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NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996
(House of Representatives - June 13, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H5782-H5892] NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996 The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 164 and rule XXIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 1530. In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill (H.R. 1530) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 1996 for military activities of the Department of Defense, to prescribe military personnel strengths for fiscal year 1996, and for other purposes with Mr. Emerson in the Chair. The Clerk read the title of the bill. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] will each be recognized for 1 hour. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence]. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to section 5(c) of House Resolution 164, I request that during the consideration of H.R. 1530, amendments number 1 and 2 printed in subpart B of part 1 of House Report 104-136 be considered before amendment number 1 printed in subpart A of part 1 of that report. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman's request is noted. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. SPENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. This bill is the first since the end of the cold war to truly look to the future while not ignoring the present. Much has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, but much remains the same. First and foremost, the United States is still a superpower with global, political, economic, and moral interests. Yet none of these can be protected, nor promoted, without a strong military. We still live in a violent world: from ethnic conflicts to regional wars, the United States has faced and will face a host of challenges to its national interests. Nor have all the changes we have seen in the post-cold-war world been benign. The crumbling of communism has rekindled rivalries and hatreds frozen in place for decades. In Asia, Africa, Europe, and even here in the Americas, armed force remains the ultimate arbiter of political disputes. The Clinton administration has responded to this growing chaos with an ambitious but ill-defined strategy of engagement and enlargement. The President has resolved to be able to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional wars in the decisive fashion Americans demand. Moreover, this administration has taken on an increased number of commitments in the form of a wide range of U.N.-led peace operations. While asking more of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, the administration is simultaneously giving them fewer tools to work with: fewer troops, fewer new weapons, fewer training opportunities. What was once a cautious and disciplined reduction in American forces has plunged into a decade of defense decline--a decline that has created a dangerous $250 billion gap between strategy and resources. The administration can neither honor its present strategic commitments nor prepare for future challenges. For the first time in a decade, the defense authorization bill says-- STOP. Stop the slide in defense spending. Stop the dissipation of our military power on futile missions. Stop the postponing of proper training. Stop the decline of our defense industrial base. Stop the erosion of servicemembers' quality of life. Stop frittering away defense resources on nondefense research. Stop the shell game that is mortgaging long-term modernization needs in order to plug holes in underfunded near-term readiness and quality of life accounts. This bill also starts the process of revitalizing America's defenses. Be sure that American soldiers are under American command. Set a clear course for stable and predictable defense spending. Provide the men and women who wear an American uniform with adequate training. Preserve the technological edge that is a force multiplier and saves lives. Guarantee a decent standard of living for them and their families. Protect our troops abroad and Americans here at home from the threat of ballistic missiles. This bill's efforts to bridge the growing inconsistencies between strategy and resource, and therefore begin a meaningful revitalization of our defenses, rests on four pillars: First, it improves the quality of service life by raising pay, enhancing housing benefits, increasing construction of family housing and prohibiting deeper cuts in manpower levels. Second, It preserves near and far-term military readiness by more robustly funding core readiness accounts and by creating a mechanism for funding the growing number of unbudgeted contingency operations from non-readiness accounts. Third, it dramatically increases weapons modernization funding in response to the administration's having mortgaged these programs to address near-term shortfalls. Modernization will help to ensure cutting edge technology on the battlefield in the future, as well as a viable industrial base to provide this technology. Fourth, it begins to aggressively reform the bloated and unresponsive Pentagon bureaucracy by reducing a growing civilian Secretariat as well as the acquisition work force, streamlining the procurement process, and eliminating nondefense research and encouraging privatization initiatives. This last pillar, in particular, is essential for generating longterm savings needed to maintain American military might over time as well as creating a more agile Defense Department able to respond in a timely manner to new challenges. Our men and women in uniform, and certainly the taxpayers, deserve no less. These four pillars are central to a sound defense program, one that can begin to bridge the gap between strategy and resources. This bill protects the peace we have won in the cold war and prepares us to prevail quickly and decisively in the future. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1530. It is a bipartisan bill on an important set of bipartisan issues. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. DELLUMS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the recommendation of the Committee on National Security on the bill before the body at this time, H.R. 1530, as amended. Mr. Chairman, the overall level of expenditures contained within the bill is too high, even though within the budget resolution limits. The bill's spending returns us to cold war priorities, and numerous provisions promote extreme agendas on major social issues. Deliberation on the bill has been so frustrated that the committee's well-developed and well-earned legacy of bipartisanship has tattered because of the unwillingness sincerely to solicit administration and alternative views. H.R. 1530 contains numerous and sweeping provisions that have been developed without, Mr. Chairman, and I underscore for emphasis without, the benefit of full consultation with the administration and others, and have not been illuminated properly even by the subcommittee's and full committee's hearing process. These include initiatives and personnel matters, weapons [[Page H5783]] procurement, research and development, foreign policy initiatives, and acquisition reform. The committee, Mr. Chairman, would embark upon an extraordinary costly program to purchase new B-2 bombers, even after all of the testimony the committee received by the Department of Defense and the services concluded that additional B-2's were not needed, and that their purchase would crowd out other higher priority programs. Yes, we will later today debate more fully this issue, but the inclusion of funding for additional B-2's is sufficient reason alone to reject this committee report. Parenthetically, Mr. Chairman, this bill contains $553 million to begin long-lead items for two additional B-2 bombers that ultimately results in an effort to build 20 additional B-2 bombers. At a time when we just came through a budget process that will visit pain and human misery by virtue of the draconian cuts in that budget upon the children of this country, mothers in this country, senior citizens in this country, veterans, and farmers, and others in America, this bill calls for beginning to go down the road toward the expenditure of $31.5 billion to build 20 planes, $19.7 billion to build them and to equip them, $11.8 billion to operate and maintain them throughout the life cycle of that plane. At a time when we are in community meetings saying we must visit pain upon all of America in order to balance the budget, $31.5 billion, the Secretary of Defense said no, we do not want them, we do not need them. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vice-chair know we do not want them, know we do not need them. {time} 1545 An independent study by the Institute for Defense Analysis: ``No, we don't need them, we don't want them, we can't afford them, and there are cost-effective alternatives.'' An independent role and missions study said, ``No, we don't want them, no, we don't need them.'' But this bill, we start down the road toward a $31.5 billion expenditure to the American taxpayer. Mr. Chairman, the bill places more resources towards weapons acquisition, despite clear testimony by Secretary Perry that the Department has a procurement strategy that will secure the timely modernization of the weapons inventory and guarantee future readiness. Rushing to replace weapons that are fairly young both wastes taxpayers' dollars and could, indeed, spark a new arms race. The majority made several assurances that it was not their intention to now develop theater missile defense nor national missile defense systems that would not comply with the ABM Treaty nor to cause a breakout from the treaty through the Missile Defense Act rewrite. Yet in spite of those assertions, Mr. Chairman, all attempts to have the committee bill conform to the ABM Treaty or to limit development activities that would violate the treaty were successfully resisted by the majority. I would submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that anytime we proceed to move beyond significant treaties, we ought to do so thoughtfully and cautiously and carefully. And if my colleagues are saying they do not wish at this time to violate the ABM Treaty, why not a simple inclusion of propositions that maintain the integrity of the ABM Treaty? That was not done. I leave that for your consideration and to draw whatever conclusions you choose to draw. Mr. Chairman, part of the bill payers for the acquisition surge were vitally important environmental cleanup programs that the Departments of Energy and Defense are required by law or by litigation to complete and for which it is our obligation to provide them the funding. None of the amendments that would restore these funds were made in order. Mr. Chairman, at a time when bases are closing throughout America, at a time when there is need to clean up those bases that we dirtied, in order to allow communities to take that land and property and go forward with community and commercial higher and better use, we are saying we are cutting environmental programs designed to clean up those facilities, rendering some communities in this country impotent in their capacity to take that land and build schools and playgrounds and develop commercial activities throughout America in order to allow us to move beyond the politics of the cold war. In order to develop a vibrant economy that speaks to the post-cold war, we cut funds. That logic of that defies understanding, and it escapes this gentleman. Part came from dual-use programs that are being used to position the industrial base to be able to support fully the emerging defense industrial challenges of the century to come. Such shortsightedness, Mr. Chairman, in cutting these funds in order to pay in part for lower- priority cold war-era weapons should be rejected by the House. We must begin to embrace the concept of conversion. How do we move from a cold war military-reliant economy to a post-cold war economy? I would suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, it means embracing the principles of conversion. How do you move from building B-2 bombers to building efficient, effective mass transit systems? How do you move from building weapons of mass destruction that rain terror and pain and human misery on people to enhancing the quality of human life? That is our challenge. That requires the highest and the best in our intellectual and political capability and understanding. The dual-use technology program was one of those specific efforts to move toward conversion, to go from swords to plowshares in very specific terms. Yet we challenge these programs. The logic of that defies understanding. Further, not all of the programs with the bill are money spending programs, Mr. Chairman: abortion, HIV status, El Salvador medals to people when we told people we in America were not waging war in El Salvador. Suddenly now we want to give medals. We are saying we really were involved in the war in El Salvador? That is in this bill. Other contentious items were placed in the bill without benefit of committee inquiry. Mr. Chairman, I know I have my politics. We all have different politics. That is the nature of the political system is to engage each others' different perspectives and different points of view, derive a consensus and move forward, but because we are legislators, we have designed a specific legislative process that allows us to engage these issues substantively at the subcommittee and full committee level prior to consideration on the floor of Congress. Many of these issues were never dealt with significantly at the subcommittee or full committee level. The process is flawed. The committee squeezed $171 million from the Nunn-Lugar nuclear weapons dismantlement program to finance projects and weapons systems of less effective value to the Nation's security, despite Secretary Perry's statement that this program was one of his highest priorities. Mr. Chairman, this program is designed to dismantle nuclear weapons developed by the former Soviet Union. We were spending, in the decade of the 1980's, in excess of $300 billion per annum in order to prepare to potentially wage war, even the insanity of nuclear war, with the Soviet Union. Now, for a measly few dollars in a multibillion-dollar budget, we cut $160 million that would dismantle these weapons. What could be more in the interests of the children of this country than to dismantle nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union? The economics of that defies logic, but we take this money to purchase more weapons. And I will argue in the context of the B-2 that is not about national security. It is about where the weapons are built, where the weapons take off and where they land. It is about parochialism. It is not about national security. It is about billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars going in the wrong place when we are denying our children better educations or people in this country better health care and other things. We are purchasing weapons systems that we do not need, that speak to yesterday, not to tomorrow. Mr. Chairman, the bill directly and adversely affects our long-term national security interests by erecting impediments to participate effectively in U.N. peacekeeping. Clearly, this is a [[Page H5784]] case in which the American people are way ahead of the committee in comprehending the enduring moral value, financial benefit and the advantage generated by having the United States participate fully in peacekeeping efforts in order to control the outbreak of war and violence. What better contribution to the world than, as the major, last-standing supervisor, that we participate with the family of nations in peacekeeping, stopping the slaughter and the violence, ending our capacity to wage war? But, no, we render ourselves impotent in this bill. We impede ourselves in this bill, not through logic and rational thought, but because of political expediency and lack of careful thinking, we deny our capacity to engage in peacekeeping. That is the wave of the future. That is America's role in the future, not conducting war and savagery on other human beings, but because of our rationality and our sanity, learning how to keep the peace in the world. That is a profound role that we have to play. This bill does not get us there. Mr. Chairman, section 3133 would fund a multipurpose reactor tritium production program that will breach the fire wall between civilian nuclear power and defense nuclear weapons programs with major implications for U.S. nonproliferation efforts and would prematurely anticipate the Secretary of Energy's decisionmaking process to identify the best source of tritium production. Let me now try to explain briefly the implications of that. This is a multipurpose tritium reactor. We have embraced a principle in the context of our international relations that says that we would not cross the line where commercial use of development of nuclear-capable material could be used for military purposes. That is an important principle in our international understandings with people. That is why we wreaked havoc on North Korea, on Iran and on Iraq. Mr. Chairman, query: How can we maintain the integrity of the moral high ground with these countries when we question their development of commercial-use reactors that could also be used to develop nuclear weapons capability materials? If we cross the line, why not the rest of the world? We lose the moral high ground. Second, this is the mother, this is the mother of all earmarks. This reactor is going to one place to one contractor, when last year on this floor we took the principled position that earmarking compromised the credibility and the integrity of the deliberative process. Yet in this bill, we have an earmark. It flies in the face of what we are ostensibly about here, and we need to reject this, and we should have a significant, and hopefully will have, a serious debate on this matter. Mr. Chairman, in the past 2 years the defense authorization bills have put the United States on a path toward beyond cold war thinking and began to move us toward a post-cold-war national security strategy. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissipated and the Warsaw Pact vanished, it ended the cold war. And I have said on more than one occasion that with the ending of the cold war it ushered in a new era, the post-cold-war era, that requires us to take off old labels of who is left wing and right wing, take off old labels of who is the peacenik and who is the hawk, take off old labels and move beyond old paradigms to challenge ourselves, to think brilliantly and competently about how we move toward the 21st century in the context of the post- cold-war; great challenges, but also great opportunities. This is a moment in a period of transition. And the great tragic reality is the American people are looking to Washington and saying, ``We don't know what to do in the context of the post-cold-war. What should we do?'' And many politicians, because they do not like to get too far out in front of public opinion, because you can lose your job doing that, are turning around saying, ``Don't ask me. What do you think we ought to do?'' So the American people are asking the political leaders what should they do. The political leaders are asking the American people what to do. In the meantime we are blowing this incredible opportunity to take the world boldly in a different place with the United States as a major superpower out in front in a courageous way. No, we are walking backward toward the cold war. We want to build B-2 bombers that were cold war weapons. We want to go back to a national missile defense in cold war era times. We want to buy weapons systems that have nothing to do with moving forward. We want to retard our capacity on peacekeeping initiatives and other things that would move us rationally and logically into the 21st century. We are going backward, and this bill underscores that. This bill reverses the course. It buys more weapons whose design, function, and purposes were rooted in cold war strategy and doctrine. It pushes away from an aggressive arms control strategy and potentially back toward global brinksmanship. The last couple of weeks we talked about not saddling the children with a budget deficit. Why saddle the children with the danger of brinksmanship? Why saddle the children with the danger of weapons systems we do not need? Why challenge the children of this country with cold war strategies that make no sense? If we are going to be consistent about embracing the future and caring about our children, then all of our policies, not just the rhetoric of the budget resolution, but the reality of the military budget and our strategy on national security, should speak eloquently and powerfully to that. It seeks to impede effective efforts by the Department of Defense to ready itself for the challenges of the current time and the next generation, all in the name of keeping it ready for the types of challenges which arose in the past. This bill represents not just a lost opportunity to adjust the changes of our time, but carries with it the tone and substance that has been the basis of so many destabilizing arms and ideological competitions of the past. My final comment, I leave you with this, Mr. Chairman, I believe that this new era has ushered in for us an incredible new opportunity, this generation as represented by those of us on this floor. We have been given an enormous gift. We have been given the gift of an opportunity to radically alter the world, to make it a safer and sane and stable place for ourselves and our children and our children's children. We can paint bold strokes across the canvas of time, leaving our legacy to the next generation of one of peace and security, or we can tinker around at the margins of change because of our caution, because of our insecurity, because of our fear, and because of our insecurity and blow this moment. {time} 1600 I hope that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren do not look back at this moment and say, ``My God, that generation had a chance to make the world a better place, and they blew the opportunity.'' I believe this bill goes down that tragic and sad road. I urge defeat of the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bateman]. Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Committee on National Security, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] for yielding this time to me. Let me also, while I am on my feet, commend him for the excellence of the leadership that he has provided to the Committee on National Security in bringing H.R. 1530 to the floor and also commend him, notwithstanding the vast differences in the point of view and perspective between my chairman and the ranking member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], for his excellent cooperation and assistance in seeing that the committee's business was fairly transacted. Let me also speak my appreciation to the ranking member of the Readiness Subcommittee, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Sisisky] for his unfailing cooperation and assistance in seeing that our portion of the bill was dealt with, and dealt with very responsibly and effectively. H.R. 1530 fully funds the military services' operation and training accounts and adds significant resources to other important readiness activities, including real property maintenance, to address health, safety, and mission- [[Page H5785]] critical deficiencies, depot maintenance to reduce backlogs, and base operations support to address shortfalls in programs which sustain mission capability, quality of life, and work force productivity. Second, H.R. 1530 undertakes a number of initiatives to reengineer and reform defense business operations and functions performed by the Department of Defense, its agencies, and the military services to create efficiencies and maximize the value of our defense dollars. These initiatives are in areas such as inventory management, computers, financial management, transportation, audit, and inspector general oversight and fuel management, and include a number of pilot programs for outsourcing functions not core to the Department of Defense warfighting mission. Third, H.R. 1530 fixes a critical problem which contributed greatly to the readiness shortfalls experienced in the late fiscal year 1994. Specifically, the bill takes action to protect the key trading and readiness accounts from having funds diverted to pay for unbudgeted contingency operations. It does so by establishing short-term financing mechanisms to cover the initial costs of such operations requiring the administration to submit timely supplemental appropriation requests and requiring the adminstration to seek funds in advance for planned, but unbudgeted, operations if they are expected to continue into the next fiscal year. Mr. Chairman, at the end of the day, H.R. 1530 achieves the goals we all share: providing the necessary resources to ensure force readiness, improving quality of life for our service people, and instituting defense support structure reforms to enable resources to be made available for other short- and long-term readiness needs. I urge my colleagues to support the bill. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery]. (Mr. MONTGOMERY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the ranking member for giving me this time, and, Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1530 and, given the tight budget situation we faced this year, the defense authorization bill represents compromise. While the legislation does not contain all the provisions I would have liked, it is balanced and a step in the right direction to provide for the defense needs of our country. I am particularly pleased with the emphasis on operation and maintenance needs in order to improve readiness of our forces. Mr. Chairman, I am also pleased and would like to note one provision. It is a joint VA/DOD housing program. This is in the bill. This is a needed program, will apply to enlisted personnel and officers 0-3 and below. They could apply for a VA guaranteed loan to purchase off-base housing with the Department of Defense buying down the interest payments for the first 3 years. This program will help to relieve the problems we are having on our bases of housing shortage. I also want to point out that the bill contains $770 million for procurement of equipment for the National Guard and Reserve and my colleagues know it pleases me very much when the Guard and Reserve are able to get the proper equipment. I am disappointed, though, Mr. Chairman, that the bill effectively kills the civil military programs conducted by the Reserve components in so many communities throughout the Nation. This program has been really important. It has a lot of merit to it, and it looks like we are not going to be able to use our National Guard and Reserve units to help out individuals that need help, and I am very worried about that, and that was what was left out of the bill. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. MONTGOMERY. I yield to the gentlewomen from Colorado. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery] for speaking up so eloquently about that because really being able to use the National Guard and Reserve to go in and serve communities, whether it is medically, whether it is helping our youth, whether it is--I find it really shocking that we are just severing that tie to the communities and that service, and I say to the gentleman, ``Thank you for the leadership you gave. How sad it is to see it all rolled back.'' Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman. There are some wonderful programs, and I think probably the people around the country will speak up, and will be able to someday get these funded. We will not talk about the money. It was peoples programs, helping underprivileged, not in Central and South America, but right here in the United States of America. So, Mr. Chairman, I reemphasize my support for this bill and urge its adoption in the House. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Procurement of the Committee on National Security. Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to start out by thanking our great chairman of the Committee on National Security for his wonderful leadership through the hearings that we held, the many briefings, discussions, the inner workings from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans working to do what is best for America, and I want to compliment the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], ranking member of the full committee, for his hard work, and my counterpart, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton], who did so much to put together a good package that will give national security to this country. My colleagues, we lived through the 1980's and rebuilt American defense because we believed in a policy of peace through strength, and at times that policy was very heavily criticized. When the Russians were ringing our allies in Europe with SS-20 missiles, and many people here at home, particularly members of the leadership, some leadership in the Democrat Party, many leaders in the media, urged that we appease the then-Soviet Union, urged that we cut back on weapon systems, urged that we terminate our ICBM systems and our bomber development, thankfully, the leadership in the House and many Members of Congress did not go along with that policy. We believed in a policy of peace through strength, and we stood up to the Russians in Europe. We put where we start moving forward with our plan to put Pershings and ground-launched cruise missiles in. In Central America, where we moved to deny the Soviets and their proxies a foothold on our own continent, in Africa, in the deep water, with the rebuilding of our American Navy, we challenged the growing Soviet fleet, and interestingly, because we stood up to the Russians, we brought about peace through strength, and the Berlin Wall came down, and then we had a conflict in the Middle East. No Russians involved, purely a conventional conflict, and all of the systems that the Members of this Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations had put into the pipeline that were heavily criticized by the media in this country, the M-1 tank that ran out of gas too soon, the Apache helicopter that needed too many spare parts, the Patriot missile system that took too long to develop; all those systems, when deployed on the sands of the Persian Gulf, proved to be very excellent systems. They saved American lives, they brought home the great majority of those body bags that we sent to the Middle East empty. Well, we have moved to continue that rebuilding of national security, and let me tell you, Mr. Chairman, On our subcommittee, at your direction, we have rebuilt ammunition accounts, we have rebuilt precision guided munitions accounts. Those were those precision guided systems where you do not drop a hundred bombs on a target. You send one in at a bridge or that particular radar site and knock it out. We rebuilt American sealift. We started to add ships to our sealift accounts. We put in extra fighters this year. Last year we bought fewer fighter aircraft than Switzerland, that great warmaking power. We kept that industrial base alive. We tried to keep our sealift going. We put in basic things like trucks so that the army can be mobile, [[Page H5786]] so it can move its logistics corps to the area of operation quickly. So we have started, Mr. Chairman, in the procurement subcommittee, moving ahead with the resumption of that policy that has not failed this country of peace through strength, and let me just say to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], the ranking member of the full Committee on National Security, it is true that there is a State earmarking of this reactor that will build tritium. On the other hand, my observation is not too many States have been asking for the reactor and, as a matter of politics, probably would not. But I think it is clear that the Clinton administration itself has said that continued tritium production is an important thing, and it is important that we move forward with the way to do that, and I personally think that the reactor is the way to go, not the accelerator that has been proposed by the administration. So, my colleagues, I think we put forth a good package for the United States to resume this policy of peace through strength, and I would urge all members to support it. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas [Mr. Ortiz]. Mr. ORTIZ. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, our national defense authorization for fiscal year 1996. I am pleased to join my colleagues in supporting what I believe to be a comprehensive and forward thinking bill to address the defense concerns of the United States into the next century. I would like to commend the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley] for his work at the subcommittee level, and both Chairman Spence and the full committee ranking minority member, Ron Dellums, for working to forge a bipartisan bill. Military construction is significantly important to our Nation's ability to have a ready and capable force. Mission support, quality of life projects, living spaces, work places, infrastructure revitalization, and environmental compliance are key factors in ensuring that our forces are able to meet the many challenges facing our military today. I have long been interested in reforming the way the armed services provide housing for our men and women in uniform. Three years ago, there was some concern about the future needs of military housing for our servicemen in south Texas--and the community responded by proposing a Naval Housing Investment Board that would combine servicemember and civilian housing through a public-private investment board. The bill before us contains a major new initiative to form public/ private partnerships in an effort to improve military housing. The program provides a series of new authorities to encourage the investment of private capital to assist in the development of military family housing. Since we began our efforts to combine our limited Federal resources with private investment in last year's DOD bill through the Navy Housing Investment Board--the program concept proved so successful that it is being extended to the other service branches with the wholehearted endorsement of Secretary of Defense William Perry. Mr. Chairman, I encourage my colleagues to vote for this bill. It is a good bill, and specifically it addresses the housing needs for men in uniform. {time} 1615 Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development of the Committee on National Security. (Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, first of all, I rise to applaud our chairman, who has done an outstanding job in leading us through this first bill that we have had the chance to put together, and also acknowledge the cooperation and support of our ranking member, who as always, is gracious and cooperative, even if we may disagree on some substantive issues. I think this is a good bill, Mr. Chairman. This is a good bill that passed out of our full committee with a vote of 48 to 3, meaning only three members of the full Committee on National Security saw fit to oppose this legislation being reported to the House floor. This bill, for the first time in the last 9 years that I have been here, reverses the hemorrhaging that has been occurring within our national defense and national security. We all heard the rhetoric of 5 years ago about the peace dividend. Well, I can tell you where the peace dividend is. It is in my UAW workers who are now looking for fast food jobs in Delaware County and Southeastern Pennsylvania because they have been laid off by Boeing Corporation, by Martin Marietta, by Lockheed. Norm Augustine, the new CEO of the new Martin Lockheed was in my office 2 weeks ago and said his company has laid off 107,000 people in the last 3 years alone, and the layoffs continue. That is what we have got even with our peace dividend. Where has been the defense conversion? There is no defense conversion, Mr. Chairman. But we stop that with this bill, and we do not do it as a jobs program. In fact, I will talk about how we have stopped that process as well, the pork barreling in the bill. We do it because we support what is important based upon the national threat. We started off this year's process with a net threat briefing where we looked at the hot spots of the world and came back to deal with our leadership in the Pentagon about where our priorities should be. Then in our subcommittees we marked up our funding levels in line with what the Joint Chiefs told us were their priorities. We also, Mr. Chairman, and I am very proud of this in the R area, we removed the tremendous amount of earmarking that has occurred in previous bills. There was one estimate that in last year's defense bill there was $4.7 billion of unauthorized appropriations, some of those having nothing to do with defense, many of them stuck in by the appropriators, some of them put in by the authorizers, but many of which were not requested by the military and had nothing to do with our national security. In the R portion of this bill this year, we have no earmarks. We have no direct programs put into that portion of the bill for individual Member requests. We in fact keep the bill clean. We do fund our priorities, Mr. Chairman. We do take a look in the R area at where we should be putting our priorities in terms of dollars. We fully fund missile defense. Now, how do we determine where the priorities should be? Unlike the previous 2 years, Mr. Chairman, when we had no hearings on ballistic missile defense, we in this year held three full hearings for members of the full committee, the subcommittees of Procurement and Research and Development, on where we are with ballistic missile defense. We had a hearing on the threat, both a closed briefing for the Members and an open briefing, a full day of hearings on what is the threat out there. We heard the horror stories of 77 nations today having cruise missiles that could be used against us. We heard the horror stories of 20 countries who today are building cruise missiles and the threat that poses to us. We had a hearing on what we have gotten for our money. What have we been able to produce with the billions of dollars we spent on missile defense over the past decade? We had a show and tell where General O'Neill brought in the technologies we developed with our missile defense funding. Finally, we had General O'Neill himself present to us what his vision of missile defense for this country would be like. Mr. Chairman, when we get to the missile defense section, every dollar that we put in this bill is in line with what General O'Neill said we should be spending on missile defense. In fact, it is less. General O'Neill told us we could add on up to $1.2 billion in the missile defense accounts for theater missile, national missile, cruise missile and Brilliant Eyes. We could not give him that full amount, but we gave him about $800 million. We have plussed up those areas where General O'Neill, acting as President Clinton's representative, told us we should put our dollars in terms of protecting our people from the threat of a missile coming into our mainland or hurting our troops when they are being deployed overseas. [[Page H5787]] This is a good bill as it relates to missile defense. Yet you will hear later on our colleagues attempt to say we are trying to undermine the ABM Treaty. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I will say this, Mr. Chairman: We are silent on the treaty. It is a treaty that we will abide by. But there are some who want to distort this bill and politicize it to have it be supportive of additional use of the ABM treaty, and we think that is a mistake, and we are going to oppose it when that amendment comes to the floor. This is a good bill, and I encourage our colleagues to support it with a large vote, and give our chairman the endorsement of an excellent job in leading us on the security of this country. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums]. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] is recognized for 4 minutes. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to respond to one of the comments that my distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania made, because he raised a very significant point, and that is the issue of job loss in the context of downsizing. I find it interesting that when you talk with the corporate CEO's about a great percentage of this downsizing in the quiet, they will agree that a great part of their job loss had nothing to do with the downsizing of the military budget, but the fact that during the years of the eighties, they developed such huge overheads, they got fat and sassy, they were no longer competitive, particularly in the international arena, so they had to cut back, they had to start getting streamlined, they had to become competitive. So a portion of those jobs were as a result of that. But I think the gentleman raises an important point. When we are downsizing, there is economic dislocation. And my response to that is that the long-term answer, the near-term answer to that, is an aggressive economic conversion strategy, not buying weapons that are expensive and unnecessary. That is not the real answer to that. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. DELLUMS. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I appreciate my friend and colleague yielding. I appreciate the willingness to engage in a dialog. What I would say is 2 years ago as we saw the defense numbers being projected by President Clinton, we went to the Office of Technology Assessment and the Congressional Budget Office. Each of them did studies that said if we implement the budget numbers proposed by President Clinton, we would see 1.5 million men and women lose their jobs in the defense industry. That is exactly what is happening, and that is happening directly because of the most massive cuts in the acquisition accounts that we have seen since before World War II. So it has had a direct impact on real jobs all across America. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, in downsizing the military budget, economic dislocation is indeed going to be a reality. The point that I am simply suggesting is that we are bright enough and competent enough to engage in a policy discussion that leads us toward the policies of economic conversion. The tragedy is that many of my colleagues, because we do not have a national jobs bill in this country, because we have not embraced economic, monetary, and budgetary policies designed to expand employment, we look at the military budget as a jobs bill. The last time I was chair of the committee, last year, my colleagues sent in requests to my office to add $10 billion to the military budget. Now, you do not have to be too bright to understand what that was about. I understand. It was about jobs. People do not like to see people unemployed. Neither do I. But the tragedy is that we are beginning to use the military budget on a more expansive basis as a jobs bill, when it should be a bill that addresses the national security needs of this country, and we need to have a much broader strategy to handle the dislocation, and I think that is economic conversion. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield further, I would just say I agree with the gentleman. That is why in this bill, in the R accounts, we keep the dual use funding levels at the same level they were in previous years, for exactly that reason. We keep the dual use of funding level at exactly the level that they were funded at over the previous 2 years. So we support that notion, when it has defense as a top priority. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder]. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I must say as a mother of yuppies, I rise in strong disagreement with this bill, because my children would call this bill retro. ``Retro'' is a negative word in the yuppie sense, and part of the reason is while we just heard about they are saying that there were $4 billion last year that they thought was fat, in this bill this debate is really nothing but kabuki theater. After we passed that rule, this has nothing to do with reality from here on. There is $9.5 billion more in this bill than the Pentagon said they needed to fight two full-time wars, and I think the Pentagon's judgment has been confirmed pretty well this last week with how well they performed. it is $9.5 billion more than the commander-in-chief wanted, and $9.5 billion more than the Senate wanted. In fact, when we were debating the rule and tried to get this opened up so we could offer some of these amendments, we were told we could not, because it might distort the negotiations with the Senate on the budget, the overall budget negotiations going on. So really we are just standing here throwing words back and forth at each other, and it really does not mean a thing, because three-fourths of the cutting amendments have been denied. They have been denied. Again, as everybody here is saying this is a better bill than before, oh, really? You thought $4 billion was a lot of fat last year, try $9.5 billion in this year's that we cannot get to. Furthermore, there is a real threat I think to the ABM Treaty. If there was not, why not say there is not? How can you say there is no threat, but we will not accept an amendment saying we do not plan to change it? If you really think the women who put their lives on the line should be considered second class citizens, which I do not, then you will love this bill. This is great. If you think we should have a line item and direct where we are going to go with tritium production, without anybody having a debate or really deciding these things, then you will love this. You are going to hear a lot of debate about industrial base. Well, let me tell you, this is, again, a retro industrial base that we are supporting in this bill. The gentleman from California and I worked very hard with many Members trying to find a competitive way to take this expensive research and development that the taxpayer had invested in and apply it to the future, apply it to other things we needed, to upgrade our industrial base and have new products we can sell to the world, in such areas as law enforcement, medical technology, all those types of things, because that is clearly where it is going. Instead, what do we have in there? We are going to have a big move to bring back the B-2 bomber. Even Secretary Cheney did not think we needed this thing. He signed off on 20 of these. You can buy these for about $1.1 billion. That is a lot of school lunches. That is a lot of student loans. During the cold war, if Secretary Cheney was convinced 20 of these was enough, I would think that that would be enough for us today in the post-cold-war era. So what I am trying to say is things like this are being kept alive in the name of keeping the industrial base up. Well, let me tell you we have a dog-gone good aviation industrial base. Just look at the Boeing 777. We are just doing this to keep some defense contractors who put out big political donations, I think, alive. And we have got all sorts of other things in here we cannot even offer an amendment to. This one at least we get to offer the amendment to. I guess they figured they have [[Page H5788]] got it wired in so they cannot lose this one, and the other ones, I guess people are afraid they should be losing. But I think Mr. Chairman, this is a very sad day, and I hope Members will join me in voting no on this retro bill. The CHAIRMAN. The Chair will advise that the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] has 42\1/2\ minutes remaining, and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] has 29 minutes remaining. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities. {time} 1630 Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. I would like to say, this is my first time to be a cochairman of this committee or any committee in Congress for that matter. And it was an experience, and I could not have asked for a more cooperative or helpful ranking member than the gentleman from Texas, Solomon Ortiz, who I thought did a super job. This was truly, at least our part of it and I think most of the bill, was truly a nonpartisan or bipartisan product. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities, I can assure the House that this bill squarely addresses one of the most serious problems confronting the Department of Defense and the people who serve in our Nation's military services. That problem is the quality and availability of adequate troop housing and military family housing. There is no question that there is a crisis in military housing. Over 600,000 single enlisted personnel are assigned to on-base troop housing facilities. The average age of barracks and dormitories is over 40 years. One-fourth of these facilities is considered substandard. At current levels of funding, improving on-base housing for single enlisted personnel cannot be accomplished, depending on the military service, for years or, in some cases, for decades. The situation in family housing is not much better. Approximately 218,000 or two-thirds of the homes in the housing inventory of the Department of Defense are classified as inadequate. One-quarter of the homes in the DOD inventory are over 40 years old and two-thirds are over 30 years old. This aging military family stock has extremely high maintenance and repair needs. If nothing changes, fixing the military family housing problem will take over 30 years. The present military housing situation is unacceptable and the Committee on National Security is determined to put us on the path toward fixing the problem. H.R. 1530 contains critically important short-term and long-term remedies to this problem. Working with the military services, we have identified a number of unfunded and badly needed quality-of-life improvements in housing, child care, health care facility that can be executed next year. We have funded solely those projects where the need is the greatest and the dollars can immediately be put to use. Equally of importance, we coordinated these recommendations thoroughly with our colleagues on the Committee on Appropriations so that we are singing from the same page of music. And we have agreed, both of us, to a strong quality of life package. This bill funds over $630 million in new construction improvements for barracks and dormitories at 63 installations, including projects at 25 installations which the committee identified as priority requirements for military services which were unfunded in the department's budget request. The bill also provides approximately $900 million in military family housing construction and improvements. These funds will provide quality housing for about 9,400 military families, over 2,000 more than the Department's request, and will ensure that other badly needed neighborhood improvements are undertaken. I want to stress again that this bill funds only those projects which can be executed in fiscal year 1996. This is not a hollow program. But beyond the important quality of life improvements we are recommending to the House, the committee has also taken a longer term view of the problem of fixing the military construction problem. We are providing for an opportunity for private sector involvement in this and have set up a structure that gives the possibility for that to take place at bases around the country. We are going to develop pilot programs this year, and I think this is the only way you can get there from here in terms of actually solving this problem. So in conclusion, let me say, I strongly support this piece of legislation. I think not only in this particular area that I have talked about but throughout the bill, we make giant strides. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. McHugh], who is the chairman of our moral, welfare, and recreation panel. Mr. McHUGH. Mr. Chairman, let me add my words of admiration and appreciation to the full committee chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence], and really all the members of the Committee on National Security, including, or course, the ranking minority member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], who have worked hard to make this, I think, a very credible and a very well-balanced piece of legislation. We have heard today, Mr. Chairman, and we will continue to hear how difficult and how different these times are. I think this legislation reflects those realities in a very direct and a very palpable way. Indeed, while these times are different, they are at least as dangerous, if not more dangerous than any circumstances that we as a nation have encountered across this globe in perhaps the last half century or more. There, too, this legislation is, I think, a very able attempt to try to react to those very dangerous circumstances. In that regard, those of us, myself included, who had the opportunity and the honor to serve on the committee special oversight panel on moral, welfare and recreation have worked to include in this legislation a number of measures that will provide for an acceptable quality of life for men and women in uniform. We all know, Mr. Chairman, that under any circumstances, these programs are so vitally important. But as our military men and women are being asked to deploy more and more, and not just by a Republican president, not just by a Democrat president, but by chiefs of the military from both sides of the aisle, to places like Haiti and Somalia, providing comfort in northern and southern Iraq and the skies of Bosnia, we have to maintain programs and let our men and women know that, as they leave, their families are being adequately taken care of, being provided for. This program and this legislation fully funds those kinds of programs, fully funds them, I might add, at a level that President Clinton requested. This is a well-balanced, well-reasoned piece of legislation that, Mr. Chairman, I respectfully urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to defend and to support. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton], a very valuable member of our committee. Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Once again, we stand on this floor and debate the merits of a defense authorization bill. But unlike previous debates, consideration of the 1996 Defense Authorization Act is different. Before us is legislation which stops the backsliding of previous defense bills and takes a critical first step toward matching resources with the ever-growing number of military commitments. This bill doesn't solve all the problems which plague our Armed Forces. Ten years of declining defense budgets cannot be overturned in a single defense budget. Yet this bill makes significant, concrete improvements. Among the many initiatives, this bill: Adds a third Aegis destroyer--a ship which was stricken from the Navy's original budget proposal but identified by the Navy's top admiral as his highest priority. Takes a more prudent and robust approach to missile defense by adding $763 million for ballistic missile defense program and directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and deploy theater and national defenses ``at the earliest practical date;'' [[Page H5789]] Fully funds the purchase of eight C-17's, a mission-essential platform which every top Pentagon official has testified as a gotta have program. In addition this bill sends a message to our military personnel and their families that we understand the hardships they endure. We show our appreciation by fully funding a 2.4 percent pay raise and by adding $425 million for the construction and improvements to military family housing and troop housing. Finally, this bill provides money to keep the B-2 industrial base in tact, giving us the option of procuring additional stealth bombers should we decide to do so. To those of my colleagues who think that the B-2 is too expensive, I simply point out that waging a war which a fleet of B-2 bombers could have deterred is far more costly both in terms of lives and money. Is this a perfect bill? No, but it does what the administration has failed to do in three previous defense proposals. It honestly identifies our defense needs and takes appropriate action to address them. My colleagues, last fall as part of our Contract With America we made a commitment to the American public that we would strengthen our military forces. In February, we passed H.R. 7 which demonstrated our commitment and our resolve. This bill continues that process by putting real deeds behind those words and promises. I urge Members to support our troops by supporting this bill. I urge my colleagues to support the bill and to avoid destructive amendments. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] for the purposes of engaging in a colloquy. Mr. HOKE. Mr. Chairman, I rise for the purpose of a colloquy with the gentleman from South Carolina. As you know, last week I submitted to the Committee on Rules an amendment that would require the President to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as permitted under article XV of that treaty. I sponsored that amendment because along with you, I believe that the ABM treaty adopts a national strategy of intentional defenselessness which is completely inconsistent and incompatible with our obligation to provide for the common defense of the people of the United States. Not only does the ABM treaty depend on a misguided strategy of mutually assured destruction, but the Government of the United States has adopted an unspoken policy of nondisclosure of that strategy to the American people. While this strategy of defenselessness may possibly have been arguable in 1972 when we had only one ICBM-capable enemy, it is utterly without merit today when many nations have gained or are gaining access to ballistic missile technology as well as to the weapons of mass destruction. All of which is to say that in my view this policy is insane and will be viewed in the long sweep of history as a particularly dumb idea which held sway under peculiar circumstances for a very brief period of time. But what is truly unconscionable is that the public has been kept out of the loop. Defrauded of its right to know and intentionally not told that all of America and particularly her largest cities are now the beta sites for a massive experiment in foreign relations, that this experiment in foreign and defense policy places the lives and fortunes of a quarter of a billion Americans at risk without their knowledge is unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong. After consulting with you and Messrs. Young, Weldon, and Livingston last week, I withdrew my amendment as a result of your stated intention to hold hearings on the validity of the ABM treaty and on a bill to repeal that treaty which will be offered later this week. I deeply appreciate that offer on your part. I view as a tremendous opportunity to this, these hearings as a tremendous opportunity to inform the American people of the policy that we are under now that leaves them defenseless. I also want to note that the gentleman form South Carolina [Mr. Spratt] has offered an amendment that amounts to an endorsem

