Accommodating the Needs of the Military
ACCOMMODATING THE NEEDS OF THE MILITARY -- (Senate - February 08, 2007)
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Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I have been watching this debate as it has taken place. I am disappointed that procedurally we dropped the ball. We were hoping to be able to speak all afternoon on probably the most immediate crisis we are facing in terms of the budget; that is, the BRAC process.
Let me share a couple of ideas as to what this is all about. A lot of people are not all that familiar with the process we are talking about. The BRAC process is the Base Closure Realignment Commission. It was brought to our attention and first voted on by a Congressman from Texas, Dick Armey. Prior to that time, it appeared that all of our military establishments that were in the United States had been looked at as economic bases. Consequently, it is very difficult to close down some that are either not efficient or not needed for defending the country.
It was the idea of Congressman Armey to put together a system to take politics out of the base-closure system and to allow some criteria to be put forth and have a base-closure commission make recommendations and then take those recommendations and put them into effect. The bottom line would be they may find, in my State of Oklahoma, that one of our installations should be closed or should be realigned and part of it moved somewhere else. If that is the case, we would have to vote on the overall picture. You could not pick or choose. That way, as nearly as you can take politics out of a procedure on this Senate floor, I believe they successfully did that.
We had the first BRAC round back in 1988. We have had four since then. The last one is the one we are talking about now.
I have to say that when we came to this fifth BRAC closure vote as to whether we are going to allow the Commission to reconvene and make determinations as to priorities, I voted against it. I led the opposition. In fact, we only lost it by two votes. We have had a BRAC round, after all.
I made a statement from this Senate floor, from this podium, that whatever recommendations they came up with on this independent, nonpartisan BRAC Commission, I would not object to, and that is exactly what has happened.
The problem we are facing--and I can remember so well saying in the Senate before this last round was decided upon, I said it may be that we will save $20 billion over a period of time with another BRAC round. We don't know that for sure, but there is one thing we do know; that is, it is going to cost us a lot of money in the next 3 or 4 years, right when we are going to need the funding for our military.
We went through the 1990s downgrading and downsizing the military. I remember this euphoric attitude that many people had--the Cold War is over, and we no longer need a military. Consequently, the attention was not given to the military.
I have a chart I have not used for quite a while. This is during the Clinton administration, from fiscal year 1993 through fiscal year 2001. If we take the black line, that shows that if we merely kept the budget we had for the military from fiscal year 1993 and added nothing but inflation, the black line would represent the amount of the budget and what it would have been at the end of that period of time. The red line represents what the President's budget--it was President Clinton at that time and what he was requesting. You can see the huge difference in there, about a $412 billion difference.
Congress, in its wisdom, increased the President's budget insofar as military spending is concerned to this line right here. Nonetheless, over that period of time, while we did bring it up a little bit, it still was $313 billion below what a static budget would have been from that year, in bringing that year forward.
That is the problem we are facing in the 1990s, the late 1990s. I remember so many times coming to the Senate and saying that we will rue the day we downgraded the military. And we did. We went down to about 60 percent of the force strength, did away with and slowed down a lot of our military modernization programs.
I remember watching other countries producing better equipment, so when we send our young people out to do battle, they don't have the kind of equipment someone else might have. A good example would be our non-line-of-sight cannon, artillery piece. The best piece we have today is the Paladin. That is World War II technology where you have to swab the breach after every shot--something that is totally unacceptable. There are five countries, including South Africa, that make a better cannon than we have. We are going to remedy that now, and we have future combat systems where we will start modernizing.
We also slipped behind in the Air Force. I remember when General Jumper at that time came to the Senate, in 1998, and he said that now the Russians are making the Su series, and he referred to the Su-35 and he said it was better than any strike vehicle we have, our F-15s and F-16s. Now we have an F-22 that will do a better job. This is what happened to us in the 1990s.
Now we come to the BRAC process. We had an opportunity to save $20 billion. But to do that, we have to build installations in different areas, divest ourselves of other installations. That is where we are today.
