H.R. 4350
Floor Speech
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Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, 60 years ago, President Dwight David Eisenhower warned Americans about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. He told us of the relentless defense interests that would use their lobbying muscle to keep money flowing into the coffers of the Pentagon. While our adversaries and competitors have changed in the past six decades, the military-industrial complex's revolving door is as well greased as Ike warned our country.
Today, Congress is set to vote to increase the already-bloated defense budget in the same year that we ended our longest war--the latest proof that the military-industrial complex is alive and well and banking on a pay raise, all while Americans struggle to afford groceries and gasoline.
Here is the simple truth about the defense budget we are debating this week: We plan to spend $768 billion to fuel the military- industrial complex even in our moment of relative peace. Yet many in this Chamber are relentlessly attacking the Build Back Better act despite this spending bill being four times its size in new spending.
What we are hearing in this Chamber this week are Cold War echoes-- words that sound like talk of the bomber and the missile gap with the former Soviet Union that drove an arms race that brought us to the brink of annihilation.
Our top military general recently called China's most recent hypersonic test a ``Sputnik moment.'' That is our top military general. But how in the world can it be a ``Sputnik moment'' if we are set to spend more on defense than the next 11 countries combined, many of which are U.S. allies and partners? There is no technological or military gap that we need to close. We have the strongest military in the world.
Our rivals, our adversaries are not 10 feet tall. We are the country that is 10 feet tall, and they are looking up at us militarily. We should just understand this, as people bad-mouth our military. It is not accurate. They are afraid of us. We are technologically superior to them, whoever they may be.
But wait. As if we weren't spending enough, Congress has tossed in an additional $25 billion that was not even requested by the Pentagon in this year's budget. You heard that right--an additional $25 billion. How many kids could go to pre-K for that? How many seniors could get dental or vision coverage? How many public housing units could we build with that, with the money that has not even been requested by the Pentagon?
We should not accept the logic that says we can afford to build a $100 billion intercontinental ballistic missile that will never be used but we cannot possibly afford paid family leave that Americans desperately need.
Universal prekindergarten is too expensive, but padding the wallets of defense firm executives with taxpayer dollars is money well spent. That is insane. That is immoral.
We should not have to fight tooth and nail to meet our commitment to replenish the Green Climate Fund to help save the planet while being told to accept the need for new weapons systems that could lead to global annihilation.
It is time we stop thinking of national security solely in terms of our inventory of bombers and missiles and submarines. Trillions in defense spending did nothing to spare Americans from the greatest security threat in generations: COVID-19. We have to stop pretending that there are military solutions to the national security challenges that we face. The defense a family needs right now is protection from eviction, hunger, electricity shut off, and pollution.
Being strong on defense means learning critical lessons from the two- decade-long war in Afghanistan. Being strong on defense means that we do not shy away from telling the military-industrial complex and its army of lobbyists that we do not need to outspend our adversaries into oblivion.
Nowhere has the gold-plated defense industry been harder at work than in gilding the whopping $1.5 trillion we are projected to spend through 2046 on upgrading our nuclear weapons enterprise. Say that again--$1.5 trillion on more nuclear weapons. There is one thing this country and this world does not need, and that is more nuclear weapons.
We know that fear and distrust of an adversary's intentions empower voices in the defense bureaucracy to sell new capabilities that spur the other side to justify weapon systems of their own. But we must avoid a rerun of the Cold War, where worst-case military planning leads to thousands of missiles pointed at Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, once again casting a terrible shadow over humanity.
That is why I introduced amendments to the NDAA that would trim $75 billion off the nuclear weapons enterprise, commit to robust diplomacy with Russia and China, and prevent the President--any President, Democratic or Republican--from firing the first shot, the first nuclear weapon in a nuclear war. The United States should never be first to launch a nuclear weapon against another country--ever. That should just be our policy. We will not be the first to use nuclear weapons when we have not been attacked with nuclear weapons. That is immoral. That is wrong. It must be the policy of our country that we will not do that.
If it is true what Ronald Reagan said--that a ``nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought''--then surely we should agree to shelve Donald Trump's new sea-based warfighting nuclear weapons.
We could play Russian roulette with our future or we can adopt a saner nuclear policy, one that says we do not need the rubble to bounce over and over and over again to deter our adversaries and reassure our allies; one, through the President's Nuclear Posture Review, that rejects the military-industrial complex efforts to make the world safe for nuclear weapons rather than from nuclear weapons.
In 2020, the amount of money that one of the five biggest defense contractors received from the Pentagon--$75 billion--was nearly double the entire development and diplomacy accounts at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for Development.
As President Biden noted in Glasgow at the international climate summit earlier this month, we have an obligation to help the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel economy to reach a green economy. Lower and middle-income countries deserve to develop and seek a higher standard of living, but we know that they can't use the dirty fuels that powered our growth if we hope to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. My climate amendment will help those countries least to blame for the climate crisis to adapt to the impacts that they are already overwhelmingly and disproportionately experiencing.
The first of its kind National Intelligence Estimate, released in October, warned us that the intensity of wildfires and the force of hurricane winds and unrelenting droughts are a mere preview of the extreme weather events to come. The Pentagon's own report warns us of the cascading security impacts if we fail to answer the national security challenge of our generation: Governments that are unable to meet the basic needs of their people risk collapse. Driven by the climate crisis, water, food, and resource scarcity will lead millions to flood across borders as stateless climate refugees. That will lead to destabilization of countries. That will lead to national security crises in country after country as a result of the climate crisis.
We have to just deal with the reality that the CO
My climate amendment says that we can avoid that grim future. We can redirect a mere 1 percent from the Pentagon topline towards global climate accounts to fight the climate crisis. We can come to grips with the fact that the greatest adversary we face is not a foreign army, navy, or air force; it is the transnational threats of the climate crisis, of pandemics, and of nuclear weapons.
We are not in a new Cold War. We are in a war for our common survival.
Yesterday, in an act of political gamesmanship, Senate Republicans joined me to vote against moving forward with this abominable $768 billion Defense bill. While I wish we could stop here and reassess the waste of three-quarters of a trillion dollars spent on defense, this was, sadly, just a Republican ploy to add even more pork onto this already fatty legislation.
Now, I urge my colleagues to support Senator Sanders' and my amendment to return the defense budget to the level requested by the President--a level of spending which is greater than we spent during the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and at the height of the Cold War.
Additionally, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment--co- sponsored by Senators Warren, Padilla, Booker, Merkley, and Sanders--to make a 1-percent cut to the Defense authorization to increase our support for global climate accounts.
If we do not adopt these changes, I cannot, in good conscience, support that budget. It is time we stop funding the military industrial complex, whose profit is based in conflict and annihilation. That is not an investment in our future; it is an invitation to destruction.
The bottom line is we are either going to live together or we are going to die together; we are either going to know each other or we are going to exterminate each other.
This is a period where we should be talking to our rivals. We should be negotiating with our rivals. We should be trying to reduce the nuclear arsenals. We should be trying to reduce the tension; reduce the paranoia; reduce the threat that, by accident, we can actually fight a nuclear war.
That is what we should be debating here and not just putting all of the additional new weapons systems that have been on the blueprints of the defense industry for a generation into this budget. That takes us in the wrong direction, towards less safety, more risk.
The correct vote here is to deal with the reality that we have too many nuclear weapons already and we haven't sufficiently dealt with the threat which the climate crisis is going to pose as a national security risk to our country and the rest of the planet.
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