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NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996
(House of Representatives - June 13, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H5782-H5892] NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996 The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 164 and rule XXIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 1530. In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill (H.R. 1530) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 1996 for military activities of the Department of Defense, to prescribe military personnel strengths for fiscal year 1996, and for other purposes with Mr. Emerson in the Chair. The Clerk read the title of the bill. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] will each be recognized for 1 hour. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence]. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to section 5(c) of House Resolution 164, I request that during the consideration of H.R. 1530, amendments number 1 and 2 printed in subpart B of part 1 of House Report 104-136 be considered before amendment number 1 printed in subpart A of part 1 of that report. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman's request is noted. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. SPENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. This bill is the first since the end of the cold war to truly look to the future while not ignoring the present. Much has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, but much remains the same. First and foremost, the United States is still a superpower with global, political, economic, and moral interests. Yet none of these can be protected, nor promoted, without a strong military. We still live in a violent world: from ethnic conflicts to regional wars, the United States has faced and will face a host of challenges to its national interests. Nor have all the changes we have seen in the post-cold-war world been benign. The crumbling of communism has rekindled rivalries and hatreds frozen in place for decades. In Asia, Africa, Europe, and even here in the Americas, armed force remains the ultimate arbiter of political disputes. The Clinton administration has responded to this growing chaos with an ambitious but ill-defined strategy of engagement and enlargement. The President has resolved to be able to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional wars in the decisive fashion Americans demand. Moreover, this administration has taken on an increased number of commitments in the form of a wide range of U.N.-led peace operations. While asking more of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, the administration is simultaneously giving them fewer tools to work with: fewer troops, fewer new weapons, fewer training opportunities. What was once a cautious and disciplined reduction in American forces has plunged into a decade of defense decline--a decline that has created a dangerous $250 billion gap between strategy and resources. The administration can neither honor its present strategic commitments nor prepare for future challenges. For the first time in a decade, the defense authorization bill says-- STOP. Stop the slide in defense spending. Stop the dissipation of our military power on futile missions. Stop the postponing of proper training. Stop the decline of our defense industrial base. Stop the erosion of servicemembers' quality of life. Stop frittering away defense resources on nondefense research. Stop the shell game that is mortgaging long-term modernization needs in order to plug holes in underfunded near-term readiness and quality of life accounts. This bill also starts the process of revitalizing America's defenses. Be sure that American soldiers are under American command. Set a clear course for stable and predictable defense spending. Provide the men and women who wear an American uniform with adequate training. Preserve the technological edge that is a force multiplier and saves lives. Guarantee a decent standard of living for them and their families. Protect our troops abroad and Americans here at home from the threat of ballistic missiles. This bill's efforts to bridge the growing inconsistencies between strategy and resource, and therefore begin a meaningful revitalization of our defenses, rests on four pillars: First, it improves the quality of service life by raising pay, enhancing housing benefits, increasing construction of family housing and prohibiting deeper cuts in manpower levels. Second, It preserves near and far-term military readiness by more robustly funding core readiness accounts and by creating a mechanism for funding the growing number of unbudgeted contingency operations from non-readiness accounts. Third, it dramatically increases weapons modernization funding in response to the administration's having mortgaged these programs to address near-term shortfalls. Modernization will help to ensure cutting edge technology on the battlefield in the future, as well as a viable industrial base to provide this technology. Fourth, it begins to aggressively reform the bloated and unresponsive Pentagon bureaucracy by reducing a growing civilian Secretariat as well as the acquisition work force, streamlining the procurement process, and eliminating nondefense research and encouraging privatization initiatives. This last pillar, in particular, is essential for generating longterm savings needed to maintain American military might over time as well as creating a more agile Defense Department able to respond in a timely manner to new challenges. Our men and women in uniform, and certainly the taxpayers, deserve no less. These four pillars are central to a sound defense program, one that can begin to bridge the gap between strategy and resources. This bill protects the peace we have won in the cold war and prepares us to prevail quickly and decisively in the future. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1530. It is a bipartisan bill on an important set of bipartisan issues. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. DELLUMS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the recommendation of the Committee on National Security on the bill before the body at this time, H.R. 1530, as amended. Mr. Chairman, the overall level of expenditures contained within the bill is too high, even though within the budget resolution limits. The bill's spending returns us to cold war priorities, and numerous provisions promote extreme agendas on major social issues. Deliberation on the bill has been so frustrated that the committee's well-developed and well-earned legacy of bipartisanship has tattered because of the unwillingness sincerely to solicit administration and alternative views. H.R. 1530 contains numerous and sweeping provisions that have been developed without, Mr. Chairman, and I underscore for emphasis without, the benefit of full consultation with the administration and others, and have not been illuminated properly even by the subcommittee's and full committee's hearing process. These include initiatives and personnel matters, weapons [[Page H5783]] procurement, research and development, foreign policy initiatives, and acquisition reform. The committee, Mr. Chairman, would embark upon an extraordinary costly program to purchase new B-2 bombers, even after all of the testimony the committee received by the Department of Defense and the services concluded that additional B-2's were not needed, and that their purchase would crowd out other higher priority programs. Yes, we will later today debate more fully this issue, but the inclusion of funding for additional B-2's is sufficient reason alone to reject this committee report. Parenthetically, Mr. Chairman, this bill contains $553 million to begin long-lead items for two additional B-2 bombers that ultimately results in an effort to build 20 additional B-2 bombers. At a time when we just came through a budget process that will visit pain and human misery by virtue of the draconian cuts in that budget upon the children of this country, mothers in this country, senior citizens in this country, veterans, and farmers, and others in America, this bill calls for beginning to go down the road toward the expenditure of $31.5 billion to build 20 planes, $19.7 billion to build them and to equip them, $11.8 billion to operate and maintain them throughout the life cycle of that plane. At a time when we are in community meetings saying we must visit pain upon all of America in order to balance the budget, $31.5 billion, the Secretary of Defense said no, we do not want them, we do not need them. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vice-chair know we do not want them, know we do not need them. {time} 1545 An independent study by the Institute for Defense Analysis: ``No, we don't need them, we don't want them, we can't afford them, and there are cost-effective alternatives.'' An independent role and missions study said, ``No, we don't want them, no, we don't need them.'' But this bill, we start down the road toward a $31.5 billion expenditure to the American taxpayer. Mr. Chairman, the bill places more resources towards weapons acquisition, despite clear testimony by Secretary Perry that the Department has a procurement strategy that will secure the timely modernization of the weapons inventory and guarantee future readiness. Rushing to replace weapons that are fairly young both wastes taxpayers' dollars and could, indeed, spark a new arms race. The majority made several assurances that it was not their intention to now develop theater missile defense nor national missile defense systems that would not comply with the ABM Treaty nor to cause a breakout from the treaty through the Missile Defense Act rewrite. Yet in spite of those assertions, Mr. Chairman, all attempts to have the committee bill conform to the ABM Treaty or to limit development activities that would violate the treaty were successfully resisted by the majority. I would submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that anytime we proceed to move beyond significant treaties, we ought to do so thoughtfully and cautiously and carefully. And if my colleagues are saying they do not wish at this time to violate the ABM Treaty, why not a simple inclusion of propositions that maintain the integrity of the ABM Treaty? That was not done. I leave that for your consideration and to draw whatever conclusions you choose to draw. Mr. Chairman, part of the bill payers for the acquisition surge were vitally important environmental cleanup programs that the Departments of Energy and Defense are required by law or by litigation to complete and for which it is our obligation to provide them the funding. None of the amendments that would restore these funds were made in order. Mr. Chairman, at a time when bases are closing throughout America, at a time when there is need to clean up those bases that we dirtied, in order to allow communities to take that land and property and go forward with community and commercial higher and better use, we are saying we are cutting environmental programs designed to clean up those facilities, rendering some communities in this country impotent in their capacity to take that land and build schools and playgrounds and develop commercial activities throughout America in order to allow us to move beyond the politics of the cold war. In order to develop a vibrant economy that speaks to the post-cold war, we cut funds. That logic of that defies understanding, and it escapes this gentleman. Part came from dual-use programs that are being used to position the industrial base to be able to support fully the emerging defense industrial challenges of the century to come. Such shortsightedness, Mr. Chairman, in cutting these funds in order to pay in part for lower- priority cold war-era weapons should be rejected by the House. We must begin to embrace the concept of conversion. How do we move from a cold war military-reliant economy to a post-cold war economy? I would suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, it means embracing the principles of conversion. How do you move from building B-2 bombers to building efficient, effective mass transit systems? How do you move from building weapons of mass destruction that rain terror and pain and human misery on people to enhancing the quality of human life? That is our challenge. That requires the highest and the best in our intellectual and political capability and understanding. The dual-use technology program was one of those specific efforts to move toward conversion, to go from swords to plowshares in very specific terms. Yet we challenge these programs. The logic of that defies understanding. Further, not all of the programs with the bill are money spending programs, Mr. Chairman: abortion, HIV status, El Salvador medals to people when we told people we in America were not waging war in El Salvador. Suddenly now we want to give medals. We are saying we really were involved in the war in El Salvador? That is in this bill. Other contentious items were placed in the bill without benefit of committee inquiry. Mr. Chairman, I know I have my politics. We all have different politics. That is the nature of the political system is to engage each others' different perspectives and different points of view, derive a consensus and move forward, but because we are legislators, we have designed a specific legislative process that allows us to engage these issues substantively at the subcommittee and full committee level prior to consideration on the floor of Congress. Many of these issues were never dealt with significantly at the subcommittee or full committee level. The process is flawed. The committee squeezed $171 million from the Nunn-Lugar nuclear weapons dismantlement program to finance projects and weapons systems of less effective value to the Nation's security, despite Secretary Perry's statement that this program was one of his highest priorities. Mr. Chairman, this program is designed to dismantle nuclear weapons developed by the former Soviet Union. We were spending, in the decade of the 1980's, in excess of $300 billion per annum in order to prepare to potentially wage war, even the insanity of nuclear war, with the Soviet Union. Now, for a measly few dollars in a multibillion-dollar budget, we cut $160 million that would dismantle these weapons. What could be more in the interests of the children of this country than to dismantle nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union? The economics of that defies logic, but we take this money to purchase more weapons. And I will argue in the context of the B-2 that is not about national security. It is about where the weapons are built, where the weapons take off and where they land. It is about parochialism. It is not about national security. It is about billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars going in the wrong place when we are denying our children better educations or people in this country better health care and other things. We are purchasing weapons systems that we do not need, that speak to yesterday, not to tomorrow. Mr. Chairman, the bill directly and adversely affects our long-term national security interests by erecting impediments to participate effectively in U.N. peacekeeping. Clearly, this is a [[Page H5784]] case in which the American people are way ahead of the committee in comprehending the enduring moral value, financial benefit and the advantage generated by having the United States participate fully in peacekeeping efforts in order to control the outbreak of war and violence. What better contribution to the world than, as the major, last-standing supervisor, that we participate with the family of nations in peacekeeping, stopping the slaughter and the violence, ending our capacity to wage war? But, no, we render ourselves impotent in this bill. We impede ourselves in this bill, not through logic and rational thought, but because of political expediency and lack of careful thinking, we deny our capacity to engage in peacekeeping. That is the wave of the future. That is America's role in the future, not conducting war and savagery on other human beings, but because of our rationality and our sanity, learning how to keep the peace in the world. That is a profound role that we have to play. This bill does not get us there. Mr. Chairman, section 3133 would fund a multipurpose reactor tritium production program that will breach the fire wall between civilian nuclear power and defense nuclear weapons programs with major implications for U.S. nonproliferation efforts and would prematurely anticipate the Secretary of Energy's decisionmaking process to identify the best source of tritium production. Let me now try to explain briefly the implications of that. This is a multipurpose tritium reactor. We have embraced a principle in the context of our international relations that says that we would not cross the line where commercial use of development of nuclear-capable material could be used for military purposes. That is an important principle in our international understandings with people. That is why we wreaked havoc on North Korea, on Iran and on Iraq. Mr. Chairman, query: How can we maintain the integrity of the moral high ground with these countries when we question their development of commercial-use reactors that could also be used to develop nuclear weapons capability materials? If we cross the line, why not the rest of the world? We lose the moral high ground. Second, this is the mother, this is the mother of all earmarks. This reactor is going to one place to one contractor, when last year on this floor we took the principled position that earmarking compromised the credibility and the integrity of the deliberative process. Yet in this bill, we have an earmark. It flies in the face of what we are ostensibly about here, and we need to reject this, and we should have a significant, and hopefully will have, a serious debate on this matter. Mr. Chairman, in the past 2 years the defense authorization bills have put the United States on a path toward beyond cold war thinking and began to move us toward a post-cold-war national security strategy. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissipated and the Warsaw Pact vanished, it ended the cold war. And I have said on more than one occasion that with the ending of the cold war it ushered in a new era, the post-cold-war era, that requires us to take off old labels of who is left wing and right wing, take off old labels of who is the peacenik and who is the hawk, take off old labels and move beyond old paradigms to challenge ourselves, to think brilliantly and competently about how we move toward the 21st century in the context of the post- cold-war; great challenges, but also great opportunities. This is a moment in a period of transition. And the great tragic reality is the American people are looking to Washington and saying, ``We don't know what to do in the context of the post-cold-war. What should we do?'' And many politicians, because they do not like to get too far out in front of public opinion, because you can lose your job doing that, are turning around saying, ``Don't ask me. What do you think we ought to do?'' So the American people are asking the political leaders what should they do. The political leaders are asking the American people what to do. In the meantime we are blowing this incredible opportunity to take the world boldly in a different place with the United States as a major superpower out in front in a courageous way. No, we are walking backward toward the cold war. We want to build B-2 bombers that were cold war weapons. We want to go back to a national missile defense in cold war era times. We want to buy weapons systems that have nothing to do with moving forward. We want to retard our capacity on peacekeeping initiatives and other things that would move us rationally and logically into the 21st century. We are going backward, and this bill underscores that. This bill reverses the course. It buys more weapons whose design, function, and purposes were rooted in cold war strategy and doctrine. It pushes away from an aggressive arms control strategy and potentially back toward global brinksmanship. The last couple of weeks we talked about not saddling the children with a budget deficit. Why saddle the children with the danger of brinksmanship? Why saddle the children with the danger of weapons systems we do not need? Why challenge the children of this country with cold war strategies that make no sense? If we are going to be consistent about embracing the future and caring about our children, then all of our policies, not just the rhetoric of the budget resolution, but the reality of the military budget and our strategy on national security, should speak eloquently and powerfully to that. It seeks to impede effective efforts by the Department of Defense to ready itself for the challenges of the current time and the next generation, all in the name of keeping it ready for the types of challenges which arose in the past. This bill represents not just a lost opportunity to adjust the changes of our time, but carries with it the tone and substance that has been the basis of so many destabilizing arms and ideological competitions of the past. My final comment, I leave you with this, Mr. Chairman, I believe that this new era has ushered in for us an incredible new opportunity, this generation as represented by those of us on this floor. We have been given an enormous gift. We have been given the gift of an opportunity to radically alter the world, to make it a safer and sane and stable place for ourselves and our children and our children's children. We can paint bold strokes across the canvas of time, leaving our legacy to the next generation of one of peace and security, or we can tinker around at the margins of change because of our caution, because of our insecurity, because of our fear, and because of our insecurity and blow this moment. {time} 1600 I hope that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren do not look back at this moment and say, ``My God, that generation had a chance to make the world a better place, and they blew the opportunity.'' I believe this bill goes down that tragic and sad road. I urge defeat of the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bateman]. Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Committee on National Security, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] for yielding this time to me. Let me also, while I am on my feet, commend him for the excellence of the leadership that he has provided to the Committee on National Security in bringing H.R. 1530 to the floor and also commend him, notwithstanding the vast differences in the point of view and perspective between my chairman and the ranking member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], for his excellent cooperation and assistance in seeing that the committee's business was fairly transacted. Let me also speak my appreciation to the ranking member of the Readiness Subcommittee, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Sisisky] for his unfailing cooperation and assistance in seeing that our portion of the bill was dealt with, and dealt with very responsibly and effectively. H.R. 1530 fully funds the military services' operation and training accounts and adds significant resources to other important readiness activities, including real property maintenance, to address health, safety, and mission- [[Page H5785]] critical deficiencies, depot maintenance to reduce backlogs, and base operations support to address shortfalls in programs which sustain mission capability, quality of life, and work force productivity. Second, H.R. 1530 undertakes a number of initiatives to reengineer and reform defense business operations and functions performed by the Department of Defense, its agencies, and the military services to create efficiencies and maximize the value of our defense dollars. These initiatives are in areas such as inventory management, computers, financial management, transportation, audit, and inspector general oversight and fuel management, and include a number of pilot programs for outsourcing functions not core to the Department of Defense warfighting mission. Third, H.R. 1530 fixes a critical problem which contributed greatly to the readiness shortfalls experienced in the late fiscal year 1994. Specifically, the bill takes action to protect the key trading and readiness accounts from having funds diverted to pay for unbudgeted contingency operations. It does so by establishing short-term financing mechanisms to cover the initial costs of such operations requiring the administration to submit timely supplemental appropriation requests and requiring the adminstration to seek funds in advance for planned, but unbudgeted, operations if they are expected to continue into the next fiscal year. Mr. Chairman, at the end of the day, H.R. 1530 achieves the goals we all share: providing the necessary resources to ensure force readiness, improving quality of life for our service people, and instituting defense support structure reforms to enable resources to be made available for other short- and long-term readiness needs. I urge my colleagues to support the bill. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery]. (Mr. MONTGOMERY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the ranking member for giving me this time, and, Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1530 and, given the tight budget situation we faced this year, the defense authorization bill represents compromise. While the legislation does not contain all the provisions I would have liked, it is balanced and a step in the right direction to provide for the defense needs of our country. I am particularly pleased with the emphasis on operation and maintenance needs in order to improve readiness of our forces. Mr. Chairman, I am also pleased and would like to note one provision. It is a joint VA/DOD housing program. This is in the bill. This is a needed program, will apply to enlisted personnel and officers 0-3 and below. They could apply for a VA guaranteed loan to purchase off-base housing with the Department of Defense buying down the interest payments for the first 3 years. This program will help to relieve the problems we are having on our bases of housing shortage. I also want to point out that the bill contains $770 million for procurement of equipment for the National Guard and Reserve and my colleagues know it pleases me very much when the Guard and Reserve are able to get the proper equipment. I am disappointed, though, Mr. Chairman, that the bill effectively kills the civil military programs conducted by the Reserve components in so many communities throughout the Nation. This program has been really important. It has a lot of merit to it, and it looks like we are not going to be able to use our National Guard and Reserve units to help out individuals that need help, and I am very worried about that, and that was what was left out of the bill. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. MONTGOMERY. I yield to the gentlewomen from Colorado. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery] for speaking up so eloquently about that because really being able to use the National Guard and Reserve to go in and serve communities, whether it is medically, whether it is helping our youth, whether it is--I find it really shocking that we are just severing that tie to the communities and that service, and I say to the gentleman, ``Thank you for the leadership you gave. How sad it is to see it all rolled back.'' Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman. There are some wonderful programs, and I think probably the people around the country will speak up, and will be able to someday get these funded. We will not talk about the money. It was peoples programs, helping underprivileged, not in Central and South America, but right here in the United States of America. So, Mr. Chairman, I reemphasize my support for this bill and urge its adoption in the House. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Procurement of the Committee on National Security. Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to start out by thanking our great chairman of the Committee on National Security for his wonderful leadership through the hearings that we held, the many briefings, discussions, the inner workings from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans working to do what is best for America, and I want to compliment the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], ranking member of the full committee, for his hard work, and my counterpart, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton], who did so much to put together a good package that will give national security to this country. My colleagues, we lived through the 1980's and rebuilt American defense because we believed in a policy of peace through strength, and at times that policy was very heavily criticized. When the Russians were ringing our allies in Europe with SS-20 missiles, and many people here at home, particularly members of the leadership, some leadership in the Democrat Party, many leaders in the media, urged that we appease the then-Soviet Union, urged that we cut back on weapon systems, urged that we terminate our ICBM systems and our bomber development, thankfully, the leadership in the House and many Members of Congress did not go along with that policy. We believed in a policy of peace through strength, and we stood up to the Russians in Europe. We put where we start moving forward with our plan to put Pershings and ground-launched cruise missiles in. In Central America, where we moved to deny the Soviets and their proxies a foothold on our own continent, in Africa, in the deep water, with the rebuilding of our American Navy, we challenged the growing Soviet fleet, and interestingly, because we stood up to the Russians, we brought about peace through strength, and the Berlin Wall came down, and then we had a conflict in the Middle East. No Russians involved, purely a conventional conflict, and all of the systems that the Members of this Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations had put into the pipeline that were heavily criticized by the media in this country, the M-1 tank that ran out of gas too soon, the Apache helicopter that needed too many spare parts, the Patriot missile system that took too long to develop; all those systems, when deployed on the sands of the Persian Gulf, proved to be very excellent systems. They saved American lives, they brought home the great majority of those body bags that we sent to the Middle East empty. Well, we have moved to continue that rebuilding of national security, and let me tell you, Mr. Chairman, On our subcommittee, at your direction, we have rebuilt ammunition accounts, we have rebuilt precision guided munitions accounts. Those were those precision guided systems where you do not drop a hundred bombs on a target. You send one in at a bridge or that particular radar site and knock it out. We rebuilt American sealift. We started to add ships to our sealift accounts. We put in extra fighters this year. Last year we bought fewer fighter aircraft than Switzerland, that great warmaking power. We kept that industrial base alive. We tried to keep our sealift going. We put in basic things like trucks so that the army can be mobile, [[Page H5786]] so it can move its logistics corps to the area of operation quickly. So we have started, Mr. Chairman, in the procurement subcommittee, moving ahead with the resumption of that policy that has not failed this country of peace through strength, and let me just say to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], the ranking member of the full Committee on National Security, it is true that there is a State earmarking of this reactor that will build tritium. On the other hand, my observation is not too many States have been asking for the reactor and, as a matter of politics, probably would not. But I think it is clear that the Clinton administration itself has said that continued tritium production is an important thing, and it is important that we move forward with the way to do that, and I personally think that the reactor is the way to go, not the accelerator that has been proposed by the administration. So, my colleagues, I think we put forth a good package for the United States to resume this policy of peace through strength, and I would urge all members to support it. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas [Mr. Ortiz]. Mr. ORTIZ. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, our national defense authorization for fiscal year 1996. I am pleased to join my colleagues in supporting what I believe to be a comprehensive and forward thinking bill to address the defense concerns of the United States into the next century. I would like to commend the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley] for his work at the subcommittee level, and both Chairman Spence and the full committee ranking minority member, Ron Dellums, for working to forge a bipartisan bill. Military construction is significantly important to our Nation's ability to have a ready and capable force. Mission support, quality of life projects, living spaces, work places, infrastructure revitalization, and environmental compliance are key factors in ensuring that our forces are able to meet the many challenges facing our military today. I have long been interested in reforming the way the armed services provide housing for our men and women in uniform. Three years ago, there was some concern about the future needs of military housing for our servicemen in south Texas--and the community responded by proposing a Naval Housing Investment Board that would combine servicemember and civilian housing through a public-private investment board. The bill before us contains a major new initiative to form public/ private partnerships in an effort to improve military housing. The program provides a series of new authorities to encourage the investment of private capital to assist in the development of military family housing. Since we began our efforts to combine our limited Federal resources with private investment in last year's DOD bill through the Navy Housing Investment Board--the program concept proved so successful that it is being extended to the other service branches with the wholehearted endorsement of Secretary of Defense William Perry. Mr. Chairman, I encourage my colleagues to vote for this bill. It is a good bill, and specifically it addresses the housing needs for men in uniform. {time} 1615 Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development of the Committee on National Security. (Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, first of all, I rise to applaud our chairman, who has done an outstanding job in leading us through this first bill that we have had the chance to put together, and also acknowledge the cooperation and support of our ranking member, who as always, is gracious and cooperative, even if we may disagree on some substantive issues. I think this is a good bill, Mr. Chairman. This is a good bill that passed out of our full committee with a vote of 48 to 3, meaning only three members of the full Committee on National Security saw fit to oppose this legislation being reported to the House floor. This bill, for the first time in the last 9 years that I have been here, reverses the hemorrhaging that has been occurring within our national defense and national security. We all heard the rhetoric of 5 years ago about the peace dividend. Well, I can tell you where the peace dividend is. It is in my UAW workers who are now looking for fast food jobs in Delaware County and Southeastern Pennsylvania because they have been laid off by Boeing Corporation, by Martin Marietta, by Lockheed. Norm Augustine, the new CEO of the new Martin Lockheed was in my office 2 weeks ago and said his company has laid off 107,000 people in the last 3 years alone, and the layoffs continue. That is what we have got even with our peace dividend. Where has been the defense conversion? There is no defense conversion, Mr. Chairman. But we stop that with this bill, and we do not do it as a jobs program. In fact, I will talk about how we have stopped that process as well, the pork barreling in the bill. We do it because we support what is important based upon the national threat. We started off this year's process with a net threat briefing where we looked at the hot spots of the world and came back to deal with our leadership in the Pentagon about where our priorities should be. Then in our subcommittees we marked up our funding levels in line with what the Joint Chiefs told us were their priorities. We also, Mr. Chairman, and I am very proud of this in the R area, we removed the tremendous amount of earmarking that has occurred in previous bills. There was one estimate that in last year's defense bill there was $4.7 billion of unauthorized appropriations, some of those having nothing to do with defense, many of them stuck in by the appropriators, some of them put in by the authorizers, but many of which were not requested by the military and had nothing to do with our national security. In the R portion of this bill this year, we have no earmarks. We have no direct programs put into that portion of the bill for individual Member requests. We in fact keep the bill clean. We do fund our priorities, Mr. Chairman. We do take a look in the R area at where we should be putting our priorities in terms of dollars. We fully fund missile defense. Now, how do we determine where the priorities should be? Unlike the previous 2 years, Mr. Chairman, when we had no hearings on ballistic missile defense, we in this year held three full hearings for members of the full committee, the subcommittees of Procurement and Research and Development, on where we are with ballistic missile defense. We had a hearing on the threat, both a closed briefing for the Members and an open briefing, a full day of hearings on what is the threat out there. We heard the horror stories of 77 nations today having cruise missiles that could be used against us. We heard the horror stories of 20 countries who today are building cruise missiles and the threat that poses to us. We had a hearing on what we have gotten for our money. What have we been able to produce with the billions of dollars we spent on missile defense over the past decade? We had a show and tell where General O'Neill brought in the technologies we developed with our missile defense funding. Finally, we had General O'Neill himself present to us what his vision of missile defense for this country would be like. Mr. Chairman, when we get to the missile defense section, every dollar that we put in this bill is in line with what General O'Neill said we should be spending on missile defense. In fact, it is less. General O'Neill told us we could add on up to $1.2 billion in the missile defense accounts for theater missile, national missile, cruise missile and Brilliant Eyes. We could not give him that full amount, but we gave him about $800 million. We have plussed up those areas where General O'Neill, acting as President Clinton's representative, told us we should put our dollars in terms of protecting our people from the threat of a missile coming into our mainland or hurting our troops when they are being deployed overseas. [[Page H5787]] This is a good bill as it relates to missile defense. Yet you will hear later on our colleagues attempt to say we are trying to undermine the ABM Treaty. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I will say this, Mr. Chairman: We are silent on the treaty. It is a treaty that we will abide by. But there are some who want to distort this bill and politicize it to have it be supportive of additional use of the ABM treaty, and we think that is a mistake, and we are going to oppose it when that amendment comes to the floor. This is a good bill, and I encourage our colleagues to support it with a large vote, and give our chairman the endorsement of an excellent job in leading us on the security of this country. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums]. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] is recognized for 4 minutes. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to respond to one of the comments that my distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania made, because he raised a very significant point, and that is the issue of job loss in the context of downsizing. I find it interesting that when you talk with the corporate CEO's about a great percentage of this downsizing in the quiet, they will agree that a great part of their job loss had nothing to do with the downsizing of the military budget, but the fact that during the years of the eighties, they developed such huge overheads, they got fat and sassy, they were no longer competitive, particularly in the international arena, so they had to cut back, they had to start getting streamlined, they had to become competitive. So a portion of those jobs were as a result of that. But I think the gentleman raises an important point. When we are downsizing, there is economic dislocation. And my response to that is that the long-term answer, the near-term answer to that, is an aggressive economic conversion strategy, not buying weapons that are expensive and unnecessary. That is not the real answer to that. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. DELLUMS. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I appreciate my friend and colleague yielding. I appreciate the willingness to engage in a dialog. What I would say is 2 years ago as we saw the defense numbers being projected by President Clinton, we went to the Office of Technology Assessment and the Congressional Budget Office. Each of them did studies that said if we implement the budget numbers proposed by President Clinton, we would see 1.5 million men and women lose their jobs in the defense industry. That is exactly what is happening, and that is happening directly because of the most massive cuts in the acquisition accounts that we have seen since before World War II. So it has had a direct impact on real jobs all across America. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, in downsizing the military budget, economic dislocation is indeed going to be a reality. The point that I am simply suggesting is that we are bright enough and competent enough to engage in a policy discussion that leads us toward the policies of economic conversion. The tragedy is that many of my colleagues, because we do not have a national jobs bill in this country, because we have not embraced economic, monetary, and budgetary policies designed to expand employment, we look at the military budget as a jobs bill. The last time I was chair of the committee, last year, my colleagues sent in requests to my office to add $10 billion to the military budget. Now, you do not have to be too bright to understand what that was about. I understand. It was about jobs. People do not like to see people unemployed. Neither do I. But the tragedy is that we are beginning to use the military budget on a more expansive basis as a jobs bill, when it should be a bill that addresses the national security needs of this country, and we need to have a much broader strategy to handle the dislocation, and I think that is economic conversion. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield further, I would just say I agree with the gentleman. That is why in this bill, in the R accounts, we keep the dual use funding levels at the same level they were in previous years, for exactly that reason. We keep the dual use of funding level at exactly the level that they were funded at over the previous 2 years. So we support that notion, when it has defense as a top priority. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder]. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I must say as a mother of yuppies, I rise in strong disagreement with this bill, because my children would call this bill retro. ``Retro'' is a negative word in the yuppie sense, and part of the reason is while we just heard about they are saying that there were $4 billion last year that they thought was fat, in this bill this debate is really nothing but kabuki theater. After we passed that rule, this has nothing to do with reality from here on. There is $9.5 billion more in this bill than the Pentagon said they needed to fight two full-time wars, and I think the Pentagon's judgment has been confirmed pretty well this last week with how well they performed. it is $9.5 billion more than the commander-in-chief wanted, and $9.5 billion more than the Senate wanted. In fact, when we were debating the rule and tried to get this opened up so we could offer some of these amendments, we were told we could not, because it might distort the negotiations with the Senate on the budget, the overall budget negotiations going on. So really we are just standing here throwing words back and forth at each other, and it really does not mean a thing, because three-fourths of the cutting amendments have been denied. They have been denied. Again, as everybody here is saying this is a better bill than before, oh, really? You thought $4 billion was a lot of fat last year, try $9.5 billion in this year's that we cannot get to. Furthermore, there is a real threat I think to the ABM Treaty. If there was not, why not say there is not? How can you say there is no threat, but we will not accept an amendment saying we do not plan to change it? If you really think the women who put their lives on the line should be considered second class citizens, which I do not, then you will love this bill. This is great. If you think we should have a line item and direct where we are going to go with tritium production, without anybody having a debate or really deciding these things, then you will love this. You are going to hear a lot of debate about industrial base. Well, let me tell you, this is, again, a retro industrial base that we are supporting in this bill. The gentleman from California and I worked very hard with many Members trying to find a competitive way to take this expensive research and development that the taxpayer had invested in and apply it to the future, apply it to other things we needed, to upgrade our industrial base and have new products we can sell to the world, in such areas as law enforcement, medical technology, all those types of things, because that is clearly where it is going. Instead, what do we have in there? We are going to have a big move to bring back the B-2 bomber. Even Secretary Cheney did not think we needed this thing. He signed off on 20 of these. You can buy these for about $1.1 billion. That is a lot of school lunches. That is a lot of student loans. During the cold war, if Secretary Cheney was convinced 20 of these was enough, I would think that that would be enough for us today in the post-cold-war era. So what I am trying to say is things like this are being kept alive in the name of keeping the industrial base up. Well, let me tell you we have a dog-gone good aviation industrial base. Just look at the Boeing 777. We are just doing this to keep some defense contractors who put out big political donations, I think, alive. And we have got all sorts of other things in here we cannot even offer an amendment to. This one at least we get to offer the amendment to. I guess they figured they have [[Page H5788]] got it wired in so they cannot lose this one, and the other ones, I guess people are afraid they should be losing. But I think Mr. Chairman, this is a very sad day, and I hope Members will join me in voting no on this retro bill. The CHAIRMAN. The Chair will advise that the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] has 42\1/2\ minutes remaining, and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] has 29 minutes remaining. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities. {time} 1630 Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. I would like to say, this is my first time to be a cochairman of this committee or any committee in Congress for that matter. And it was an experience, and I could not have asked for a more cooperative or helpful ranking member than the gentleman from Texas, Solomon Ortiz, who I thought did a super job. This was truly, at least our part of it and I think most of the bill, was truly a nonpartisan or bipartisan product. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities, I can assure the House that this bill squarely addresses one of the most serious problems confronting the Department of Defense and the people who serve in our Nation's military services. That problem is the quality and availability of adequate troop housing and military family housing. There is no question that there is a crisis in military housing. Over 600,000 single enlisted personnel are assigned to on-base troop housing facilities. The average age of barracks and dormitories is over 40 years. One-fourth of these facilities is considered substandard. At current levels of funding, improving on-base housing for single enlisted personnel cannot be accomplished, depending on the military service, for years or, in some cases, for decades. The situation in family housing is not much better. Approximately 218,000 or two-thirds of the homes in the housing inventory of the Department of Defense are classified as inadequate. One-quarter of the homes in the DOD inventory are over 40 years old and two-thirds are over 30 years old. This aging military family stock has extremely high maintenance and repair needs. If nothing changes, fixing the military family housing problem will take over 30 years. The present military housing situation is unacceptable and the Committee on National Security is determined to put us on the path toward fixing the problem. H.R. 1530 contains critically important short-term and long-term remedies to this problem. Working with the military services, we have identified a number of unfunded and badly needed quality-of-life improvements in housing, child care, health care facility that can be executed next year. We have funded solely those projects where the need is the greatest and the dollars can immediately be put to use. Equally of importance, we coordinated these recommendations thoroughly with our colleagues on the Committee on Appropriations so that we are singing from the same page of music. And we have agreed, both of us, to a strong quality of life package. This bill funds over $630 million in new construction improvements for barracks and dormitories at 63 installations, including projects at 25 installations which the committee identified as priority requirements for military services which were unfunded in the department's budget request. The bill also provides approximately $900 million in military family housing construction and improvements. These funds will provide quality housing for about 9,400 military families, over 2,000 more than the Department's request, and will ensure that other badly needed neighborhood improvements are undertaken. I want to stress again that this bill funds only those projects which can be executed in fiscal year 1996. This is not a hollow program. But beyond the important quality of life improvements we are recommending to the House, the committee has also taken a longer term view of the problem of fixing the military construction problem. We are providing for an opportunity for private sector involvement in this and have set up a structure that gives the possibility for that to take place at bases around the country. We are going to develop pilot programs this year, and I think this is the only way you can get there from here in terms of actually solving this problem. So in conclusion, let me say, I strongly support this piece of legislation. I think not only in this particular area that I have talked about but throughout the bill, we make giant strides. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. McHugh], who is the chairman of our moral, welfare, and recreation panel. Mr. McHUGH. Mr. Chairman, let me add my words of admiration and appreciation to the full committee chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence], and really all the members of the Committee on National Security, including, or course, the ranking minority member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], who have worked hard to make this, I think, a very credible and a very well-balanced piece of legislation. We have heard today, Mr. Chairman, and we will continue to hear how difficult and how different these times are. I think this legislation reflects those realities in a very direct and a very palpable way. Indeed, while these times are different, they are at least as dangerous, if not more dangerous than any circumstances that we as a nation have encountered across this globe in perhaps the last half century or more. There, too, this legislation is, I think, a very able attempt to try to react to those very dangerous circumstances. In that regard, those of us, myself included, who had the opportunity and the honor to serve on the committee special oversight panel on moral, welfare and recreation have worked to include in this legislation a number of measures that will provide for an acceptable quality of life for men and women in uniform. We all know, Mr. Chairman, that under any circumstances, these programs are so vitally important. But as our military men and women are being asked to deploy more and more, and not just by a Republican president, not just by a Democrat president, but by chiefs of the military from both sides of the aisle, to places like Haiti and Somalia, providing comfort in northern and southern Iraq and the skies of Bosnia, we have to maintain programs and let our men and women know that, as they leave, their families are being adequately taken care of, being provided for. This program and this legislation fully funds those kinds of programs, fully funds them, I might add, at a level that President Clinton requested. This is a well-balanced, well-reasoned piece of legislation that, Mr. Chairman, I respectfully urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to defend and to support. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton], a very valuable member of our committee. Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Once again, we stand on this floor and debate the merits of a defense authorization bill. But unlike previous debates, consideration of the 1996 Defense Authorization Act is different. Before us is legislation which stops the backsliding of previous defense bills and takes a critical first step toward matching resources with the ever-growing number of military commitments. This bill doesn't solve all the problems which plague our Armed Forces. Ten years of declining defense budgets cannot be overturned in a single defense budget. Yet this bill makes significant, concrete improvements. Among the many initiatives, this bill: Adds a third Aegis destroyer--a ship which was stricken from the Navy's original budget proposal but identified by the Navy's top admiral as his highest priority. Takes a more prudent and robust approach to missile defense by adding $763 million for ballistic missile defense program and directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and deploy theater and national defenses ``at the earliest practical date;'' [[Page H5789]] Fully funds the purchase of eight C-17's, a mission-essential platform which every top Pentagon official has testified as a gotta have program. In addition this bill sends a message to our military personnel and their families that we understand the hardships they endure. We show our appreciation by fully funding a 2.4 percent pay raise and by adding $425 million for the construction and improvements to military family housing and troop housing. Finally, this bill provides money to keep the B-2 industrial base in tact, giving us the option of procuring additional stealth bombers should we decide to do so. To those of my colleagues who think that the B-2 is too expensive, I simply point out that waging a war which a fleet of B-2 bombers could have deterred is far more costly both in terms of lives and money. Is this a perfect bill? No, but it does what the administration has failed to do in three previous defense proposals. It honestly identifies our defense needs and takes appropriate action to address them. My colleagues, last fall as part of our Contract With America we made a commitment to the American public that we would strengthen our military forces. In February, we passed H.R. 7 which demonstrated our commitment and our resolve. This bill continues that process by putting real deeds behind those words and promises. I urge Members to support our troops by supporting this bill. I urge my colleagues to support the bill and to avoid destructive amendments. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] for the purposes of engaging in a colloquy. Mr. HOKE. Mr. Chairman, I rise for the purpose of a colloquy with the gentleman from South Carolina. As you know, last week I submitted to the Committee on Rules an amendment that would require the President to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as permitted under article XV of that treaty. I sponsored that amendment because along with you, I believe that the ABM treaty adopts a national strategy of intentional defenselessness which is completely inconsistent and incompatible with our obligation to provide for the common defense of the people of the United States. Not only does the ABM treaty depend on a misguided strategy of mutually assured destruction, but the Government of the United States has adopted an unspoken policy of nondisclosure of that strategy to the American people. While this strategy of defenselessness may possibly have been arguable in 1972 when we had only one ICBM-capable enemy, it is utterly without merit today when many nations have gained or are gaining access to ballistic missile technology as well as to the weapons of mass destruction. All of which is to say that in my view this policy is insane and will be viewed in the long sweep of history as a particularly dumb idea which held sway under peculiar circumstances for a very brief period of time. But what is truly unconscionable is that the public has been kept out of the loop. Defrauded of its right to know and intentionally not told that all of America and particularly her largest cities are now the beta sites for a massive experiment in foreign relations, that this experiment in foreign and defense policy places the lives and fortunes of a quarter of a billion Americans at risk without their knowledge is unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong. After consulting with you and Messrs. Young, Weldon, and Livingston last week, I withdrew my amendment as a result of your stated intention to hold hearings on the validity of the ABM treaty and on a bill to repeal that treaty which will be offered later this week. I deeply appreciate that offer on your part. I view as a tremendous opportunity to this, these hearings as a tremendous opportunity to inform the American people of the policy that we are under now that leaves them defenseless. I also want to note that the gentleman form South Carolina [Mr. Spratt] has offered an amendment that amounts to a

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NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996
