OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Howard P. "Buck" McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

Date: May 20, 2014
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Defense

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, congratulations to the chair of the committee and the ranking member for putting together a unanimous bipartisan bill. There is much to say in this bill that is good, and I would like to say about two things. One, the ISR capabilities of the military, particularly the Air Force, are maintained in this bill. The U-2 and the Global Hawk will continue to operate and provide critical intelligence to our military, operating now in the Sahel of Africa, chasing off Boko Haram.

This bill also provides us with the continuability to get to where we need to go. The KC-10 will remain in the force for the foreseeable future, until it is fully replaced by the KC-46s.

All of this is good. You need to know what is going on around the world, and you need to be able to get there, and this bill provides for that.

However, there are issues in this bill that we need to spend some time working on. It has been some 20 years since we have taken a hard look at the nuclear triad, an extraordinarily expensive and extraordinarily dangerous part of our military apparatus.

We are talking nuclear weapons here and the triad--the bombers, the ICBMs, and the submarines.

How do they fit? What do we need? How much do we really need to spend upon them?

Also, the nuclear weapons that go with them. The rebuilding of our nuclear weapons is a 20- to 30-year process, and we are talking about tens of billions of dollars. Too much? Enough? Maybe. Too much? Probably.

We also have to dispose of some 43 tons of unnecessary plutonium. How is that going to be done at the Savannah facility? There is money in this budget to continue a dead-end process. We ought to take a new look at that. And there will be amendments that will be proposed.

And finally, the big elephant in the room. We are talking about Afghanistan. $74 billion in this bill not debated, not discussed. We must do that. It is our obligation as Members of the House of Representatives and the representatives of the people of the United States to talk about what we are going to do in Afghanistan, and that needs to be done.

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