Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I compliment the Senator from Massachusetts for his endurance. I appreciate that.

I have to say also to the Senator from Indiana, my good friend, I am kind of in a unique position as one who serves on both the Armed Services and the Foreign Relations Committee. I disagree with most of what was just stated by the senior Senator from Massachusetts.

One of the concerns I have had is that we have so many people who want to be in on this, who should be in on this, who have been elected. We have new Senators, one who is occupying the chair right now. We have Senators Kirk and Manchin. We also have Senators-elect Blunt, Boozman, Portman, Moran, Lee, Johnson, Hoeven, Ayotte, Paul, and Rubio. All of them have signed a letter saying: This is very significant. We really need to be a part of this. This is important.

It is important in a different way to me than it is to others. I am opposed for a number of reasons. I am one of the few bad guys who came out initially and said I opposed it.

We all know what a strategic arms reduction act is. Initially, when we had two superpowers, it made a lot more sense to me. Frankly, I look at this, and I see the concerns I have.

Verification--that sounds good. Yes, we will verify. Yet the number of verifications, inspections, is like 18 per year in the New START as opposed to some 600 over a 15-year period.

Modernization is one thing on which we all agree. We have to modernize. But there has to be a way of doing it. We haven't done it yet.

It was 3 years ago that Secretary Gates said:

No way can we maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without either resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program.

That is an area where we all agree. How are we going to do that? Right now, I think the generally agreed upon number that it would cost over a period of 10 years would be $85 billion. We have right now about $600 million that would be coming up in the next budget cycle. We all know how things work around here. We can only commit funds for the next cycle. There is no assurance at all that we would be able to come through with the other $84.5 billion in that period. The modernization is not set up in a way where we are in the current year demonstrating the commitment we have to modernize our fleet.

The fact that we are handling this in a lameduck session--most of the stuff we are trying to cram in right now is what we should have been talking about all year long and have not been. They all fall into a category where it looks as if things are going to change in the Senate. We know the House, after the November election, is now a Republican-dominated House. We know we have gained large numbers in the Senate. We also know there are several of my good colleagues who are up for reelection in 2012. I am not sure they all want to join in all of these issues coming up at the last minute. This is one of them.

I look at the quotes we have--the missile defense issue has not been addressed. I know it would take a lot of discussion. There are probably potentially, with the new Congress coming in in January, 40 or 50 different amendments just addressing the missile defense issue. They say: Well, no, this is not a problem. But anytime you have a unilateral statement that was made--which was made by the Russians early on--that this treaty can only operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively and qualitatively--that has been stated, and it has been stated and reaffirmed more recently when Sergei Lavrov said:

We have not yet agreed on this [missile defense] issue and we are trying to clarify how the agreements reached by the two presidents. ..... correlate with the actions taken unilaterally by Washington.

The problem is that when the American people look at this, they say that maybe back during the Cold War and maybe back when we had two superpowers, this thing made sense. Frankly, I was not as supportive of this concept back then. But there is certainly justification for it.

Where are we today? Right now, we are probably in the most endangered position we have been in as a nation. I say this from the experience I have had on both of these committees. We have problems. There are certainly problems with North Korea and what they have developed in their capabilities, problems with Syria, certainly problems with Iran. Our intelligence says--and it is not even classified--that Iran would have the capability of sending a missile to Western Europe and the Eastern United States by 2015.

One of the most disturbing things that happened at the beginning of this administration, a year and a half ago, was when the President came out with his budget and did away with our site in Poland which was a ground interceptor site that would have given us the capability of defending the geography I just mentioned. They took a risk. It wasn't easy for Poland or the Czech Republic, in terms of their radar system, to almost defy Russia, but they were willing to do it. I always remember being a part of the negotiation over there when they said: Are you sure, if we take this bold step, we start agreeing to build a ground interceptor in Poland that would protect that area, are you sure you will not pull the rug out from under us? I said: Absolutely. I had no hint that this would happen, but it did. So in February, right after the new President was inaugurated, of the many things he did that I found objectionable with our defense systems, that was the most egregious.