(House of Representatives - June 13, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H5782-H5892] NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996 The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 164 and rule XXIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 1530. In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill (H.R. 1530) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 1996 for military activities of the Department of Defense, to prescribe military personnel strengths for fiscal year 1996, and for other purposes with Mr. Emerson in the Chair. The Clerk read the title of the bill. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] will each be recognized for 1 hour. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence]. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to section 5(c) of House Resolution 164, I request that during the consideration of H.R. 1530, amendments number 1 and 2 printed in subpart B of part 1 of House Report 104-136 be considered before amendment number 1 printed in subpart A of part 1 of that report. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman's request is noted. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. SPENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. This bill is the first since the end of the cold war to truly look to the future while not ignoring the present. Much has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, but much remains the same. First and foremost, the United States is still a superpower with global, political, economic, and moral interests. Yet none of these can be protected, nor promoted, without a strong military. We still live in a violent world: from ethnic conflicts to regional wars, the United States has faced and will face a host of challenges to its national interests. Nor have all the changes we have seen in the post-cold-war world been benign. The crumbling of communism has rekindled rivalries and hatreds frozen in place for decades. In Asia, Africa, Europe, and even here in the Americas, armed force remains the ultimate arbiter of political disputes. The Clinton administration has responded to this growing chaos with an ambitious but ill-defined strategy of engagement and enlargement. The President has resolved to be able to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional wars in the decisive fashion Americans demand. Moreover, this administration has taken on an increased number of commitments in the form of a wide range of U.N.-led peace operations. While asking more of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, the administration is simultaneously giving them fewer tools to work with: fewer troops, fewer new weapons, fewer training opportunities. What was once a cautious and disciplined reduction in American forces has plunged into a decade of defense decline--a decline that has created a dangerous $250 billion gap between strategy and resources. The administration can neither honor its present strategic commitments nor prepare for future challenges. For the first time in a decade, the defense authorization bill says-- STOP. Stop the slide in defense spending. Stop the dissipation of our military power on futile missions. Stop the postponing of proper training. Stop the decline of our defense industrial base. Stop the erosion of servicemembers' quality of life. Stop frittering away defense resources on nondefense research. Stop the shell game that is mortgaging long-term modernization needs in order to plug holes in underfunded near-term readiness and quality of life accounts. This bill also starts the process of revitalizing America's defenses. Be sure that American soldiers are under American command. Set a clear course for stable and predictable defense spending. Provide the men and women who wear an American uniform with adequate training. Preserve the technological edge that is a force multiplier and saves lives. Guarantee a decent standard of living for them and their families. Protect our troops abroad and Americans here at home from the threat of ballistic missiles. This bill's efforts to bridge the growing inconsistencies between strategy and resource, and therefore begin a meaningful revitalization of our defenses, rests on four pillars: First, it improves the quality of service life by raising pay, enhancing housing benefits, increasing construction of family housing and prohibiting deeper cuts in manpower levels. Second, It preserves near and far-term military readiness by more robustly funding core readiness accounts and by creating a mechanism for funding the growing number of unbudgeted contingency operations from non-readiness accounts. Third, it dramatically increases weapons modernization funding in response to the administration's having mortgaged these programs to address near-term shortfalls. Modernization will help to ensure cutting edge technology on the battlefield in the future, as well as a viable industrial base to provide this technology. Fourth, it begins to aggressively reform the bloated and unresponsive Pentagon bureaucracy by reducing a growing civilian Secretariat as well as the acquisition work force, streamlining the procurement process, and eliminating nondefense research and encouraging privatization initiatives. This last pillar, in particular, is essential for generating longterm savings needed to maintain American military might over time as well as creating a more agile Defense Department able to respond in a timely manner to new challenges. Our men and women in uniform, and certainly the taxpayers, deserve no less. These four pillars are central to a sound defense program, one that can begin to bridge the gap between strategy and resources. This bill protects the peace we have won in the cold war and prepares us to prevail quickly and decisively in the future. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1530. It is a bipartisan bill on an important set of bipartisan issues. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. DELLUMS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the recommendation of the Committee on National Security on the bill before the body at this time, H.R. 1530, as amended. Mr. Chairman, the overall level of expenditures contained within the bill is too high, even though within the budget resolution limits. The bill's spending returns us to cold war priorities, and numerous provisions promote extreme agendas on major social issues. Deliberation on the bill has been so frustrated that the committee's well-developed and well-earned legacy of bipartisanship has tattered because of the unwillingness sincerely to solicit administration and alternative views. H.R. 1530 contains numerous and sweeping provisions that have been developed without, Mr. Chairman, and I underscore for emphasis without, the benefit of full consultation with the administration and others, and have not been illuminated properly even by the subcommittee's and full committee's hearing process. These include initiatives and personnel matters, weapons [[Page H5783]] procurement, research and development, foreign policy initiatives, and acquisition reform. The committee, Mr. Chairman, would embark upon an extraordinary costly program to purchase new B-2 bombers, even after all of the testimony the committee received by the Department of Defense and the services concluded that additional B-2's were not needed, and that their purchase would crowd out other higher priority programs. Yes, we will later today debate more fully this issue, but the inclusion of funding for additional B-2's is sufficient reason alone to reject this committee report. Parenthetically, Mr. Chairman, this bill contains $553 million to begin long-lead items for two additional B-2 bombers that ultimately results in an effort to build 20 additional B-2 bombers. At a time when we just came through a budget process that will visit pain and human misery by virtue of the draconian cuts in that budget upon the children of this country, mothers in this country, senior citizens in this country, veterans, and farmers, and others in America, this bill calls for beginning to go down the road toward the expenditure of $31.5 billion to build 20 planes, $19.7 billion to build them and to equip them, $11.8 billion to operate and maintain them throughout the life cycle of that plane. At a time when we are in community meetings saying we must visit pain upon all of America in order to balance the budget, $31.5 billion, the Secretary of Defense said no, we do not want them, we do not need them. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vice-chair know we do not want them, know we do not need them. {time} 1545 An independent study by the Institute for Defense Analysis: ``No, we don't need them, we don't want them, we can't afford them, and there are cost-effective alternatives.'' An independent role and missions study said, ``No, we don't want them, no, we don't need them.'' But this bill, we start down the road toward a $31.5 billion expenditure to the American taxpayer. Mr. Chairman, the bill places more resources towards weapons acquisition, despite clear testimony by Secretary Perry that the Department has a procurement strategy that will secure the timely modernization of the weapons inventory and guarantee future readiness. Rushing to replace weapons that are fairly young both wastes taxpayers' dollars and could, indeed, spark a new arms race. The majority made several assurances that it was not their intention to now develop theater missile defense nor national missile defense systems that would not comply with the ABM Treaty nor to cause a breakout from the treaty through the Missile Defense Act rewrite. Yet in spite of those assertions, Mr. Chairman, all attempts to have the committee bill conform to the ABM Treaty or to limit development activities that would violate the treaty were successfully resisted by the majority. I would submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that anytime we proceed to move beyond significant treaties, we ought to do so thoughtfully and cautiously and carefully. And if my colleagues are saying they do not wish at this time to violate the ABM Treaty, why not a simple inclusion of propositions that maintain the integrity of the ABM Treaty? That was not done. I leave that for your consideration and to draw whatever conclusions you choose to draw. Mr. Chairman, part of the bill payers for the acquisition surge were vitally important environmental cleanup programs that the Departments of Energy and Defense are required by law or by litigation to complete and for which it is our obligation to provide them the funding. None of the amendments that would restore these funds were made in order. Mr. Chairman, at a time when bases are closing throughout America, at a time when there is need to clean up those bases that we dirtied, in order to allow communities to take that land and property and go forward with community and commercial higher and better use, we are saying we are cutting environmental programs designed to clean up those facilities, rendering some communities in this country impotent in their capacity to take that land and build schools and playgrounds and develop commercial activities throughout America in order to allow us to move beyond the politics of the cold war. In order to develop a vibrant economy that speaks to the post-cold war, we cut funds. That logic of that defies understanding, and it escapes this gentleman. Part came from dual-use programs that are being used to position the industrial base to be able to support fully the emerging defense industrial challenges of the century to come. Such shortsightedness, Mr. Chairman, in cutting these funds in order to pay in part for lower- priority cold war-era weapons should be rejected by the House. We must begin to embrace the concept of conversion. How do we move from a cold war military-reliant economy to a post-cold war economy? I would suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, it means embracing the principles of conversion. How do you move from building B-2 bombers to building efficient, effective mass transit systems? How do you move from building weapons of mass destruction that rain terror and pain and human misery on people to enhancing the quality of human life? That is our challenge. That requires the highest and the best in our intellectual and political capability and understanding. The dual-use technology program was one of those specific efforts to move toward conversion, to go from swords to plowshares in very specific terms. Yet we challenge these programs. The logic of that defies understanding. Further, not all of the programs with the bill are money spending programs, Mr. Chairman: abortion, HIV status, El Salvador medals to people when we told people we in America were not waging war in El Salvador. Suddenly now we want to give medals. We are saying we really were involved in the war in El Salvador? That is in this bill. Other contentious items were placed in the bill without benefit of committee inquiry. Mr. Chairman, I know I have my politics. We all have different politics. That is the nature of the political system is to engage each others' different perspectives and different points of view, derive a consensus and move forward, but because we are legislators, we have designed a specific legislative process that allows us to engage these issues substantively at the subcommittee and full committee level prior to consideration on the floor of Congress. Many of these issues were never dealt with significantly at the subcommittee or full committee level. The process is flawed. The committee squeezed $171 million from the Nunn-Lugar nuclear weapons dismantlement program to finance projects and weapons systems of less effective value to the Nation's security, despite Secretary Perry's statement that this program was one of his highest priorities. Mr. Chairman, this program is designed to dismantle nuclear weapons developed by the former Soviet Union. We were spending, in the decade of the 1980's, in excess of $300 billion per annum in order to prepare to potentially wage war, even the insanity of nuclear war, with the Soviet Union. Now, for a measly few dollars in a multibillion-dollar budget, we cut $160 million that would dismantle these weapons. What could be more in the interests of the children of this country than to dismantle nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union? The economics of that defies logic, but we take this money to purchase more weapons. And I will argue in the context of the B-2 that is not about national security. It is about where the weapons are built, where the weapons take off and where they land. It is about parochialism. It is not about national security. It is about billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars going in the wrong place when we are denying our children better educations or people in this country better health care and other things. We are purchasing weapons systems that we do not need, that speak to yesterday, not to tomorrow. Mr. Chairman, the bill directly and adversely affects our long-term national security interests by erecting impediments to participate effectively in U.N. peacekeeping. Clearly, this is a [[Page H5784]] case in which the American people are way ahead of the committee in comprehending the enduring moral value, financial benefit and the advantage generated by having the United States participate fully in peacekeeping efforts in order to control the outbreak of war and violence. What better contribution to the world than, as the major, last-standing supervisor, that we participate with the family of nations in peacekeeping, stopping the slaughter and the violence, ending our capacity to wage war? But, no, we render ourselves impotent in this bill. We impede ourselves in this bill, not through logic and rational thought, but because of political expediency and lack of careful thinking, we deny our capacity to engage in peacekeeping. That is the wave of the future. That is America's role in the future, not conducting war and savagery on other human beings, but because of our rationality and our sanity, learning how to keep the peace in the world. That is a profound role that we have to play. This bill does not get us there. Mr. Chairman, section 3133 would fund a multipurpose reactor tritium production program that will breach the fire wall between civilian nuclear power and defense nuclear weapons programs with major implications for U.S. nonproliferation efforts and would prematurely anticipate the Secretary of Energy's decisionmaking process to identify the best source of tritium production. Let me now try to explain briefly the implications of that. This is a multipurpose tritium reactor. We have embraced a principle in the context of our international relations that says that we would not cross the line where commercial use of development of nuclear-capable material could be used for military purposes. That is an important principle in our international understandings with people. That is why we wreaked havoc on North Korea, on Iran and on Iraq. Mr. Chairman, query: How can we maintain the integrity of the moral high ground with these countries when we question their development of commercial-use reactors that could also be used to develop nuclear weapons capability materials? If we cross the line, why not the rest of the world? We lose the moral high ground. Second, this is the mother, this is the mother of all earmarks. This reactor is going to one place to one contractor, when last year on this floor we took the principled position that earmarking compromised the credibility and the integrity of the deliberative process. Yet in this bill, we have an earmark. It flies in the face of what we are ostensibly about here, and we need to reject this, and we should have a significant, and hopefully will have, a serious debate on this matter. Mr. Chairman, in the past 2 years the defense authorization bills have put the United States on a path toward beyond cold war thinking and began to move us toward a post-cold-war national security strategy. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissipated and the Warsaw Pact vanished, it ended the cold war. And I have said on more than one occasion that with the ending of the cold war it ushered in a new era, the post-cold-war era, that requires us to take off old labels of who is left wing and right wing, take off old labels of who is the peacenik and who is the hawk, take off old labels and move beyond old paradigms to challenge ourselves, to think brilliantly and competently about how we move toward the 21st century in the context of the post- cold-war; great challenges, but also great opportunities. This is a moment in a period of transition. And the great tragic reality is the American people are looking to Washington and saying, ``We don't know what to do in the context of the post-cold-war. What should we do?'' And many politicians, because they do not like to get too far out in front of public opinion, because you can lose your job doing that, are turning around saying, ``Don't ask me. What do you think we ought to do?'' So the American people are asking the political leaders what should they do. The political leaders are asking the American people what to do. In the meantime we are blowing this incredible opportunity to take the world boldly in a different place with the United States as a major superpower out in front in a courageous way. No, we are walking backward toward the cold war. We want to build B-2 bombers that were cold war weapons. We want to go back to a national missile defense in cold war era times. We want to buy weapons systems that have nothing to do with moving forward. We want to retard our capacity on peacekeeping initiatives and other things that would move us rationally and logically into the 21st century. We are going backward, and this bill underscores that. This bill reverses the course. It buys more weapons whose design, function, and purposes were rooted in cold war strategy and doctrine. It pushes away from an aggressive arms control strategy and potentially back toward global brinksmanship. The last couple of weeks we talked about not saddling the children with a budget deficit. Why saddle the children with the danger of brinksmanship? Why saddle the children with the danger of weapons systems we do not need? Why challenge the children of this country with cold war strategies that make no sense? If we are going to be consistent about embracing the future and caring about our children, then all of our policies, not just the rhetoric of the budget resolution, but the reality of the military budget and our strategy on national security, should speak eloquently and powerfully to that. It seeks to impede effective efforts by the Department of Defense to ready itself for the challenges of the current time and the next generation, all in the name of keeping it ready for the types of challenges which arose in the past. This bill represents not just a lost opportunity to adjust the changes of our time, but carries with it the tone and substance that has been the basis of so many destabilizing arms and ideological competitions of the past. My final comment, I leave you with this, Mr. Chairman, I believe that this new era has ushered in for us an incredible new opportunity, this generation as represented by those of us on this floor. We have been given an enormous gift. We have been given the gift of an opportunity to radically alter the world, to make it a safer and sane and stable place for ourselves and our children and our children's children. We can paint bold strokes across the canvas of time, leaving our legacy to the next generation of one of peace and security, or we can tinker around at the margins of change because of our caution, because of our insecurity, because of our fear, and because of our insecurity and blow this moment. {time} 1600 I hope that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren do not look back at this moment and say, ``My God, that generation had a chance to make the world a better place, and they blew the opportunity.'' I believe this bill goes down that tragic and sad road. I urge defeat of the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bateman]. Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Committee on National Security, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] for yielding this time to me. Let me also, while I am on my feet, commend him for the excellence of the leadership that he has provided to the Committee on National Security in bringing H.R. 1530 to the floor and also commend him, notwithstanding the vast differences in the point of view and perspective between my chairman and the ranking member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], for his excellent cooperation and assistance in seeing that the committee's business was fairly transacted. Let me also speak my appreciation to the ranking member of the Readiness Subcommittee, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Sisisky] for his unfailing cooperation and assistance in seeing that our portion of the bill was dealt with, and dealt with very responsibly and effectively. H.R. 1530 fully funds the military services' operation and training accounts and adds significant resources to other important readiness activities, including real property maintenance, to address health, safety, and mission- [[Page H5785]] critical deficiencies, depot maintenance to reduce backlogs, and base operations support to address shortfalls in programs which sustain mission capability, quality of life, and work force productivity. Second, H.R. 1530 undertakes a number of initiatives to reengineer and reform defense business operations and functions performed by the Department of Defense, its agencies, and the military services to create efficiencies and maximize the value of our defense dollars. These initiatives are in areas such as inventory management, computers, financial management, transportation, audit, and inspector general oversight and fuel management, and include a number of pilot programs for outsourcing functions not core to the Department of Defense warfighting mission. Third, H.R. 1530 fixes a critical problem which contributed greatly to the readiness shortfalls experienced in the late fiscal year 1994. Specifically, the bill takes action to protect the key trading and readiness accounts from having funds diverted to pay for unbudgeted contingency operations. It does so by establishing short-term financing mechanisms to cover the initial costs of such operations requiring the administration to submit timely supplemental appropriation requests and requiring the adminstration to seek funds in advance for planned, but unbudgeted, operations if they are expected to continue into the next fiscal year. Mr. Chairman, at the end of the day, H.R. 1530 achieves the goals we all share: providing the necessary resources to ensure force readiness, improving quality of life for our service people, and instituting defense support structure reforms to enable resources to be made available for other short- and long-term readiness needs. I urge my colleagues to support the bill. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery]. (Mr. MONTGOMERY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the ranking member for giving me this time, and, Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1530 and, given the tight budget situation we faced this year, the defense authorization bill represents compromise. While the legislation does not contain all the provisions I would have liked, it is balanced and a step in the right direction to provide for the defense needs of our country. I am particularly pleased with the emphasis on operation and maintenance needs in order to improve readiness of our forces. Mr. Chairman, I am also pleased and would like to note one provision. It is a joint VA/DOD housing program. This is in the bill. This is a needed program, will apply to enlisted personnel and officers 0-3 and below. They could apply for a VA guaranteed loan to purchase off-base housing with the Department of Defense buying down the interest payments for the first 3 years. This program will help to relieve the problems we are having on our bases of housing shortage. I also want to point out that the bill contains $770 million for procurement of equipment for the National Guard and Reserve and my colleagues know it pleases me very much when the Guard and Reserve are able to get the proper equipment. I am disappointed, though, Mr. Chairman, that the bill effectively kills the civil military programs conducted by the Reserve components in so many communities throughout the Nation. This program has been really important. It has a lot of merit to it, and it looks like we are not going to be able to use our National Guard and Reserve units to help out individuals that need help, and I am very worried about that, and that was what was left out of the bill. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. MONTGOMERY. I yield to the gentlewomen from Colorado. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery] for speaking up so eloquently about that because really being able to use the National Guard and Reserve to go in and serve communities, whether it is medically, whether it is helping our youth, whether it is--I find it really shocking that we are just severing that tie to the communities and that service, and I say to the gentleman, ``Thank you for the leadership you gave. How sad it is to see it all rolled back.'' Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman. There are some wonderful programs, and I think probably the people around the country will speak up, and will be able to someday get these funded. We will not talk about the money. It was peoples programs, helping underprivileged, not in Central and South America, but right here in the United States of America. So, Mr. Chairman, I reemphasize my support for this bill and urge its adoption in the House. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Procurement of the Committee on National Security. Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to start out by thanking our great chairman of the Committee on National Security for his wonderful leadership through the hearings that we held, the many briefings, discussions, the inner workings from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans working to do what is best for America, and I want to compliment the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], ranking member of the full committee, for his hard work, and my counterpart, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton], who did so much to put together a good package that will give national security to this country. My colleagues, we lived through the 1980's and rebuilt American defense because we believed in a policy of peace through strength, and at times that policy was very heavily criticized. When the Russians were ringing our allies in Europe with SS-20 missiles, and many people here at home, particularly members of the leadership, some leadership in the Democrat Party, many leaders in the media, urged that we appease the then-Soviet Union, urged that we cut back on weapon systems, urged that we terminate our ICBM systems and our bomber development, thankfully, the leadership in the House and many Members of Congress did not go along with that policy. We believed in a policy of peace through strength, and we stood up to the Russians in Europe. We put where we start moving forward with our plan to put Pershings and ground-launched cruise missiles in. In Central America, where we moved to deny the Soviets and their proxies a foothold on our own continent, in Africa, in the deep water, with the rebuilding of our American Navy, we challenged the growing Soviet fleet, and interestingly, because we stood up to the Russians, we brought about peace through strength, and the Berlin Wall came down, and then we had a conflict in the Middle East. No Russians involved, purely a conventional conflict, and all of the systems that the Members of this Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations had put into the pipeline that were heavily criticized by the media in this country, the M-1 tank that ran out of gas too soon, the Apache helicopter that needed too many spare parts, the Patriot missile system that took too long to develop; all those systems, when deployed on the sands of the Persian Gulf, proved to be very excellent systems. They saved American lives, they brought home the great majority of those body bags that we sent to the Middle East empty. Well, we have moved to continue that rebuilding of national security, and let me tell you, Mr. Chairman, On our subcommittee, at your direction, we have rebuilt ammunition accounts, we have rebuilt precision guided munitions accounts. Those were those precision guided systems where you do not drop a hundred bombs on a target. You send one in at a bridge or that particular radar site and knock it out. We rebuilt American sealift. We started to add ships to our sealift accounts. We put in extra fighters this year. Last year we bought fewer fighter aircraft than Switzerland, that great warmaking power. We kept that industrial base alive. We tried to keep our sealift going. We put in basic things like trucks so that the army can be mobile, [[Page H5786]] so it can move its logistics corps to the area of operation quickly. So we have started, Mr. Chairman, in the procurement subcommittee, moving ahead with the resumption of that policy that has not failed this country of peace through strength, and let me just say to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], the ranking member of the full Committee on National Security, it is true that there is a State earmarking of this reactor that will build tritium. On the other hand, my observation is not too many States have been asking for the reactor and, as a matter of politics, probably would not. But I think it is clear that the Clinton administration itself has said that continued tritium production is an important thing, and it is important that we move forward with the way to do that, and I personally think that the reactor is the way to go, not the accelerator that has been proposed by the administration. So, my colleagues, I think we put forth a good package for the United States to resume this policy of peace through strength, and I would urge all members to support it. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas [Mr. Ortiz]. Mr. ORTIZ. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, our national defense authorization for fiscal year 1996. I am pleased to join my colleagues in supporting what I believe to be a comprehensive and forward thinking bill to address the defense concerns of the United States into the next century. I would like to commend the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley] for his work at the subcommittee level, and both Chairman Spence and the full committee ranking minority member, Ron Dellums, for working to forge a bipartisan bill. Military construction is significantly important to our Nation's ability to have a ready and capable force. Mission support, quality of life projects, living spaces, work places, infrastructure revitalization, and environmental compliance are key factors in ensuring that our forces are able to meet the many challenges facing our military today. I have long been interested in reforming the way the armed services provide housing for our men and women in uniform. Three years ago, there was some concern about the future needs of military housing for our servicemen in south Texas--and the community responded by proposing a Naval Housing Investment Board that would combine servicemember and civilian housing through a public-private investment board. The bill before us contains a major new initiative to form public/ private partnerships in an effort to improve military housing. The program provides a series of new authorities to encourage the investment of private capital to assist in the development of military family housing. Since we began our efforts to combine our limited Federal resources with private investment in last year's DOD bill through the Navy Housing Investment Board--the program concept proved so successful that it is being extended to the other service branches with the wholehearted endorsement of Secretary of Defense William Perry. Mr. Chairman, I encourage my colleagues to vote for this bill. It is a good bill, and specifically it addresses the housing needs for men in uniform. {time} 1615 Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development of the Committee on National Security. (Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, first of all, I rise to applaud our chairman, who has done an outstanding job in leading us through this first bill that we have had the chance to put together, and also acknowledge the cooperation and support of our ranking member, who as always, is gracious and cooperative, even if we may disagree on some substantive issues. I think this is a good bill, Mr. Chairman. This is a good bill that passed out of our full committee with a vote of 48 to 3, meaning only three members of the full Committee on National Security saw fit to oppose this legislation being reported to the House floor. This bill, for the first time in the last 9 years that I have been here, reverses the hemorrhaging that has been occurring within our national defense and national security. We all heard the rhetoric of 5 years ago about the peace dividend. Well, I can tell you where the peace dividend is. It is in my UAW workers who are now looking for fast food jobs in Delaware County and Southeastern Pennsylvania because they have been laid off by Boeing Corporation, by Martin Marietta, by Lockheed. Norm Augustine, the new CEO of the new Martin Lockheed was in my office 2 weeks ago and said his company has laid off 107,000 people in the last 3 years alone, and the layoffs continue. That is what we have got even with our peace dividend. Where has been the defense conversion? There is no defense conversion, Mr. Chairman. But we stop that with this bill, and we do not do it as a jobs program. In fact, I will talk about how we have stopped that process as well, the pork barreling in the bill. We do it because we support what is important based upon the national threat. We started off this year's process with a net threat briefing where we looked at the hot spots of the world and came back to deal with our leadership in the Pentagon about where our priorities should be. Then in our subcommittees we marked up our funding levels in line with what the Joint Chiefs told us were their priorities. We also, Mr. Chairman, and I am very proud of this in the R area, we removed the tremendous amount of earmarking that has occurred in previous bills. There was one estimate that in last year's defense bill there was $4.7 billion of unauthorized appropriations, some of those having nothing to do with defense, many of them stuck in by the appropriators, some of them put in by the authorizers, but many of which were not requested by the military and had nothing to do with our national security. In the R portion of this bill this year, we have no earmarks. We have no direct programs put into that portion of the bill for individual Member requests. We in fact keep the bill clean. We do fund our priorities, Mr. Chairman. We do take a look in the R area at where we should be putting our priorities in terms of dollars. We fully fund missile defense. Now, how do we determine where the priorities should be? Unlike the previous 2 years, Mr. Chairman, when we had no hearings on ballistic missile defense, we in this year held three full hearings for members of the full committee, the subcommittees of Procurement and Research and Development, on where we are with ballistic missile defense. We had a hearing on the threat, both a closed briefing for the Members and an open briefing, a full day of hearings on what is the threat out there. We heard the horror stories of 77 nations today having cruise missiles that could be used against us. We heard the horror stories of 20 countries who today are building cruise missiles and the threat that poses to us. We had a hearing on what we have gotten for our money. What have we been able to produce with the billions of dollars we spent on missile defense over the past decade? We had a show and tell where General O'Neill brought in the technologies we developed with our missile defense funding. Finally, we had General O'Neill himself present to us what his vision of missile defense for this country would be like. Mr. Chairman, when we get to the missile defense section, every dollar that we put in this bill is in line with what General O'Neill said we should be spending on missile defense. In fact, it is less. General O'Neill told us we could add on up to $1.2 billion in the missile defense accounts for theater missile, national missile, cruise missile and Brilliant Eyes. We could not give him that full amount, but we gave him about $800 million. We have plussed up those areas where General O'Neill, acting as President Clinton's representative, told us we should put our dollars in terms of protecting our people from the threat of a missile coming into our mainland or hurting our troops when they are being deployed overseas. [[Page H5787]] This is a good bill as it relates to missile defense. Yet you will hear later on our colleagues attempt to say we are trying to undermine the ABM Treaty. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I will say this, Mr. Chairman: We are silent on the treaty. It is a treaty that we will abide by. But there are some who want to distort this bill and politicize it to have it be supportive of additional use of the ABM treaty, and we think that is a mistake, and we are going to oppose it when that amendment comes to the floor. This is a good bill, and I encourage our colleagues to support it with a large vote, and give our chairman the endorsement of an excellent job in leading us on the security of this country. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums]. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] is recognized for 4 minutes. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to respond to one of the comments that my distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania made, because he raised a very significant point, and that is the issue of job loss in the context of downsizing. I find it interesting that when you talk with the corporate CEO's about a great percentage of this downsizing in the quiet, they will agree that a great part of their job loss had nothing to do with the downsizing of the military budget, but the fact that during the years of the eighties, they developed such huge overheads, they got fat and sassy, they were no longer competitive, particularly in the international arena, so they had to cut back, they had to start getting streamlined, they had to become competitive. So a portion of those jobs were as a result of that. But I think the gentleman raises an important point. When we are downsizing, there is economic dislocation. And my response to that is that the long-term answer, the near-term answer to that, is an aggressive economic conversion strategy, not buying weapons that are expensive and unnecessary. That is not the real answer to that. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. DELLUMS. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I appreciate my friend and colleague yielding. I appreciate the willingness to engage in a dialog. What I would say is 2 years ago as we saw the defense numbers being projected by President Clinton, we went to the Office of Technology Assessment and the Congressional Budget Office. Each of them did studies that said if we implement the budget numbers proposed by President Clinton, we would see 1.5 million men and women lose their jobs in the defense industry. That is exactly what is happening, and that is happening directly because of the most massive cuts in the acquisition accounts that we have seen since before World War II. So it has had a direct impact on real jobs all across America. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, in downsizing the military budget, economic dislocation is indeed going to be a reality. The point that I am simply suggesting is that we are bright enough and competent enough to engage in a policy discussion that leads us toward the policies of economic conversion. The tragedy is that many of my colleagues, because we do not have a national jobs bill in this country, because we have not embraced economic, monetary, and budgetary policies designed to expand employment, we look at the military budget as a jobs bill. The last time I was chair of the committee, last year, my colleagues sent in requests to my office to add $10 billion to the military budget. Now, you do not have to be too bright to understand what that was about. I understand. It was about jobs. People do not like to see people unemployed. Neither do I. But the tragedy is that we are beginning to use the military budget on a more expansive basis as a jobs bill, when it should be a bill that addresses the national security needs of this country, and we need to have a much broader strategy to handle the dislocation, and I think that is economic conversion. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield further, I would just say I agree with the gentleman. That is why in this bill, in the R accounts, we keep the dual use funding levels at the same level they were in previous years, for exactly that reason. We keep the dual use of funding level at exactly the level that they were funded at over the previous 2 years. So we support that notion, when it has defense as a top priority. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder]. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I must say as a mother of yuppies, I rise in strong disagreement with this bill, because my children would call this bill retro. ``Retro'' is a negative word in the yuppie sense, and part of the reason is while we just heard about they are saying that there were $4 billion last year that they thought was fat, in this bill this debate is really nothing but kabuki theater. After we passed that rule, this has nothing to do with reality from here on. There is $9.5 billion more in this bill than the Pentagon said they needed to fight two full-time wars, and I think the Pentagon's judgment has been confirmed pretty well this last week with how well they performed. it is $9.5 billion more than the commander-in-chief wanted, and $9.5 billion more than the Senate wanted. In fact, when we were debating the rule and tried to get this opened up so we could offer some of these amendments, we were told we could not, because it might distort the negotiations with the Senate on the budget, the overall budget negotiations going on. So really we are just standing here throwing words back and forth at each other, and it really does not mean a thing, because three-fourths of the cutting amendments have been denied. They have been denied. Again, as everybody here is saying this is a better bill than before, oh, really? You thought $4 billion was a lot of fat last year, try $9.5 billion in this year's that we cannot get to. Furthermore, there is a real threat I think to the ABM Treaty. If there was not, why not say there is not? How can you say there is no threat, but we will not accept an amendment saying we do not plan to change it? If you really think the women who put their lives on the line should be considered second class citizens, which I do not, then you will love this bill. This is great. If you think we should have a line item and direct where we are going to go with tritium production, without anybody having a debate or really deciding these things, then you will love this. You are going to hear a lot of debate about industrial base. Well, let me tell you, this is, again, a retro industrial base that we are supporting in this bill. The gentleman from California and I worked very hard with many Members trying to find a competitive way to take this expensive research and development that the taxpayer had invested in and apply it to the future, apply it to other things we needed, to upgrade our industrial base and have new products we can sell to the world, in such areas as law enforcement, medical technology, all those types of things, because that is clearly where it is going. Instead, what do we have in there? We are going to have a big move to bring back the B-2 bomber. Even Secretary Cheney did not think we needed this thing. He signed off on 20 of these. You can buy these for about $1.1 billion. That is a lot of school lunches. That is a lot of student loans. During the cold war, if Secretary Cheney was convinced 20 of these was enough, I would think that that would be enough for us today in the post-cold-war era. So what I am trying to say is things like this are being kept alive in the name of keeping the industrial base up. Well, let me tell you we have a dog-gone good aviation industrial base. Just look at the Boeing 777. We are just doing this to keep some defense contractors who put out big political donations, I think, alive. And we have got all sorts of other things in here we cannot even offer an amendment to. This one at least we get to offer the amendment to. I guess they figured they have [[Page H5788]] got it wired in so they cannot lose this one, and the other ones, I guess people are afraid they should be losing. But I think Mr. Chairman, this is a very sad day, and I hope Members will join me in voting no on this retro bill. The CHAIRMAN. The Chair will advise that the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] has 42\1/2\ minutes remaining, and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] has 29 minutes remaining. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities. {time} 1630 Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. I would like to say, this is my first time to be a cochairman of this committee or any committee in Congress for that matter. And it was an experience, and I could not have asked for a more cooperative or helpful ranking member than the gentleman from Texas, Solomon Ortiz, who I thought did a super job. This was truly, at least our part of it and I think most of the bill, was truly a nonpartisan or bipartisan product. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities, I can assure the House that this bill squarely addresses one of the most serious problems confronting the Department of Defense and the people who serve in our Nation's military services. That problem is the quality and availability of adequate troop housing and military family housing. There is no question that there is a crisis in military housing. Over 600,000 single enlisted personnel are assigned to on-base troop housing facilities. The average age of barracks and dormitories is over 40 years. One-fourth of these facilities is considered substandard. At current levels of funding, improving on-base housing for single enlisted personnel cannot be accomplished, depending on the military service, for years or, in some cases, for decades. The situation in family housing is not much better. Approximately 218,000 or two-thirds of the homes in the housing inventory of the Department of Defense are classified as inadequate. One-quarter of the homes in the DOD inventory are over 40 years old and two-thirds are over 30 years old. This aging military family stock has extremely high maintenance and repair needs. If nothing changes, fixing the military family housing problem will take over 30 years. The present military housing situation is unacceptable and the Committee on National Security is determined to put us on the path toward fixing the problem. H.R. 1530 contains critically important short-term and long-term remedies to this problem. Working with the military services, we have identified a number of unfunded and badly needed quality-of-life improvements in housing, child care, health care facility that can be executed next year. We have funded solely those projects where the need is the greatest and the dollars can immediately be put to use. Equally of importance, we coordinated these recommendations thoroughly with our colleagues on the Committee on Appropriations so that we are singing from the same page of music. And we have agreed, both of us, to a strong quality of life package. This bill funds over $630 million in new construction improvements for barracks and dormitories at 63 installations, including projects at 25 installations which the committee identified as priority requirements for military services which were unfunded in the department's budget request. The bill also provides approximately $900 million in military family housing construction and improvements. These funds will provide quality housing for about 9,400 military families, over 2,000 more than the Department's request, and will ensure that other badly needed neighborhood improvements are undertaken. I want to stress again that this bill funds only those projects which can be executed in fiscal year 1996. This is not a hollow program. But beyond the important quality of life improvements we are recommending to the House, the committee has also taken a longer term view of the problem of fixing the military construction problem. We are providing for an opportunity for private sector involvement in this and have set up a structure that gives the possibility for that to take place at bases around the country. We are going to develop pilot programs this year, and I think this is the only way you can get there from here in terms of actually solving this problem. So in conclusion, let me say, I strongly support this piece of legislation. I think not only in this particular area that I have talked about but throughout the bill, we make giant strides. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. McHugh], who is the chairman of our moral, welfare, and recreation panel. Mr. McHUGH. Mr. Chairman, let me add my words of admiration and appreciation to the full committee chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence], and really all the members of the Committee on National Security, including, or course, the ranking minority member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], who have worked hard to make this, I think, a very credible and a very well-balanced piece of legislation. We have heard today, Mr. Chairman, and we will continue to hear how difficult and how different these times are. I think this legislation reflects those realities in a very direct and a very palpable way. Indeed, while these times are different, they are at least as dangerous, if not more dangerous than any circumstances that we as a nation have encountered across this globe in perhaps the last half century or more. There, too, this legislation is, I think, a very able attempt to try to react to those very dangerous circumstances. In that regard, those of us, myself included, who had the opportunity and the honor to serve on the committee special oversight panel on moral, welfare and recreation have worked to include in this legislation a number of measures that will provide for an acceptable quality of life for men and women in uniform. We all know, Mr. Chairman, that under any circumstances, these programs are so vitally important. But as our military men and women are being asked to deploy more and more, and not just by a Republican president, not just by a Democrat president, but by chiefs of the military from both sides of the aisle, to places like Haiti and Somalia, providing comfort in northern and southern Iraq and the skies of Bosnia, we have to maintain programs and let our men and women know that, as they leave, their families are being adequately taken care of, being provided for. This program and this legislation fully funds those kinds of programs, fully funds them, I might add, at a level that President Clinton requested. This is a well-balanced, well-reasoned piece of legislation that, Mr. Chairman, I respectfully urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to defend and to support. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton], a very valuable member of our committee. Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Once again, we stand on this floor and debate the merits of a defense authorization bill. But unlike previous debates, consideration of the 1996 Defense Authorization Act is different. Before us is legislation which stops the backsliding of previous defense bills and takes a critical first step toward matching resources with the ever-growing number of military commitments. This bill doesn't solve all the problems which plague our Armed Forces. Ten years of declining defense budgets cannot be overturned in a single defense budget. Yet this bill makes significant, concrete improvements. Among the many initiatives, this bill: Adds a third Aegis destroyer--a ship which was stricken from the Navy's original budget proposal but identified by the Navy's top admiral as his highest priority. Takes a more prudent and robust approach to missile defense by adding $763 million for ballistic missile defense program and directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and deploy theater and national defenses ``at the earliest practical date;'' [[Page H5789]] Fully funds the purchase of eight C-17's, a mission-essential platform which every top Pentagon official has testified as a gotta have program. In addition this bill sends a message to our military personnel and their families that we understand the hardships they endure. We show our appreciation by fully funding a 2.4 percent pay raise and by adding $425 million for the construction and improvements to military family housing and troop housing. Finally, this bill provides money to keep the B-2 industrial base in tact, giving us the option of procuring additional stealth bombers should we decide to do so. To those of my colleagues who think that the B-2 is too expensive, I simply point out that waging a war which a fleet of B-2 bombers could have deterred is far more costly both in terms of lives and money. Is this a perfect bill? No, but it does what the administration has failed to do in three previous defense proposals. It honestly identifies our defense needs and takes appropriate action to address them. My colleagues, last fall as part of our Contract With America we made a commitment to the American public that we would strengthen our military forces. In February, we passed H.R. 7 which demonstrated our commitment and our resolve. This bill continues that process by putting real deeds behind those words and promises. I urge Members to support our troops by supporting this bill. I urge my colleagues to support the bill and to avoid destructive amendments. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] for the purposes of engaging in a colloquy. Mr. HOKE. Mr. Chairman, I rise for the purpose of a colloquy with the gentleman from South Carolina. As you know, last week I submitted to the Committee on Rules an amendment that would require the President to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as permitted under article XV of that treaty. I sponsored that amendment because along with you, I believe that the ABM treaty adopts a national strategy of intentional defenselessness which is completely inconsistent and incompatible with our obligation to provide for the common defense of the people of the United States. Not only does the ABM treaty depend on a misguided strategy of mutually assured destruction, but the Government of the United States has adopted an unspoken policy of nondisclosure of that strategy to the American people. While this strategy of defenselessness may possibly have been arguable in 1972 when we had only one ICBM-capable enemy, it is utterly without merit today when many nations have gained or are gaining access to ballistic missile technology as well as to the weapons of mass destruction. All of which is to say that in my view this policy is insane and will be viewed in the long sweep of history as a particularly dumb idea which held sway under peculiar circumstances for a very brief period of time. But what is truly unconscionable is that the public has been kept out of the loop. Defrauded of its right to know and intentionally not told that all of America and particularly her largest cities are now the beta sites for a massive experiment in foreign relations, that this experiment in foreign and defense policy places the lives and fortunes of a quarter of a billion Americans at risk without their knowledge is unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong. After consulting with you and Messrs. Young, Weldon, and Livingston last week, I withdrew my amendment as a result of your stated intention to hold hearings on the validity of the ABM treaty and on a bill to repeal that treaty which will be offered later this week. I deeply appreciate that offer on your part. I view as a tremendous opportunity to this, these hearings as a tremendous opportunity to inform the American people of the policy that we are under now that leaves them defenseless. I also want to note that the gentleman form South Carolina [Mr. Spratt] has offered an amendment that amounts to an endorsem

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NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996
