National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentleman's courtesy in permitting me to speak on the en bloc amendment, and I appreciate the committee having accepted the amendment dealing with cost accountability for the B-21 bomber. This is a new weapon that has both conventional and nuclear weapons capability.

We are in a situation now where there is tremendous stress on our Defense Department budget with a whole range of weaponry. I think it is more important now than ever that we are able to understand exactly what we are getting into, how much this is going to cost. There is about $1.4 billion already into this. We ought to be able to know what the total commitment is being made, to be able to have appropriate decisions made by Congress.

I am deeply concerned that the Defense Department, to this point, has resisted giving an appraisal of what the total cost is going to be, somehow fearing that, if the total budget were available, that would give too much information to our adversaries about the weight, size, and range of the plane. I think not. I think the real danger here is that the American public and Congress would know what the costs are. This is not an acceptable approach as we deal with these critical questions.

It is important, Mr. Chairman, that we have full transparency about what the costs are going to be for these massive, expensive, and, in some cases, questionable weapons systems. This is not an argument for or against it. It is an argument for transparency and being able to know what we are getting into.

The worst of all possible worlds is making commitments and then finding, 5 and 10 years down the line, that we can't follow through on them or they result in cannibalizing other important priorities. I would think that this is one area that we could all agree we need to have this transparency and have this information available.

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Chair, this seems to me to be a priority going forward, given the experience we have had with cost overruns and given how many elements that this committee is trying to juggle. The demands on the committee, I think, are remarkable. It is not a job that I envy. These are hard decisions that are being made.

The Department of Defense can do a favor for themselves and for us by being fully transparent so we know what we should be budgeting for in the future and that they can be held accountable for performance.

Mr. O'ROURKE. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Chair, I listened to the frustration of the chairman describing the process, and I sympathize with that. I have sat and admitted that this committee has one of the most difficult tasks, because as long as we are sort of unhinged here from the reality and the accountability of how they all work out, we will have people make requests for this or the administration will leave something out there, and it is difficult for the committee to try to make sense of reality out of these conflicting requests.

Out of this, I think there is an elephant in the room of an unrealistic, unsustainable, and unnecessary trillion-dollar path we are on for the nuclear triad of bombers, land-based missiles, and the submarines.

These are weapons that we have never used in 71 years. These are weapons that do not help us with the major challenges that vex this committee right now in terms of military readiness, the challenges dealing with ISIS, dealing with encroachment by the Chinese, problems with Russia.

These are weapons that didn't stop Russian aggression in the Crimea or Ukraine or Chinese encroachment. These are weapons that don't deter the greatest nuclear threat we face, which is nuclear materials falling into the hands of extremist elements from rogue nations like North Korea or some of our purported friends in Pakistan.

These are the threats that we face. And this muscle-bound nuclear triad that we are going to spend a trillion dollars on does not help us.

There is enough blame, I think, to go around. The administration made an agreement to upgrade and modernize all these nuclear weapons in their effort to get the nonproliferation treaty advanced. I think it was a foolish bargain, an expensive bargain. They are not going to be around to have to deliver on the trillion dollars. They are nibbling around the edges and moving these things forward and leaving the big decisions for the future.

They have actually made it worse by not fighting aggressively for nonproliferation resources to help us keep these materials out of the hands of the extremists and retire nuclear weapons that are floating around the world now.

We have more nuclear weapons than we need, more nuclear weapons than we can use, more nuclear weapons than we can afford. We can debate whether we have enough to destroy the world 3 times, 5 times, or 10 times. What is ironic is that we never have that debate on the floor of the House on how the tradeoffs occur, what the threats to conventional military capacity are, and how they fit into an overall scheme of affairs.

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. I suggest this is the least-effective part of our overall defense inventory. I would hope that, in the future, when maybe we have a new administration willing to turn a page, when we have a Congress that is willing to entertain a broad and robust debate about this critical issue, that we can deal with an effort to rein in this trillion-dollar spending folly that is going to have disastrous effects for our military readiness in the years ahead.

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Chairman, how much time remains?

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentleman's courtesy and his leadership on this, and I think he laid it out very clearly.

This is an imaginary problem, but it is an area that actually needs to have some attention to it. He referenced recent problems in terms of potential drug abuse. You know they found the cheating earlier because they were investigating drug abuse when they found out that there was cheating on the readiness test.

I would advise my colleagues to read Eric Schlosser's ``Command and Control,'' a fascinating study about the history of American nuclear weapons and problems that we have had, mistakes that were made, and near misses.

There are serious issues that we need to be thinking in terms of the readiness and how it goes forward. We need to think clearly about what we do in the future, what is the right level of deterrence, and how are we going to adequately analyze it.

454 land-based missiles are not necessarily a magic number that we should be freezing on a permanent basis. Looking at what happens going forward with the trillion-dollar commitment with missiles that are submarine based--we have our bombers; we have land based--and being able to have a critical appraisal of how much deterrence is enough and look at problems, such as security lapses, training problems, drug problems, this is not a situation that we should just sort of happily freeze for the next go-around and maintain that any adjustment to this or even evaluating an adjustment is somehow a threat to national security.

The real problems that we face dealing with international terrorism and the potential of nuclear weapons falling into rogue hands, those are very real problems that we need to be doing more. This vast nuclear triad that we will spend a trillion dollars on does not help us with those challenges. Rather than hollow out the military, we ought to be looking at potential changes going forward.

This amendment is ill-advised, unnecessary, and is the wrong direction we should be going.

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Chairman, I wanted to refer back to an amendment that was in the previous en bloc that dealt with the special immigrant visas.

I want to express my appreciation to the committee, the chairman, the ranking member, and to the staff. This is a complicated issue. It is in your bill, but it is not entirely within your jurisdiction. And there has been an ebb and flow. It has been something that I have, as you know, been working on for a decade, and that is for the United States to keep faith with the people in Afghanistan who made the mission possible--the people who literally risked their lives as guides, construction workers, interpreters, and truck drivers--the men and women who made it possible for us to succeed.

It isn't just the Department of Defense. There are men and women who worked with the State Department and USAID, which are an important part of our activities in those countries. Those foreign nationals are every bit at risk as somebody who is guiding our troops in the field.

I appreciate your willingness to put in the en bloc amendment a little bit of flexibility. I hope it is not the last word, because we need to think seriously about what we do for the people who work on base, people who work for the State Department, and the people who work for USAID so that we are able to make sure that we have an adequate number of visas and that we don't have an arbitrarily short period of time because the pipeline has been hopelessly complex and flawed.

We have been working with the bureaucracy in trying to make it work better, but that is an ongoing struggle. And the fact is, there are different people with different committees who have different orientations.

I hope that this en bloc amendment is just the start and that we can continue working with the chairman, with the minority party, with the staff, and with the advocates and various people who are committed to making sure that we do right by the people who are at risk now of being killed, murdered, tortured, and having family members killed.

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