National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011--Continued--

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Chairman, it's a treat to be able to rise and say the en bloc amendment is fine, just as most of what is in the bill is fine.

Unfortunately, there is an amendment that's being offered which threatens to poison the entire package and to do great damage to our military, and that is an issue that you've heard from earlier this day, the idea of repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell legislation.

Now, the way it works currently in the military is that if you happen to be homosexual and you want to serve in the military, that's fine. And as long as your particular sexual tastes don't get in the way of performing the mission, there's no problem.

The point is that the military has a job to protect our citizens, and we don't want things getting in the way of that. If you were to commit adultery, you could be discharged because that gets in the way of our performing our mission.

Now, we face an amendment here, which is opposed by all of our military leadership, which says we're going to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

What, then, does that look like?

I mean, currently the policy is you could be gay, and as long as it doesn't get in the way of doing your job, everything is fine.

So now we're going to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. So what exactly are we asking?

Are we asking the military then to protect or condone homosexual behavior if it does get in the way of performing the mission?

What exactly are we talking about?

Are we talking about creating separate dormitories, for instance, if we have sexual harassment?

What will this have to do with recruitment? People that have a 17-year-old kid that may be wanting to sign up, what will this do to recruitment?

What's it going to do to the morale of the troops?

What's it going to do to small-unit cohesion?

And, also, the other piece of the military is about these soldiers that are giving their time and lives are confined to very tight areas and pushed together in very difficult circumstances over long periods of time. What is the effect of that?

And all of these questions are sitting out there, and the military leadership is saying, yeah, we don't know the answer to those questions. Give us some time to take a look at it. We don't want you to pass this until we can see what's going on with this.

Now, I have three sons. They've graduated Naval Academy. All of them went Marine Corps. One survived his experience in 2005 in Fallujah.

And when our sons and daughters are serving and laying their lives or their bodies on the line so that we can live in peace and freedom, that is a very sacred kind of sacrifice they're making for us. So why would we belittle that by jumping into something?

We're being asked to pass something that we don't even know what we're passing. We don't understand the implications or how it would look. And yet we're going to jump into this for, what, some sort of political deal to satisfy some vocal but small minority using the lives of our own children?

I will not have any part of betraying the interest of our kids just for political purposes.

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Mr. AKIN. Just to respond briefly here on the subject of missile defense, I know we are working with some en bloc amendments. We're comfortable with those amendments. There is some disagreement on missile defense, and I think at least a considerable vulnerability that many people on our side are very concerned with was the decision not to build a ground base system in Poland and the radar in the Czech Republic, but instead, to suggest that the Aegis class cruisers could cruise around in the ocean and take care of the mission to stop ballistic missiles, particularly a longer range ballistic missile possibly equipped with a nuclear warhead coming out of Iran.

The fact of the matter is that the Aegis class missiles do not have the velocity necessary to stop a longer-range ballistic missile. And the only way we had to do that was, quite simply, the ground-based system, which is a 20-ton missile; the Aegis class missiles are more two ton. So there is a factor-of-10 difference in the weight of the missile. Obviously, the much larger missile can develop the velocity it needs to go after a very high-flying, fast-moving ballistic missile that could come from Iran as early as in the next few years.

And so there is a serious concern that, in terms of missile defense, we do not really have protection over Western Europe and our troops that are stationed in Western Europe. Of more concern to us was some level of obfuscation that we received from the Pentagon as to what the real capabilities of this potentially Standard Block 3 missile--it's called the Standard Block 3, 2A--and what sort of velocities that could attain. From the most reliable sources that I personally have been able to discuss this with and keeping things within the nonclassified setting, that missile we have very little hope will ever develop the velocity necessary to take out a high-flying ballistic missile.

So we have a big gap in our ballistic missile capabilities, and that gap is the size of Europe. And we are betting on the development of a missile that just does not have the physical size or capabilities of developing the velocities we need to protect Europe. We don't think that's good strategy. We think that's a weakness in the bill.

I still support the bill, it's a good bill--unless we put bad amendments on it. This block of amendments is okay, but we do have some weaknesses.

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