(House of Representatives - June 13, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H5782-H5892] NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996 The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 164 and rule XXIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 1530. In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill (H.R. 1530) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 1996 for military activities of the Department of Defense, to prescribe military personnel strengths for fiscal year 1996, and for other purposes with Mr. Emerson in the Chair. The Clerk read the title of the bill. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] will each be recognized for 1 hour. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence]. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, pursuant to section 5(c) of House Resolution 164, I request that during the consideration of H.R. 1530, amendments number 1 and 2 printed in subpart B of part 1 of House Report 104-136 be considered before amendment number 1 printed in subpart A of part 1 of that report. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman's request is noted. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. SPENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. This bill is the first since the end of the cold war to truly look to the future while not ignoring the present. Much has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, but much remains the same. First and foremost, the United States is still a superpower with global, political, economic, and moral interests. Yet none of these can be protected, nor promoted, without a strong military. We still live in a violent world: from ethnic conflicts to regional wars, the United States has faced and will face a host of challenges to its national interests. Nor have all the changes we have seen in the post-cold-war world been benign. The crumbling of communism has rekindled rivalries and hatreds frozen in place for decades. In Asia, Africa, Europe, and even here in the Americas, armed force remains the ultimate arbiter of political disputes. The Clinton administration has responded to this growing chaos with an ambitious but ill-defined strategy of engagement and enlargement. The President has resolved to be able to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional wars in the decisive fashion Americans demand. Moreover, this administration has taken on an increased number of commitments in the form of a wide range of U.N.-led peace operations. While asking more of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, the administration is simultaneously giving them fewer tools to work with: fewer troops, fewer new weapons, fewer training opportunities. What was once a cautious and disciplined reduction in American forces has plunged into a decade of defense decline--a decline that has created a dangerous $250 billion gap between strategy and resources. The administration can neither honor its present strategic commitments nor prepare for future challenges. For the first time in a decade, the defense authorization bill says-- STOP. Stop the slide in defense spending. Stop the dissipation of our military power on futile missions. Stop the postponing of proper training. Stop the decline of our defense industrial base. Stop the erosion of servicemembers' quality of life. Stop frittering away defense resources on nondefense research. Stop the shell game that is mortgaging long-term modernization needs in order to plug holes in underfunded near-term readiness and quality of life accounts. This bill also starts the process of revitalizing America's defenses. Be sure that American soldiers are under American command. Set a clear course for stable and predictable defense spending. Provide the men and women who wear an American uniform with adequate training. Preserve the technological edge that is a force multiplier and saves lives. Guarantee a decent standard of living for them and their families. Protect our troops abroad and Americans here at home from the threat of ballistic missiles. This bill's efforts to bridge the growing inconsistencies between strategy and resource, and therefore begin a meaningful revitalization of our defenses, rests on four pillars: First, it improves the quality of service life by raising pay, enhancing housing benefits, increasing construction of family housing and prohibiting deeper cuts in manpower levels. Second, It preserves near and far-term military readiness by more robustly funding core readiness accounts and by creating a mechanism for funding the growing number of unbudgeted contingency operations from non-readiness accounts. Third, it dramatically increases weapons modernization funding in response to the administration's having mortgaged these programs to address near-term shortfalls. Modernization will help to ensure cutting edge technology on the battlefield in the future, as well as a viable industrial base to provide this technology. Fourth, it begins to aggressively reform the bloated and unresponsive Pentagon bureaucracy by reducing a growing civilian Secretariat as well as the acquisition work force, streamlining the procurement process, and eliminating nondefense research and encouraging privatization initiatives. This last pillar, in particular, is essential for generating longterm savings needed to maintain American military might over time as well as creating a more agile Defense Department able to respond in a timely manner to new challenges. Our men and women in uniform, and certainly the taxpayers, deserve no less. These four pillars are central to a sound defense program, one that can begin to bridge the gap between strategy and resources. This bill protects the peace we have won in the cold war and prepares us to prevail quickly and decisively in the future. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1530. It is a bipartisan bill on an important set of bipartisan issues. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. DELLUMS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the recommendation of the Committee on National Security on the bill before the body at this time, H.R. 1530, as amended. Mr. Chairman, the overall level of expenditures contained within the bill is too high, even though within the budget resolution limits. The bill's spending returns us to cold war priorities, and numerous provisions promote extreme agendas on major social issues. Deliberation on the bill has been so frustrated that the committee's well-developed and well-earned legacy of bipartisanship has tattered because of the unwillingness sincerely to solicit administration and alternative views. H.R. 1530 contains numerous and sweeping provisions that have been developed without, Mr. Chairman, and I underscore for emphasis without, the benefit of full consultation with the administration and others, and have not been illuminated properly even by the subcommittee's and full committee's hearing process. These include initiatives and personnel matters, weapons [[Page H5783]] procurement, research and development, foreign policy initiatives, and acquisition reform. The committee, Mr. Chairman, would embark upon an extraordinary costly program to purchase new B-2 bombers, even after all of the testimony the committee received by the Department of Defense and the services concluded that additional B-2's were not needed, and that their purchase would crowd out other higher priority programs. Yes, we will later today debate more fully this issue, but the inclusion of funding for additional B-2's is sufficient reason alone to reject this committee report. Parenthetically, Mr. Chairman, this bill contains $553 million to begin long-lead items for two additional B-2 bombers that ultimately results in an effort to build 20 additional B-2 bombers. At a time when we just came through a budget process that will visit pain and human misery by virtue of the draconian cuts in that budget upon the children of this country, mothers in this country, senior citizens in this country, veterans, and farmers, and others in America, this bill calls for beginning to go down the road toward the expenditure of $31.5 billion to build 20 planes, $19.7 billion to build them and to equip them, $11.8 billion to operate and maintain them throughout the life cycle of that plane. At a time when we are in community meetings saying we must visit pain upon all of America in order to balance the budget, $31.5 billion, the Secretary of Defense said no, we do not want them, we do not need them. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vice-chair know we do not want them, know we do not need them. {time} 1545 An independent study by the Institute for Defense Analysis: ``No, we don't need them, we don't want them, we can't afford them, and there are cost-effective alternatives.'' An independent role and missions study said, ``No, we don't want them, no, we don't need them.'' But this bill, we start down the road toward a $31.5 billion expenditure to the American taxpayer. Mr. Chairman, the bill places more resources towards weapons acquisition, despite clear testimony by Secretary Perry that the Department has a procurement strategy that will secure the timely modernization of the weapons inventory and guarantee future readiness. Rushing to replace weapons that are fairly young both wastes taxpayers' dollars and could, indeed, spark a new arms race. The majority made several assurances that it was not their intention to now develop theater missile defense nor national missile defense systems that would not comply with the ABM Treaty nor to cause a breakout from the treaty through the Missile Defense Act rewrite. Yet in spite of those assertions, Mr. Chairman, all attempts to have the committee bill conform to the ABM Treaty or to limit development activities that would violate the treaty were successfully resisted by the majority. I would submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that anytime we proceed to move beyond significant treaties, we ought to do so thoughtfully and cautiously and carefully. And if my colleagues are saying they do not wish at this time to violate the ABM Treaty, why not a simple inclusion of propositions that maintain the integrity of the ABM Treaty? That was not done. I leave that for your consideration and to draw whatever conclusions you choose to draw. Mr. Chairman, part of the bill payers for the acquisition surge were vitally important environmental cleanup programs that the Departments of Energy and Defense are required by law or by litigation to complete and for which it is our obligation to provide them the funding. None of the amendments that would restore these funds were made in order. Mr. Chairman, at a time when bases are closing throughout America, at a time when there is need to clean up those bases that we dirtied, in order to allow communities to take that land and property and go forward with community and commercial higher and better use, we are saying we are cutting environmental programs designed to clean up those facilities, rendering some communities in this country impotent in their capacity to take that land and build schools and playgrounds and develop commercial activities throughout America in order to allow us to move beyond the politics of the cold war. In order to develop a vibrant economy that speaks to the post-cold war, we cut funds. That logic of that defies understanding, and it escapes this gentleman. Part came from dual-use programs that are being used to position the industrial base to be able to support fully the emerging defense industrial challenges of the century to come. Such shortsightedness, Mr. Chairman, in cutting these funds in order to pay in part for lower- priority cold war-era weapons should be rejected by the House. We must begin to embrace the concept of conversion. How do we move from a cold war military-reliant economy to a post-cold war economy? I would suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, it means embracing the principles of conversion. How do you move from building B-2 bombers to building efficient, effective mass transit systems? How do you move from building weapons of mass destruction that rain terror and pain and human misery on people to enhancing the quality of human life? That is our challenge. That requires the highest and the best in our intellectual and political capability and understanding. The dual-use technology program was one of those specific efforts to move toward conversion, to go from swords to plowshares in very specific terms. Yet we challenge these programs. The logic of that defies understanding. Further, not all of the programs with the bill are money spending programs, Mr. Chairman: abortion, HIV status, El Salvador medals to people when we told people we in America were not waging war in El Salvador. Suddenly now we want to give medals. We are saying we really were involved in the war in El Salvador? That is in this bill. Other contentious items were placed in the bill without benefit of committee inquiry. Mr. Chairman, I know I have my politics. We all have different politics. That is the nature of the political system is to engage each others' different perspectives and different points of view, derive a consensus and move forward, but because we are legislators, we have designed a specific legislative process that allows us to engage these issues substantively at the subcommittee and full committee level prior to consideration on the floor of Congress. Many of these issues were never dealt with significantly at the subcommittee or full committee level. The process is flawed. The committee squeezed $171 million from the Nunn-Lugar nuclear weapons dismantlement program to finance projects and weapons systems of less effective value to the Nation's security, despite Secretary Perry's statement that this program was one of his highest priorities. Mr. Chairman, this program is designed to dismantle nuclear weapons developed by the former Soviet Union. We were spending, in the decade of the 1980's, in excess of $300 billion per annum in order to prepare to potentially wage war, even the insanity of nuclear war, with the Soviet Union. Now, for a measly few dollars in a multibillion-dollar budget, we cut $160 million that would dismantle these weapons. What could be more in the interests of the children of this country than to dismantle nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union? The economics of that defies logic, but we take this money to purchase more weapons. And I will argue in the context of the B-2 that is not about national security. It is about where the weapons are built, where the weapons take off and where they land. It is about parochialism. It is not about national security. It is about billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars going in the wrong place when we are denying our children better educations or people in this country better health care and other things. We are purchasing weapons systems that we do not need, that speak to yesterday, not to tomorrow. Mr. Chairman, the bill directly and adversely affects our long-term national security interests by erecting impediments to participate effectively in U.N. peacekeeping. Clearly, this is a [[Page H5784]] case in which the American people are way ahead of the committee in comprehending the enduring moral value, financial benefit and the advantage generated by having the United States participate fully in peacekeeping efforts in order to control the outbreak of war and violence. What better contribution to the world than, as the major, last-standing supervisor, that we participate with the family of nations in peacekeeping, stopping the slaughter and the violence, ending our capacity to wage war? But, no, we render ourselves impotent in this bill. We impede ourselves in this bill, not through logic and rational thought, but because of political expediency and lack of careful thinking, we deny our capacity to engage in peacekeeping. That is the wave of the future. That is America's role in the future, not conducting war and savagery on other human beings, but because of our rationality and our sanity, learning how to keep the peace in the world. That is a profound role that we have to play. This bill does not get us there. Mr. Chairman, section 3133 would fund a multipurpose reactor tritium production program that will breach the fire wall between civilian nuclear power and defense nuclear weapons programs with major implications for U.S. nonproliferation efforts and would prematurely anticipate the Secretary of Energy's decisionmaking process to identify the best source of tritium production. Let me now try to explain briefly the implications of that. This is a multipurpose tritium reactor. We have embraced a principle in the context of our international relations that says that we would not cross the line where commercial use of development of nuclear-capable material could be used for military purposes. That is an important principle in our international understandings with people. That is why we wreaked havoc on North Korea, on Iran and on Iraq. Mr. Chairman, query: How can we maintain the integrity of the moral high ground with these countries when we question their development of commercial-use reactors that could also be used to develop nuclear weapons capability materials? If we cross the line, why not the rest of the world? We lose the moral high ground. Second, this is the mother, this is the mother of all earmarks. This reactor is going to one place to one contractor, when last year on this floor we took the principled position that earmarking compromised the credibility and the integrity of the deliberative process. Yet in this bill, we have an earmark. It flies in the face of what we are ostensibly about here, and we need to reject this, and we should have a significant, and hopefully will have, a serious debate on this matter. Mr. Chairman, in the past 2 years the defense authorization bills have put the United States on a path toward beyond cold war thinking and began to move us toward a post-cold-war national security strategy. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissipated and the Warsaw Pact vanished, it ended the cold war. And I have said on more than one occasion that with the ending of the cold war it ushered in a new era, the post-cold-war era, that requires us to take off old labels of who is left wing and right wing, take off old labels of who is the peacenik and who is the hawk, take off old labels and move beyond old paradigms to challenge ourselves, to think brilliantly and competently about how we move toward the 21st century in the context of the post- cold-war; great challenges, but also great opportunities. This is a moment in a period of transition. And the great tragic reality is the American people are looking to Washington and saying, ``We don't know what to do in the context of the post-cold-war. What should we do?'' And many politicians, because they do not like to get too far out in front of public opinion, because you can lose your job doing that, are turning around saying, ``Don't ask me. What do you think we ought to do?'' So the American people are asking the political leaders what should they do. The political leaders are asking the American people what to do. In the meantime we are blowing this incredible opportunity to take the world boldly in a different place with the United States as a major superpower out in front in a courageous way. No, we are walking backward toward the cold war. We want to build B-2 bombers that were cold war weapons. We want to go back to a national missile defense in cold war era times. We want to buy weapons systems that have nothing to do with moving forward. We want to retard our capacity on peacekeeping initiatives and other things that would move us rationally and logically into the 21st century. We are going backward, and this bill underscores that. This bill reverses the course. It buys more weapons whose design, function, and purposes were rooted in cold war strategy and doctrine. It pushes away from an aggressive arms control strategy and potentially back toward global brinksmanship. The last couple of weeks we talked about not saddling the children with a budget deficit. Why saddle the children with the danger of brinksmanship? Why saddle the children with the danger of weapons systems we do not need? Why challenge the children of this country with cold war strategies that make no sense? If we are going to be consistent about embracing the future and caring about our children, then all of our policies, not just the rhetoric of the budget resolution, but the reality of the military budget and our strategy on national security, should speak eloquently and powerfully to that. It seeks to impede effective efforts by the Department of Defense to ready itself for the challenges of the current time and the next generation, all in the name of keeping it ready for the types of challenges which arose in the past. This bill represents not just a lost opportunity to adjust the changes of our time, but carries with it the tone and substance that has been the basis of so many destabilizing arms and ideological competitions of the past. My final comment, I leave you with this, Mr. Chairman, I believe that this new era has ushered in for us an incredible new opportunity, this generation as represented by those of us on this floor. We have been given an enormous gift. We have been given the gift of an opportunity to radically alter the world, to make it a safer and sane and stable place for ourselves and our children and our children's children. We can paint bold strokes across the canvas of time, leaving our legacy to the next generation of one of peace and security, or we can tinker around at the margins of change because of our caution, because of our insecurity, because of our fear, and because of our insecurity and blow this moment. {time} 1600 I hope that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren do not look back at this moment and say, ``My God, that generation had a chance to make the world a better place, and they blew the opportunity.'' I believe this bill goes down that tragic and sad road. I urge defeat of the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bateman]. Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Committee on National Security, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] for yielding this time to me. Let me also, while I am on my feet, commend him for the excellence of the leadership that he has provided to the Committee on National Security in bringing H.R. 1530 to the floor and also commend him, notwithstanding the vast differences in the point of view and perspective between my chairman and the ranking member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], for his excellent cooperation and assistance in seeing that the committee's business was fairly transacted. Let me also speak my appreciation to the ranking member of the Readiness Subcommittee, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Sisisky] for his unfailing cooperation and assistance in seeing that our portion of the bill was dealt with, and dealt with very responsibly and effectively. H.R. 1530 fully funds the military services' operation and training accounts and adds significant resources to other important readiness activities, including real property maintenance, to address health, safety, and mission- [[Page H5785]] critical deficiencies, depot maintenance to reduce backlogs, and base operations support to address shortfalls in programs which sustain mission capability, quality of life, and work force productivity. Second, H.R. 1530 undertakes a number of initiatives to reengineer and reform defense business operations and functions performed by the Department of Defense, its agencies, and the military services to create efficiencies and maximize the value of our defense dollars. These initiatives are in areas such as inventory management, computers, financial management, transportation, audit, and inspector general oversight and fuel management, and include a number of pilot programs for outsourcing functions not core to the Department of Defense warfighting mission. Third, H.R. 1530 fixes a critical problem which contributed greatly to the readiness shortfalls experienced in the late fiscal year 1994. Specifically, the bill takes action to protect the key trading and readiness accounts from having funds diverted to pay for unbudgeted contingency operations. It does so by establishing short-term financing mechanisms to cover the initial costs of such operations requiring the administration to submit timely supplemental appropriation requests and requiring the adminstration to seek funds in advance for planned, but unbudgeted, operations if they are expected to continue into the next fiscal year. Mr. Chairman, at the end of the day, H.R. 1530 achieves the goals we all share: providing the necessary resources to ensure force readiness, improving quality of life for our service people, and instituting defense support structure reforms to enable resources to be made available for other short- and long-term readiness needs. I urge my colleagues to support the bill. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery]. (Mr. MONTGOMERY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the ranking member for giving me this time, and, Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1530 and, given the tight budget situation we faced this year, the defense authorization bill represents compromise. While the legislation does not contain all the provisions I would have liked, it is balanced and a step in the right direction to provide for the defense needs of our country. I am particularly pleased with the emphasis on operation and maintenance needs in order to improve readiness of our forces. Mr. Chairman, I am also pleased and would like to note one provision. It is a joint VA/DOD housing program. This is in the bill. This is a needed program, will apply to enlisted personnel and officers 0-3 and below. They could apply for a VA guaranteed loan to purchase off-base housing with the Department of Defense buying down the interest payments for the first 3 years. This program will help to relieve the problems we are having on our bases of housing shortage. I also want to point out that the bill contains $770 million for procurement of equipment for the National Guard and Reserve and my colleagues know it pleases me very much when the Guard and Reserve are able to get the proper equipment. I am disappointed, though, Mr. Chairman, that the bill effectively kills the civil military programs conducted by the Reserve components in so many communities throughout the Nation. This program has been really important. It has a lot of merit to it, and it looks like we are not going to be able to use our National Guard and Reserve units to help out individuals that need help, and I am very worried about that, and that was what was left out of the bill. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. MONTGOMERY. I yield to the gentlewomen from Colorado. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery] for speaking up so eloquently about that because really being able to use the National Guard and Reserve to go in and serve communities, whether it is medically, whether it is helping our youth, whether it is--I find it really shocking that we are just severing that tie to the communities and that service, and I say to the gentleman, ``Thank you for the leadership you gave. How sad it is to see it all rolled back.'' Mr. MONTGOMERY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman. There are some wonderful programs, and I think probably the people around the country will speak up, and will be able to someday get these funded. We will not talk about the money. It was peoples programs, helping underprivileged, not in Central and South America, but right here in the United States of America. So, Mr. Chairman, I reemphasize my support for this bill and urge its adoption in the House. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Procurement of the Committee on National Security. Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to start out by thanking our great chairman of the Committee on National Security for his wonderful leadership through the hearings that we held, the many briefings, discussions, the inner workings from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans working to do what is best for America, and I want to compliment the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], ranking member of the full committee, for his hard work, and my counterpart, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton], who did so much to put together a good package that will give national security to this country. My colleagues, we lived through the 1980's and rebuilt American defense because we believed in a policy of peace through strength, and at times that policy was very heavily criticized. When the Russians were ringing our allies in Europe with SS-20 missiles, and many people here at home, particularly members of the leadership, some leadership in the Democrat Party, many leaders in the media, urged that we appease the then-Soviet Union, urged that we cut back on weapon systems, urged that we terminate our ICBM systems and our bomber development, thankfully, the leadership in the House and many Members of Congress did not go along with that policy. We believed in a policy of peace through strength, and we stood up to the Russians in Europe. We put where we start moving forward with our plan to put Pershings and ground-launched cruise missiles in. In Central America, where we moved to deny the Soviets and their proxies a foothold on our own continent, in Africa, in the deep water, with the rebuilding of our American Navy, we challenged the growing Soviet fleet, and interestingly, because we stood up to the Russians, we brought about peace through strength, and the Berlin Wall came down, and then we had a conflict in the Middle East. No Russians involved, purely a conventional conflict, and all of the systems that the Members of this Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations had put into the pipeline that were heavily criticized by the media in this country, the M-1 tank that ran out of gas too soon, the Apache helicopter that needed too many spare parts, the Patriot missile system that took too long to develop; all those systems, when deployed on the sands of the Persian Gulf, proved to be very excellent systems. They saved American lives, they brought home the great majority of those body bags that we sent to the Middle East empty. Well, we have moved to continue that rebuilding of national security, and let me tell you, Mr. Chairman, On our subcommittee, at your direction, we have rebuilt ammunition accounts, we have rebuilt precision guided munitions accounts. Those were those precision guided systems where you do not drop a hundred bombs on a target. You send one in at a bridge or that particular radar site and knock it out. We rebuilt American sealift. We started to add ships to our sealift accounts. We put in extra fighters this year. Last year we bought fewer fighter aircraft than Switzerland, that great warmaking power. We kept that industrial base alive. We tried to keep our sealift going. We put in basic things like trucks so that the army can be mobile, [[Page H5786]] so it can move its logistics corps to the area of operation quickly. So we have started, Mr. Chairman, in the procurement subcommittee, moving ahead with the resumption of that policy that has not failed this country of peace through strength, and let me just say to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], the ranking member of the full Committee on National Security, it is true that there is a State earmarking of this reactor that will build tritium. On the other hand, my observation is not too many States have been asking for the reactor and, as a matter of politics, probably would not. But I think it is clear that the Clinton administration itself has said that continued tritium production is an important thing, and it is important that we move forward with the way to do that, and I personally think that the reactor is the way to go, not the accelerator that has been proposed by the administration. So, my colleagues, I think we put forth a good package for the United States to resume this policy of peace through strength, and I would urge all members to support it. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas [Mr. Ortiz]. Mr. ORTIZ. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, our national defense authorization for fiscal year 1996. I am pleased to join my colleagues in supporting what I believe to be a comprehensive and forward thinking bill to address the defense concerns of the United States into the next century. I would like to commend the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley] for his work at the subcommittee level, and both Chairman Spence and the full committee ranking minority member, Ron Dellums, for working to forge a bipartisan bill. Military construction is significantly important to our Nation's ability to have a ready and capable force. Mission support, quality of life projects, living spaces, work places, infrastructure revitalization, and environmental compliance are key factors in ensuring that our forces are able to meet the many challenges facing our military today. I have long been interested in reforming the way the armed services provide housing for our men and women in uniform. Three years ago, there was some concern about the future needs of military housing for our servicemen in south Texas--and the community responded by proposing a Naval Housing Investment Board that would combine servicemember and civilian housing through a public-private investment board. The bill before us contains a major new initiative to form public/ private partnerships in an effort to improve military housing. The program provides a series of new authorities to encourage the investment of private capital to assist in the development of military family housing. Since we began our efforts to combine our limited Federal resources with private investment in last year's DOD bill through the Navy Housing Investment Board--the program concept proved so successful that it is being extended to the other service branches with the wholehearted endorsement of Secretary of Defense William Perry. Mr. Chairman, I encourage my colleagues to vote for this bill. It is a good bill, and specifically it addresses the housing needs for men in uniform. {time} 1615 Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development of the Committee on National Security. (Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, first of all, I rise to applaud our chairman, who has done an outstanding job in leading us through this first bill that we have had the chance to put together, and also acknowledge the cooperation and support of our ranking member, who as always, is gracious and cooperative, even if we may disagree on some substantive issues. I think this is a good bill, Mr. Chairman. This is a good bill that passed out of our full committee with a vote of 48 to 3, meaning only three members of the full Committee on National Security saw fit to oppose this legislation being reported to the House floor. This bill, for the first time in the last 9 years that I have been here, reverses the hemorrhaging that has been occurring within our national defense and national security. We all heard the rhetoric of 5 years ago about the peace dividend. Well, I can tell you where the peace dividend is. It is in my UAW workers who are now looking for fast food jobs in Delaware County and Southeastern Pennsylvania because they have been laid off by Boeing Corporation, by Martin Marietta, by Lockheed. Norm Augustine, the new CEO of the new Martin Lockheed was in my office 2 weeks ago and said his company has laid off 107,000 people in the last 3 years alone, and the layoffs continue. That is what we have got even with our peace dividend. Where has been the defense conversion? There is no defense conversion, Mr. Chairman. But we stop that with this bill, and we do not do it as a jobs program. In fact, I will talk about how we have stopped that process as well, the pork barreling in the bill. We do it because we support what is important based upon the national threat. We started off this year's process with a net threat briefing where we looked at the hot spots of the world and came back to deal with our leadership in the Pentagon about where our priorities should be. Then in our subcommittees we marked up our funding levels in line with what the Joint Chiefs told us were their priorities. We also, Mr. Chairman, and I am very proud of this in the R area, we removed the tremendous amount of earmarking that has occurred in previous bills. There was one estimate that in last year's defense bill there was $4.7 billion of unauthorized appropriations, some of those having nothing to do with defense, many of them stuck in by the appropriators, some of them put in by the authorizers, but many of which were not requested by the military and had nothing to do with our national security. In the R portion of this bill this year, we have no earmarks. We have no direct programs put into that portion of the bill for individual Member requests. We in fact keep the bill clean. We do fund our priorities, Mr. Chairman. We do take a look in the R area at where we should be putting our priorities in terms of dollars. We fully fund missile defense. Now, how do we determine where the priorities should be? Unlike the previous 2 years, Mr. Chairman, when we had no hearings on ballistic missile defense, we in this year held three full hearings for members of the full committee, the subcommittees of Procurement and Research and Development, on where we are with ballistic missile defense. We had a hearing on the threat, both a closed briefing for the Members and an open briefing, a full day of hearings on what is the threat out there. We heard the horror stories of 77 nations today having cruise missiles that could be used against us. We heard the horror stories of 20 countries who today are building cruise missiles and the threat that poses to us. We had a hearing on what we have gotten for our money. What have we been able to produce with the billions of dollars we spent on missile defense over the past decade? We had a show and tell where General O'Neill brought in the technologies we developed with our missile defense funding. Finally, we had General O'Neill himself present to us what his vision of missile defense for this country would be like. Mr. Chairman, when we get to the missile defense section, every dollar that we put in this bill is in line with what General O'Neill said we should be spending on missile defense. In fact, it is less. General O'Neill told us we could add on up to $1.2 billion in the missile defense accounts for theater missile, national missile, cruise missile and Brilliant Eyes. We could not give him that full amount, but we gave him about $800 million. We have plussed up those areas where General O'Neill, acting as President Clinton's representative, told us we should put our dollars in terms of protecting our people from the threat of a missile coming into our mainland or hurting our troops when they are being deployed overseas. [[Page H5787]] This is a good bill as it relates to missile defense. Yet you will hear later on our colleagues attempt to say we are trying to undermine the ABM Treaty. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I will say this, Mr. Chairman: We are silent on the treaty. It is a treaty that we will abide by. But there are some who want to distort this bill and politicize it to have it be supportive of additional use of the ABM treaty, and we think that is a mistake, and we are going to oppose it when that amendment comes to the floor. This is a good bill, and I encourage our colleagues to support it with a large vote, and give our chairman the endorsement of an excellent job in leading us on the security of this country. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums]. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] is recognized for 4 minutes. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to respond to one of the comments that my distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania made, because he raised a very significant point, and that is the issue of job loss in the context of downsizing. I find it interesting that when you talk with the corporate CEO's about a great percentage of this downsizing in the quiet, they will agree that a great part of their job loss had nothing to do with the downsizing of the military budget, but the fact that during the years of the eighties, they developed such huge overheads, they got fat and sassy, they were no longer competitive, particularly in the international arena, so they had to cut back, they had to start getting streamlined, they had to become competitive. So a portion of those jobs were as a result of that. But I think the gentleman raises an important point. When we are downsizing, there is economic dislocation. And my response to that is that the long-term answer, the near-term answer to that, is an aggressive economic conversion strategy, not buying weapons that are expensive and unnecessary. That is not the real answer to that. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. DELLUMS. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I appreciate my friend and colleague yielding. I appreciate the willingness to engage in a dialog. What I would say is 2 years ago as we saw the defense numbers being projected by President Clinton, we went to the Office of Technology Assessment and the Congressional Budget Office. Each of them did studies that said if we implement the budget numbers proposed by President Clinton, we would see 1.5 million men and women lose their jobs in the defense industry. That is exactly what is happening, and that is happening directly because of the most massive cuts in the acquisition accounts that we have seen since before World War II. So it has had a direct impact on real jobs all across America. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, in downsizing the military budget, economic dislocation is indeed going to be a reality. The point that I am simply suggesting is that we are bright enough and competent enough to engage in a policy discussion that leads us toward the policies of economic conversion. The tragedy is that many of my colleagues, because we do not have a national jobs bill in this country, because we have not embraced economic, monetary, and budgetary policies designed to expand employment, we look at the military budget as a jobs bill. The last time I was chair of the committee, last year, my colleagues sent in requests to my office to add $10 billion to the military budget. Now, you do not have to be too bright to understand what that was about. I understand. It was about jobs. People do not like to see people unemployed. Neither do I. But the tragedy is that we are beginning to use the military budget on a more expansive basis as a jobs bill, when it should be a bill that addresses the national security needs of this country, and we need to have a much broader strategy to handle the dislocation, and I think that is economic conversion. Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield further, I would just say I agree with the gentleman. That is why in this bill, in the R accounts, we keep the dual use funding levels at the same level they were in previous years, for exactly that reason. We keep the dual use of funding level at exactly the level that they were funded at over the previous 2 years. So we support that notion, when it has defense as a top priority. Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder]. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I must say as a mother of yuppies, I rise in strong disagreement with this bill, because my children would call this bill retro. ``Retro'' is a negative word in the yuppie sense, and part of the reason is while we just heard about they are saying that there were $4 billion last year that they thought was fat, in this bill this debate is really nothing but kabuki theater. After we passed that rule, this has nothing to do with reality from here on. There is $9.5 billion more in this bill than the Pentagon said they needed to fight two full-time wars, and I think the Pentagon's judgment has been confirmed pretty well this last week with how well they performed. it is $9.5 billion more than the commander-in-chief wanted, and $9.5 billion more than the Senate wanted. In fact, when we were debating the rule and tried to get this opened up so we could offer some of these amendments, we were told we could not, because it might distort the negotiations with the Senate on the budget, the overall budget negotiations going on. So really we are just standing here throwing words back and forth at each other, and it really does not mean a thing, because three-fourths of the cutting amendments have been denied. They have been denied. Again, as everybody here is saying this is a better bill than before, oh, really? You thought $4 billion was a lot of fat last year, try $9.5 billion in this year's that we cannot get to. Furthermore, there is a real threat I think to the ABM Treaty. If there was not, why not say there is not? How can you say there is no threat, but we will not accept an amendment saying we do not plan to change it? If you really think the women who put their lives on the line should be considered second class citizens, which I do not, then you will love this bill. This is great. If you think we should have a line item and direct where we are going to go with tritium production, without anybody having a debate or really deciding these things, then you will love this. You are going to hear a lot of debate about industrial base. Well, let me tell you, this is, again, a retro industrial base that we are supporting in this bill. The gentleman from California and I worked very hard with many Members trying to find a competitive way to take this expensive research and development that the taxpayer had invested in and apply it to the future, apply it to other things we needed, to upgrade our industrial base and have new products we can sell to the world, in such areas as law enforcement, medical technology, all those types of things, because that is clearly where it is going. Instead, what do we have in there? We are going to have a big move to bring back the B-2 bomber. Even Secretary Cheney did not think we needed this thing. He signed off on 20 of these. You can buy these for about $1.1 billion. That is a lot of school lunches. That is a lot of student loans. During the cold war, if Secretary Cheney was convinced 20 of these was enough, I would think that that would be enough for us today in the post-cold-war era. So what I am trying to say is things like this are being kept alive in the name of keeping the industrial base up. Well, let me tell you we have a dog-gone good aviation industrial base. Just look at the Boeing 777. We are just doing this to keep some defense contractors who put out big political donations, I think, alive. And we have got all sorts of other things in here we cannot even offer an amendment to. This one at least we get to offer the amendment to. I guess they figured they have [[Page H5788]] got it wired in so they cannot lose this one, and the other ones, I guess people are afraid they should be losing. But I think Mr. Chairman, this is a very sad day, and I hope Members will join me in voting no on this retro bill. The CHAIRMAN. The Chair will advise that the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] has 42\1/2\ minutes remaining, and the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] has 29 minutes remaining. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities. {time} 1630 Mr. HEFLEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 1530, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1996. I would like to say, this is my first time to be a cochairman of this committee or any committee in Congress for that matter. And it was an experience, and I could not have asked for a more cooperative or helpful ranking member than the gentleman from Texas, Solomon Ortiz, who I thought did a super job. This was truly, at least our part of it and I think most of the bill, was truly a nonpartisan or bipartisan product. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Installations and Facilities, I can assure the House that this bill squarely addresses one of the most serious problems confronting the Department of Defense and the people who serve in our Nation's military services. That problem is the quality and availability of adequate troop housing and military family housing. There is no question that there is a crisis in military housing. Over 600,000 single enlisted personnel are assigned to on-base troop housing facilities. The average age of barracks and dormitories is over 40 years. One-fourth of these facilities is considered substandard. At current levels of funding, improving on-base housing for single enlisted personnel cannot be accomplished, depending on the military service, for years or, in some cases, for decades. The situation in family housing is not much better. Approximately 218,000 or two-thirds of the homes in the housing inventory of the Department of Defense are classified as inadequate. One-quarter of the homes in the DOD inventory are over 40 years old and two-thirds are over 30 years old. This aging military family stock has extremely high maintenance and repair needs. If nothing changes, fixing the military family housing problem will take over 30 years. The present military housing situation is unacceptable and the Committee on National Security is determined to put us on the path toward fixing the problem. H.R. 1530 contains critically important short-term and long-term remedies to this problem. Working with the military services, we have identified a number of unfunded and badly needed quality-of-life improvements in housing, child care, health care facility that can be executed next year. We have funded solely those projects where the need is the greatest and the dollars can immediately be put to use. Equally of importance, we coordinated these recommendations thoroughly with our colleagues on the Committee on Appropriations so that we are singing from the same page of music. And we have agreed, both of us, to a strong quality of life package. This bill funds over $630 million in new construction improvements for barracks and dormitories at 63 installations, including projects at 25 installations which the committee identified as priority requirements for military services which were unfunded in the department's budget request. The bill also provides approximately $900 million in military family housing construction and improvements. These funds will provide quality housing for about 9,400 military families, over 2,000 more than the Department's request, and will ensure that other badly needed neighborhood improvements are undertaken. I want to stress again that this bill funds only those projects which can be executed in fiscal year 1996. This is not a hollow program. But beyond the important quality of life improvements we are recommending to the House, the committee has also taken a longer term view of the problem of fixing the military construction problem. We are providing for an opportunity for private sector involvement in this and have set up a structure that gives the possibility for that to take place at bases around the country. We are going to develop pilot programs this year, and I think this is the only way you can get there from here in terms of actually solving this problem. So in conclusion, let me say, I strongly support this piece of legislation. I think not only in this particular area that I have talked about but throughout the bill, we make giant strides. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. McHugh], who is the chairman of our moral, welfare, and recreation panel. Mr. McHUGH. Mr. Chairman, let me add my words of admiration and appreciation to the full committee chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence], and really all the members of the Committee on National Security, including, or course, the ranking minority member, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], who have worked hard to make this, I think, a very credible and a very well-balanced piece of legislation. We have heard today, Mr. Chairman, and we will continue to hear how difficult and how different these times are. I think this legislation reflects those realities in a very direct and a very palpable way. Indeed, while these times are different, they are at least as dangerous, if not more dangerous than any circumstances that we as a nation have encountered across this globe in perhaps the last half century or more. There, too, this legislation is, I think, a very able attempt to try to react to those very dangerous circumstances. In that regard, those of us, myself included, who had the opportunity and the honor to serve on the committee special oversight panel on moral, welfare and recreation have worked to include in this legislation a number of measures that will provide for an acceptable quality of life for men and women in uniform. We all know, Mr. Chairman, that under any circumstances, these programs are so vitally important. But as our military men and women are being asked to deploy more and more, and not just by a Republican president, not just by a Democrat president, but by chiefs of the military from both sides of the aisle, to places like Haiti and Somalia, providing comfort in northern and southern Iraq and the skies of Bosnia, we have to maintain programs and let our men and women know that, as they leave, their families are being adequately taken care of, being provided for. This program and this legislation fully funds those kinds of programs, fully funds them, I might add, at a level that President Clinton requested. This is a well-balanced, well-reasoned piece of legislation that, Mr. Chairman, I respectfully urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to defend and to support. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton], a very valuable member of our committee. Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Once again, we stand on this floor and debate the merits of a defense authorization bill. But unlike previous debates, consideration of the 1996 Defense Authorization Act is different. Before us is legislation which stops the backsliding of previous defense bills and takes a critical first step toward matching resources with the ever-growing number of military commitments. This bill doesn't solve all the problems which plague our Armed Forces. Ten years of declining defense budgets cannot be overturned in a single defense budget. Yet this bill makes significant, concrete improvements. Among the many initiatives, this bill: Adds a third Aegis destroyer--a ship which was stricken from the Navy's original budget proposal but identified by the Navy's top admiral as his highest priority. Takes a more prudent and robust approach to missile defense by adding $763 million for ballistic missile defense program and directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and deploy theater and national defenses ``at the earliest practical date;'' [[Page H5789]] Fully funds the purchase of eight C-17's, a mission-essential platform which every top Pentagon official has testified as a gotta have program. In addition this bill sends a message to our military personnel and their families that we understand the hardships they endure. We show our appreciation by fully funding a 2.4 percent pay raise and by adding $425 million for the construction and improvements to military family housing and troop housing. Finally, this bill provides money to keep the B-2 industrial base in tact, giving us the option of procuring additional stealth bombers should we decide to do so. To those of my colleagues who think that the B-2 is too expensive, I simply point out that waging a war which a fleet of B-2 bombers could have deterred is far more costly both in terms of lives and money. Is this a perfect bill? No, but it does what the administration has failed to do in three previous defense proposals. It honestly identifies our defense needs and takes appropriate action to address them. My colleagues, last fall as part of our Contract With America we made a commitment to the American public that we would strengthen our military forces. In February, we passed H.R. 7 which demonstrated our commitment and our resolve. This bill continues that process by putting real deeds behind those words and promises. I urge Members to support our troops by supporting this bill. I urge my colleagues to support the bill and to avoid destructive amendments. Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] for the purposes of engaging in a colloquy. Mr. HOKE. Mr. Chairman, I rise for the purpose of a colloquy with the gentleman from South Carolina. As you know, last week I submitted to the Committee on Rules an amendment that would require the President to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as permitted under article XV of that treaty. I sponsored that amendment because along with you, I believe that the ABM treaty adopts a national strategy of intentional defenselessness which is completely inconsistent and incompatible with our obligation to provide for the common defense of the people of the United States. Not only does the ABM treaty depend on a misguided strategy of mutually assured destruction, but the Government of the United States has adopted an unspoken policy of nondisclosure of that strategy to the American people. While this strategy of defenselessness may possibly have been arguable in 1972 when we had only one ICBM-capable enemy, it is utterly without merit today when many nations have gained or are gaining access to ballistic missile technology as well as to the weapons of mass destruction. All of which is to say that in my view this policy is insane and will be viewed in the long sweep of history as a particularly dumb idea which held sway under peculiar circumstances for a very brief period of time. But what is truly unconscionable is that the public has been kept out of the loop. Defrauded of its right to know and intentionally not told that all of America and particularly her largest cities are now the beta sites for a massive experiment in foreign relations, that this experiment in foreign and defense policy places the lives and fortunes of a quarter of a billion Americans at risk without their knowledge is unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong. After consulting with you and Messrs. Young, Weldon, and Livingston last week, I withdrew my amendment as a result of your stated intention to hold hearings on the validity of the ABM treaty and on a bill to repeal that treaty which will be offered later this week. I deeply appreciate that offer on your part. I view as a tremendous opportunity to this, these hearings as a tremendous opportunity to inform the American people of the policy that we are under now that leaves them defenseless. I also want to note that the gentleman form South Carolina [Mr. Spratt] has offered an amendment that amounts to a