Mac Thornberry

Mr. THORNBERRY

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to House Resolution 735, I offer amendments en bloc.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Among the amendments in this en bloc package is one that I have authored to establish a global engagement center. I thank my cosponsors of this amendment, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Langevin, the chair and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats & Capabilities. I also thank Chairman Royce, who has worked with us. Included in this amendment are reforms of the Broadcasting Board of Governors that he and his ranking member have worked on for some time. Mr. Chair, it has been a source of great frustration for me that our government has seemed to be so inept in the battle of ideas against the terrorists. I first introduced a bill on this topic in 2005. Today there is a lot of talk not only of the so-called physical caliphate that ISIS claims, but of the virtual caliphate. Unless and until we can be more effective at engaging in the battle of ideas, we will not succeed in defeating terrorism. It is not just the terrorists we have to worry about. We have seen the Russians lie and use deception for military gain. We have seen similar sorts of tactics by the Chinese in their building these islands out in the South China Sea and elsewhere around the world. This amendment requires the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and others--the executive branch--to get their act together, coordinate, and more effectively engage in the battle of ideas. I hope it helps. As I say, this is a crucial battlefield, and our country needs to do better in this field. Mr. Chair, as I have no further speakers at this point, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chair, I urge the adoption of the en bloc package. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, the Spectrum Pipeline Act was included in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 that we passed in December. Now, apparently, there has developed some disagreement among lawyers about whether that had some effect on section 1062(b) of the fiscal year 2000 National Defense Authorization Act related to spectrum. My amendment simply clarifies what everyone that I know of agrees on, and that is it was never intended to have any effect. We have assurance from the Office of Management and Budget that was their intention. I appreciate Chairman Fred Upton, who has worked with us on this amendment, saying that was not his intention. Basically, Mr. Chairman, I see this as a technical amendment to resolve some disagreement among lawyers. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Montana (Mr. Zinke), a member of the committee.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds. Mr. Chairman, the reason these weapons have not been used since 1945 is that we have had a credible nuclear deterrent. The fastest way to have a more dangerous, destabilized world is for the credibility of that deterrent to erode, and I worry about that. Secondly, if you look at what is planned with upgrading the weapons and the delivery systems, at no point does it become more than 11 percent of the U.S. defense budget. That is a pretty good investment to make sure that they are not used, and I suggest that it is well worth the investment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman from Colorado raising the issue that he just raised because it gives me the opportunity to affirm that many of the programs he was just mentioning like the Black Hawks, for example, have been requested by many of the Members on his side of the aisle. And they were included in the unfunded requirements list from the Army. So the way it works is we get all sorts of requests from Members on both sides of the aisle. Each of the services gives us a list of what they would like to have had in the budget request but the administration took out, and then where the two match up as Member priorities and service priorities, that is what these funds are. It is not that they weren't asked for from the military. It is the military wanted them but OMB took them out. And when you have many Members, particularly on the Black Hawks, the V-22s, the LCS, and a number of the items he just mentioned on his side of the aisle, asking for them as well as the service, then that becomes part of the modernization priority. Let me just make one other point. In the Black Hawk case specifically, these new Black Hawks will replace helicopters that were built in 1979, for which we cannot get parts, which have very restricted flight envelopes because of all the restrictions. They can't be repaired. They can't do everything the Army wants them to do. So the administration did not ask for any. Many Members on the Democratic side asked for some. We put them in here. And that is the way to fix readiness: by replacing a 1979 helicopter with a 2016 helicopter. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to House Resolution 735, I offer amendments en bloc.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa).