We are talking about doing a type of strategic arms reduction with Russia. I am not concerned about Russia; I am concerned about these other places. The threat is there. The threat is real. I don't think there are too many people around since 9/11 who don't know that the terrorists would in a heartbeat come after the United States.

When we have something that is written in the preamble--statements have been made over and over again that it would be a violation of this treaty if we were to enhance our missile defense system. Yet we know that Syria is going to have a capability by 2015. To me, that is mind-boggling that people could be sitting around here worrying about this treaty between two countries when I don't look at them as being a threat.

Then we have the issue of force structure. I think we know that not only do we have to have a weapon, we have to have a way of sending it. We all know the triad and how they are not being enhanced by this. That is my major concern.

I was against it from the very beginning. However, this is where we are today. We are in the middle of it. I know I keep hearing on the radio: You are going to be here until Christmas; you shouldn't do that. I will be spending New Year's Eve with our troops in Afghanistan. I am also concerned about what we are doing here in America. Why are we waiting? Last year, we waited until Christmas Eve. I always remember going home Christmas Eve. It happened to fall at the same time. It was the worst snowstorm in the history of Texas and northeastern Oklahoma. I barely made it in time to get home. Yes, I have 20 kids and grandkids. I would kind of like to see them at Christmas. These are things we could have been doing a long time ago. You wait until the last minute. This is when you want to cram things through that the American people don't want and that should take time. We beat up this thing on this treaty for long enough.

But let's look at what we should be talking about now; that is, running government into the next year so we don't have some type of a stoppage, some type of a crisis on our hands. So the liberals have the omnibus bill that they have up, a bill that is $1.3 trillion. Here we are talking about we have come up with $2 trillion--$3 trillion--$2 trillion in the first 2 years. This is unheard of in terms of deficits. Look where we are going right now with $9 billion more in spending than last year, and we thought last year was an absolute disaster.

At the same time, where is the spending going? We have such things as their agenda--$1.4 billion for a variety of climate change programs. They are not going to give up on that. They are going to keep coming forth trying to spend money. They are talking about the money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, talking about zeroing out the efforts in Yucca Mountain. These are things that are in this bill.

What it does to the defense system--everything is enhanced except defense. What is this aversion to trying to rebuild America's defense system? Overall, the defense spending cuts in the omnibus bill amount to $10.3 billion. That is from the President's request of 2011. It includes the $450 million to include work on the second engine, the alternate engine. We have already talked about that. We have been discussing that in the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee.

We decided, I believe justly--I was on the single engine side of that argument because of the sheer cost. Yet I know the arguments on both sides. We have already done that. We have already debated it. I don't know why we have to come to the floor after we have made these decisions and then look at a bill that cuts the proposed purchase of the F-35s from 42 to 35.

Let's remember what happened a year and a half ago. They talked about doing away with the F-22s, which are the only fifth-generation capability we have. The justification was, look what we are doing with F-35s. That is fine. But so it is going to be 42. This bill would cut it down--further cuts.

So while we are talking about a bill of $1.3 trillion, it throws money at every kind of social engineering, everything you could have except defense.

The CERP--this program used to be called the commander's emergency relief program. It was one that was my program. You talk to the commanders in the field, and they will tell you they have a capability of taking care of some of these needs. Whether it used to be Iraq, now Afghanistan, they can accomplish so much more if they can do it right now. That is called CERP. They are already bringing the funding of that down in this bill. I look at over $1 trillion in funding to implement the very unpopular health care law. If anybody is out there thinking this is going to be an easy lift, I personally think we will be able to defeat this omnibus bill. I think it will be defeated by almost all Republicans and a few of the Democrats, particularly those coming up for reelection in 2012. I would hate to be in a position where I would say: What I am going to run on is the fact that I already voted to put more than $1 trillion into funding this form of socialized medicine.

That is where we are right now. I do think we need to take a deep breath and just figure that we have a new Congress coming in, a new Senate coming in right after January. We will have plenty of time to allow other Senators who were elected to weigh in on this very critical issue of the New START treaty.

With that, I yield the floor.

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