As has been said by several speakers in the Senate, we are in a position now going into a continuing resolution, that it would tie us to the 2006 budget. If this happens, the BRAC funding that is necessary to implement the changes to accommodate our fighting troops over there, in their rotations coming back home--all of these things that are taking place are things that can't be taking place now because we are $3 billion short.
My next chart shows we are scraping just to fund the BRAC process. The money the military needs to pursue the BRAC round in fiscal year 2007 is $5.6 billion. You can see that on the chart. That is the amount the President requested. That is also the amount in our authorization bill, the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act. Those on the Senate Committee on Armed Services authorized this $5.6 billion. The Senate appropriators thought they could shave a little bit off, so they cut from that $.4 billion. That brings it down to $5.2 billion.
Because there is no appropriated amount, the BRAC was funded at the fiscal year 2006 level, which is $1.6 billion--far lower than what is required to even start the process of this latest BRAC round. Under the continuing resolution now being considered, the funding was increased by $1 billion, which puts us at a total of $2.5 billion less what the military is going to have to have. That means it is a $3.1 billion shortfall. I know it is confusing, so we put it on a chart so we can clearly understand it. That is what is necessary to carry out those requirements we had in the BRAC round.
We did get $1 billion. Let me tell Members where that came from. The Democrats scraped and squeezed all the unfunded amounts that were needed to be funded by the CR. They were able to get an extra $13 billion to fund their own priorities. We talked about those priorities, many of them social programs, many of them programs I would support, some programs I would oppose. To me, they were not in the league of necessity that we have in our military construction in carrying out and implementing BRAC.
The chart shows the amount of money, the $13 billion, and where this money went. If you go around the chart, you see Veterans' Administration, $4.5 billion--we supported that; defense health, $1.4 billion; State and Foreign Ops--this is HIV/AIDS, which has been talked about in the Senate--that is $1.25 billion; law enforcement, $1.35 billion--quite frankly, I am not sure what that is referring to; pay raise for Federal workers, $1 billion; Labor-HHS, Head Start, AIDS, Social Security, and so forth, Pell grants, that is $2.3 billion; Interior Department, $200 million. Finally, after everyone else is taken care of, everyone else has been funded, there is $1 billion left over to put toward BRAC. The need was $4.1 billion. It brings it down to the $3.1 billion. So the need is still there. That is how we got where we are today.
What this Senate needs to do is to evaluate and establish priorities as to what is really significant. What do we need to add? We are at war. It is inconceivable to me, when we come along with a BRAC process that applies housing and other needs for our troops who are rotating back and forth, that we are not able to do that.
One of the concerns I have that I have not talked about in the Senate is the problems we have in the communities. One of the reasons my State of Oklahoma has always, throughout all BRAC processes, all five of them, benefited--and I am bragging a little bit here, and I know other States do a good job--Oklahoma has always done an excellent job on community support. In our five major military installations, we have the communities building hospitals, doing child health care, helping with roads, donating land. For that reason, we have always done a very good job of that in my State. A lot of people were concerned when the BRAC processes took place; that is something which has actually been a benefit to my State. However, in this case, there isn't a State that isn't involved either in pluses or minuses, but overall it is a way to take care of those kids when they come back, when they rotate through.
We have two things that are happening right now. We are trying to rotate our troops who were in battle, and the second thing is, we are trying to establish a program where, instead of sending some of our people overseas for 3 and 4 years with their families, to bring them back and let them rotate.
With that, I am going to yield the floor. It is my intention to come back. I have quite a few more things to talk about.
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Mr. INHOFE. The point I was trying to make in terms of community support, many communities in Georgia and Oklahoma have made commitments predicated on this next BRAC round coming forward. I ask the question, Aren't you a little concerned how to face the communities if we renege on what the Government's portion is?
Mr. CHAMBLISS. The Senator is exactly right. I will address that in my comments in a few minutes. It is not fair to the taxpayers in general but specifically those communities that are affected, as communities in Oklahoma and Georgia are, that we now come back and say: I know you have made these plans and you were preparing to receive additional infrastructure, but now it will not happen because the folks in the Senate have decided they want to spend that money on social programs as opposed to spending it on our military.
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