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, I think I made clear a few moments ago that I believe we need to have a better way to fund defense, a more predictable way. But, Mr. Chairman, I am not willing to wait to support the military until that is done. I am not willing to wait until we have tax reform and entitlement reform and all sorts of other things before I am willing to stand up and support the military. There are lives at stake today, and we have enormous challenges in the future, there is no question, budgetary and otherwise. But I think it would be a mistake if I were to say we have all these challenges coming down the road, therefore, I am not going to fix this problem that is affecting pilots, mechanics, others today. We can do something about it today. As a matter of fact, the gentleman talks about the Budget Control Act. We have made some alterations to the Budget Control Act for each of the last 4 years because of this problem. I think most people, at least on both sides of the aisle, realize that when you cut defense 23 percent since 2010, and the world is not 23 percent safer, we are not asking our military folks for 23 percent fewer deployments, that something has got to give. So there has been--it has been painful, it has been messy, it has not been ideal, but there has been some alterations to the Budget Control Act. I said a while ago that I am for doing away with these artificial caps. The Budget Control Act did not work as anyone, I think, intended. There was never the mandatory spending reform that was the goal. And what bore the brunt of the cuts? Defense. Fifteen percent of the budget has absorbed 50 percent of the cuts under the Budget Control Act. That is wrong. Now, I think if Members on both sides of the aisle committed to working together to fix that, we could. Now, that would involve not having a President use the military as a hostage to try to force more domestic spending, which is what this President has done. That would mean that we focus on trying to fix defense, and understand that all of us have other priorities that we need to also work on at the same time. But we are always going to have different budget laws and different circumstances. I still do not understand how a Democratic majority, in 2008, could use this approach, to give the new President the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of a fresh look; and when we try to do the same for the next President, who none of us know who it is going to be, but when we try to use the same approach, all of a sudden then you just can't do it. It is irresponsible, it is a gimmick, and all sorts of names. The gentleman mentioned that we are not making choices and mentioned specifically the A-10. Mr. Chairman, there are a lot more things that I would like to have done in this bill, lots of additional programs I would like to have authorized. We had to make difficult choices. But just to take the A-10 for an example, the administration has proposed eliminating the A-10 for the past several years. This Congress reached a different judgment on that. That is what the Constitution, by the way, says we are supposed to do. It is our job to raise and support, build and maintain the Armed Forces of the United States. On the A-10 program, we reached a different conclusion. We decided that, until you have something to take its place, we shouldn't get rid of it. And you know what? The Secretary of Defense has testified that it has been devastating in its use against ISIS today. If we had eliminated it, it wouldn't be there. So sometimes our judgment--and we have a long list of instances where Congress, under majorities of both parties, have exercised a different judgment from the administration and where we were proved right. So we make tough choices. Sometimes our choices actually turn out to look pretty good in hindsight. But the bottom line, Mr. Chairman, is we could all wait to support a defense bill until some far-off condition were met. It is easy to vote ``no'' unless something happens or unless some condition is met; but for this, if only that. That is easy. But that does not fix the immediate problems that face the men and women who volunteer to defend our country, the problems that they are facing today. That is what we are trying to do with this bill. We don't actually fix them. We just start to turn it around. I don't think there is an excuse that justifies opposing doing what is right for them, and that is the reason I believe that this bill should be supported. I hope Members will support this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I have no further speakers. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, no one can contest the gentlewoman from California's sincerity on this issue. On September 14, 2001, when this House passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that she is talking about, 3 days after 3,000 Americans had been murdered on 9/11, the vote in this House was 420-1, and the one person who voted against this AUMF was the gentlewoman from California who offered this amendment. So her sincerity cannot be questioned. I also, by the way, happen to agree with her that we need to update this AUMF. As a matter of fact, this House passed, twice, provisions that I had authored to update the 2001 AUMF. We passed it in 2011; we passed it in 2012. Unfortunately, the administration says: No, we are opposed to that; the one we have got is just fine. And the Senate took that position, and so it did not get passed into law. But to say, now, to unilaterally repeal the 2001 AUMF on which the administration is relying for all its counterterrorism activities not only against al Qaeda, but against ISIS and others, to repeal it now, I believe, would be a mistake. There are still real dangers in the world from terrorists. I don't think I need to remind Members of Paris, of Brussels, of San Bernardino, and just today, of Baghdad. The other point I want to make, Mr. Chairman, is I think we all underestimate the catastrophes that have been avoided--in other words, the terrorist plots, what they wanted to do, what they tried to do-- that were thwarted. Sometimes they were thwarted just because we were lucky, but a lot of times they were thwarted because of the work of the men and women in the military, the men and women in the intelligence community, the men and women in law enforcement doing a lot of hard work, sacrificing, some of them losing their lives to make sure that we did not have a repeat of the 3,000 people murdered on 9/11. We owe them, Mr. Chairman, more than just a thank-you. We owe them whatever preparation, whatever equipment, whatever support they need to continue to battle terrorists today. That is what this bill tries to do: to make sure that we don't send people out in the Middle East to bomb terrorists on airplanes that cannot fly, that cannot be maintained, that we don't wear our pilots and our mechanics out. That is readiness. That is what we are talking about in this bill. That is what we have an obligation in this House to do for them who do so much for us. I oppose the gentlewoman's amendment. As I say, I have tremendous respect for her views and the sincerity with which she holds them. I think it results in a more dangerous world. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to House Resolution 735, I offer amendments en bloc.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, just to be clear, the President in his budget request takes some of the OCO dollars and uses it to meet base requirements. He does that in his budget. It is not a question of whether it is done or not. The question is, how much? And even though the President uses OCO dollars to help meet base shortfalls, his own Comptroller in the defense budget review writes, even though they do that in the President's budget request: ``The Department will continue to experience gaps in training and maintenance over the near term and have a reduced margin of error in dealing with risks of uncertainty in a dynamic and shifting security environment.'' In other words, even the President's own budget documents say that it is not enough what he has done. So what we try to do is we try to do more. We are not going to do it all, but we try to do more to make sure that the training and maintenance that our troops are entitled to are provided. What that means is we should not send anyone out on a mission for which they are not fully prepared and fully supported. The problem is, as I mentioned awhile ago with the Black Hawk example, some of these folks have to fly helicopters that were made in 1979. I, myself, saw a fighter plane that President Reagan sent to bomb Muammar Qadhafi in 1986, and they couldn't find the parts for it. The pilot tried. He figured out a way to take a part off of a museum aircraft and tried to make it fit, but the holes were drilled in the wrong place, so it didn't work. The only thing you can do to replace a helicopter made in 1979 or an airplane that was flown on a mission in 1986 is to get a new one. So that is what the procurement is. As I mentioned a few moments ago, we have had a number of people from the Democratic side of the aisle who have asked for C-40s, MQ-4s, Black Hawks, B-22s, F-18s, F-35s, C-130s. Now, they didn't just invent that. The reason that Democratic Members have asked for those things above and beyond what the President submitted is because there is a real need and because the only way we are going to fix some of these readiness problems, in addition to more money for training and maintenance, more money for facilities, and preventing further cuts in end strength, is to replace some of this old equipment with new equipment. That is what we do. The gentleman would undo that. I think his amendment should be defeated. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Massachusetts, and he is exactly right. He and other Members are very concerned about this issue. He has talked to me about it a number of times. I have been concerned that there was abuse of this system. That was gathered from visits I have made to Afghanistan, including last year. But I very much appreciate the points that the gentleman from Massachusetts has made. I think he and others who have worked on this issue have come up with a good amendment. I support it. All of us agree that if someone has risked their lives or would be in danger for supporting the United States and our folks in Afghanistan, then that person needs protection. None of us want to see the program abused. But I am convinced that the changes that the gentleman has been instrumental in working out are helpful. I support it. And I thank him for his efforts on doing this. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wittman), the distinguished chairman of the Subcommittee on Readiness.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Turner).

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.