overall discretionary spending, which includes defense, but is not limited to defense. That is betting on the future, and I think is an illusion. We are not going to make those size cuts in the outyears. That means under neither the budget resolution, nor the administration's proposal, are we likely to make the kind of cuts required to get the budget balanced in 2002. That is why I supported the Chafee-Breaux alternative, which in my view, represented a much more realistic picture of what is achievable, sustainable and sensible in terms of both defense and nondefense spending. In my view, Mr. President, we need to increase the defense topline now, to restore the balance to our defense program. We also need to extend the firewalls that the Senator from New Mexico has reinstated for fiscal years 1996, 1997, and 1998 in the budget resolution to protect any defense increases we are able to achieve and to provide some stability in the defense budget. Firewalls do not mean the defense budget cannot be cut. It can be. It does mean it will not be shifted to other nondefense purposes. We have been reducing the defense budget for a long time. The current builddown started during President Reagan's second term, significantly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It continued and was accelerated through the Bush administration and the Clinton administration. However, Mr. President, the time has come to stabilize the defense budget as much as possible. The defense budget has already made a major contribution to deficit reduction, more so than any other part of the budget. I am often intrigued by the arguments made about how many Federal employees we have cut out in the last several years. Mr. President, if you look at the numbers--I do not have the exact numbers in my mind-- something like 70 percent of all the Federal employees that have been cut from the payroll have been cut from the Department of Defense. Defense is doing its part, has done its part. We need to begin to level it off. Even if we defeat this amendment, there would still be a decrease in the defense budget in real-dollar terms from last year. Mr. President, modernization funding should be increased. The future readiness and future capability of the Defense Department requires modernization and it requires research and development. Those are the programs that have been cut most deeply during the defense drawdown. The pressure to achieve and maintain a balanced budget will make it very difficult to increase the defense budget above current levels--yet current levels are still artificially low as we work back towards a normal level of procurement and a normal level of infrastructure investment. Because we were reducing the size of the force and were able to keep the most modern equipment as we downsized, a temporary decline in procurement was appropriate. But we are now reaching the point where we have to get our modernization budget back up to a long-term level that will sustain our forces for the future. We have to start increasing the procurement budget to prevent the average age of our weapons technology from reaching unacceptable levels. At the same time, because the personnel drawdown is nearly complete, we are not going to be able to continue to reduce that part of our defense budget. It is unrealistic to expect this long period of declining defense budgets to continue. Similarly, during the BRAC era we underinvested in facilities modernization because nobody wanted to waste money modernizing facilities we might be about to shut down. But now that we have made those decisions and the BRAC process is over we are going to have to put more money in modernizing and maintaining the facilities we have left. So our children will be to have a budget that is slightly larger than the ones now planned. If we are going to balance the budget, it is unrealistic to plan for more than a slight increase. The budget resolution only increases the defense budget by about 1 percent over the levels in the administration's request--in order to have adequate funds for capital investments in weapons and facilities. This is why I oppose amendments which would reduce the defense topline number below the levels agreed to in the budget resolution. The funds added to the administration request by the committee have gone almost entirely to modernization--in other words, they have been invested in the future. I think my colleagues will find that the funds the Armed Services Committee added to the modernization accounts have gone mostly, not completely, to programs the service chiefs have requested, and most of these were programs the administration was already planning to do. So, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the Wellstone amendment.

Mr. NUNN. Yes, that is my belief of what we should do. I am not absolutely certain that will be done yet. I hope that would be done.

Mr. NUNN. I say to the Senator, is he assuming his amendment may not pass. If it is adopted, I will not be proposing that $1.7 billion.

Mr. NUNN. I will include the Senator on that if we are so fortunate as to defeat the Wellstone amendment.

Mr. NUNN. I understand. I know what the Senator was doing. I will respond briefly. There is the problem, though, that the reduction here will have to come out of modernization. This is a procurement account, which is already where the problem is.

Mr. NUNN

Mr. NUNN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Mr. LOTT addressed the Chair.