Defense Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about what turns into a perennial topic, and that is how we fund our military.

We are in a situation that in the last 45 years, we have only funded the Federal Government four times on time. Yet we see a situation where the world is more dangerous than at any time in my lifetime. We face five threats across five domains--this has increased over the last 15 or 20 years--and at the same time, we have been at work for 20 years against terrorism. That war has not abated. It has not gone away. It is still there.

We now face five threats--primarily, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism--across five domains: air, land, sea, cyber, and now space. Yet, with that backdrop, the world being more dangerous than at any time in my lifetime--and I remember the Cold War. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. These are things that, in my childhood, really imprinted on my brain how dangerous the world can be. Yet, today, I say with some qualification, the world is more dangerous than at any time in my lifetime. Yet, three times in the last 50 years--the last three Democratic Presidents cut spending in our military by 25 percent. That was in the late 1970s, in the mid-1990s, and just in the last decade. This is devastating. We saw that in readiness in January of 2017. Two- thirds of our F/A-18s couldn't fly. We had only 3 Army brigades ready to fight out of 59.

This was a devastating thing we did to the U.S. military, and it hasn't gone away today. Today--even today--under Republican leadership in this Senate, this is something that has been going on for decades; that is, we use something called continuing resolutions.

Let me describe where we are today. The reason I am here speaking to the body is that we are beginning the authorization process for defense and other authorizing functions within committees, leading to the appropriations process, which was supposed to be completed by September 30 this year, the end of our fiscal year. Well, we are in the sixth fiscal month of this fiscal year, which ends September 30, and we are just now beginning this process--for a lot of reasons, impeachment being one. There are several other reasons contributing to the fact that we are late in this process. So we are staring down the barrel of another continuing resolution, which we now know costs the U.S. military $5 billion per quarter.

For 12 of the last 13 years, the Congress has put a continuing resolution in place for the first quarter of each new fiscal year. Only in 2018, when this body stayed here in August and wrestled this issue to the ground, did we fund the military by the end of the fiscal year-- only one time in the last 13 years. As a matter of fact, in 2018 when we got 75 percent of the budget funded, that was the first time in 22 years we had gotten that much funded.

This is ridiculous. It is broken. We have to fix it. The victim of that has been the U.S. military. This is devastating on their operation of rebuilding readiness and now on the recapitalization program we are beginning in earnest.

Over the last 20 years, shipbuilding has been devastated. We have lost some 20,000 vendors across all of the DOD, most of those in shipbuilding. Almost 14,000 primary vendors have been lost in the supply chain.

Now, even if we were to fund a recapitalization effort that would get us back to being on par with some of our peer competitors, I question whether we even have the supply chain today to do that. This is a major challenge for us right now.

Technology is building, our lethality is building, the way we fight our fleet is building, but we have to be serious about maintaining continuity of funding across decades with regard to this capability we have. We are the 800-pound gorilla beneath the sea today, but today we are outgunned and outsticked by one of our ``near peer competitors,'' and that is China.

We have a 2016 shipbuilding plan that was done prior to the 2017 national defense strategy, the NDS. In the shipbuilding plan of 2016, it called for 355 ships by 2034. These are submarines, amphibious ships, heavy combatant ships, aircraft carriers--over the next 15 years.

Well, the NDS was done in 2017. We still don't know what that shipbuilding plan is to support the NDS. The new plan is on the desk of the Secretary of Defense. I understand he is taking his time to make sure he understands the requirements. He has a particular problem because of the budget. I get that.

But I want to highlight today what we are up against. Today, China has 355 ships in their navy; we have 296. That is a 54-ship disadvantage that we already have today in 2020. That is devastating. Most people in America don't think that. They don't know that.

Oh, by the way, they really have only one area of operations--the Indo-Pacific region, although that is changing. But we have multiple areas of operation around the world. So this is a huge disadvantage we already have today.

If you look at the next 15 years to 2034, they are projected to go to 435 ships; we are hoping to get to 355 under the current plan of 2016. That may change when we see this new shipbuilding plan, which, by the way, was due when the budget was submitted to Congress. That is an 80- ship delta--80-ship disadvantage that we have to China. That doesn't count what Russia is investing in its new technology, submarine, and surface fleet.

We also know what China is doing with the Belt and Road Initiative on the back of this incremental capability they have in the naval power that they have been developing for the last 30 years. That is the Belt and Road Initiative where they go into more than 30 ports in Africa, over 50 ports in Latin America--that is South America and Central America--where they make these proprietary loans. They have already foreclosed on two of those proprietary loans--one in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the other in Karachi, Pakistan, where they have actually taken possession and they are now building military naval bases in those ports.

Add to that what we see them doing and have done in the South China Sea. I actually was blessed to be able to go with the Navy on a flyover--part of a Freedom of Navigation Operation in the South China Sea--to see exactly what China has done there. We saw Coast Guard ships 1,000 kilometers off the coast of China down in the South China Sea, patrolling the waters, as if they were within the 12-mile legal limit of China.

We believe that we can compete. Today we are still the 800-pound gorilla. Our technology and our sailors and pilots in the Navy and our marines are the best in the world. We can stand up to the threat today.

My question and caution today, as we are looking at this authorization for our defense and for the budgeting therein, we have to make sure that over the next 15 years that we do this shipbuilding plan, we maintain a more consistent and better funding for that plan so we can rebuild the supply chain in order to build this capability.

Let me state one other thing. The number of ships is a function of the distribution of those ships--how many small ships, large ships, carriers, submarines, and so forth. I get that. But the other is also a function of how the Navy will fight that. There are new doctrines being put in place. The Advanced Battle Management System is going in, and we are increasing dramatically the lethality of the weapons and the munitions on these vessels. That is the encouraging part. The discouraging part is that China has the lead right now with regard to range and speed and a few other things in terms of their munitions. I am confident we will catch up with that.

We have the first ever--thanks to President Trump, we have the first- ever audit of the DOD. It came to us 1 year ago. We have been looking at it. It identified $4 billion of obsolete programs they wanted to get rid of. Between that $4 billion and the $5 billion that is going to be wasted this year alone, if we end up with another CR in the October, November, December timeframe, that is $9 billion. That is almost 40 percent of 1 year's shipbuilding plan. That is serious money, and it is up to us to get that taken care of and to find that money and to rebuild this Navy.

Let me close with this. The next 50 to 100 years will be determined in the next 3 to 5 years, in terms of our relationship not only with China but with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the other threats we have around the world. We have to establish with our allies, particularly our NATO allies and also Japan--to make sure that they get their investments moving in the right direction so that, collectively, we can stand up to this growing threat around the world.

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