-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Escobar), a member of the committee.

Substantively, I reiterate my initial remarks. I think this is a good bill that was put together. You have heard a lot of comments from the individual subcommittee chairs. Many other Members also contributed significant and important policy to this piece of legislation that gives us the opportunity to properly exercise oversight of the Pentagon, which is our job. This bill does an excellent job of that, and I think, as I mentioned, we have made some progress in recent years.

The one big point I did not emphasize sufficiently at the start of my remarks is how important innovation and new technologies are right now. I don't think there has been a time in the history of warfare where things have been changing as rapidly. We have certainly seen that play out on the battlefield in Ukraine but also in other fights that have happened in smaller conflicts in Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Middle East.

You have to develop the new, best innovative technology, and as anyone would recognize, the Pentagon is not typically good at moving fast. It is a large bureaucracy. It takes them time to process ideas. What we have done is we have put forth innovative legislation to move that along faster so that we can develop the better technologies, take advantage of drone technology, take advantage of AI, and make sure that our systems are secure. That has really made a huge difference to make sure that we get the most out of the money we spend and that we are in the best position to have the technologies that we need. So, a number of these policies have made a huge difference.

I will use the balance of my time to thank six members of our committee on the Democratic side who are retiring at the end of this Congress: Congress Members Langevin, Cooper, Speier, Brown, Murphy, and Kahele. I thank them very much for their service. As you have heard many times, the cornerstone of this committee is our bipartisan approach and our commitment to regular order, to sending our bills through the normal process in committee, having markups, debates, and then doing the same on the floor in a bipartisan way, which makes an enormous difference. These Members have contributed to that. I will especially recognize a couple of Members because a number have served for a long time on the committee. Jim Langevin is the chairman of the subcommittee with the really complicated name that I have to have written down to remember, but it has to do with cyber and intelligence matters. Jim has dove into these issues. When I talk, as I did, about innovative technologies, it is his subcommittee that focuses on putting us in the best position to deal with artificial intelligence, to figure out how to use directed-energy weapons and drones, to do the innovation that is crucial. Jim's knowledge level on this is above anybody in Congress. He has done an outstanding job over, I guess it is, 22 years as a Member of Congress and now a subcommittee chair. His leadership has been invaluable in those crucial issues. Jim Cooper, also retiring, is a subcommittee chair. He is very responsible for getting us to properly focus on space. There is a lot of talk about the Space Force. Certainly, that is part of it, but that was never really the entire point. The point was that space has become crucial in modern warfare. Literally, everything we do gets shut down if we don't have robust access to our space assets. Recognize the importance of that and how much that has changed, certainly in the last 50 years but even in the last 10. Chairman Cooper has worked with now- Ranking Member Rogers, also a past chairman of that subcommittee, to make this happen. Jim's intelligence and leadership have made a huge difference in those issues.

Jackie Speier is retiring as the chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee. It is impossible to overstate the work she has done to look after the men and women who serve in our forces, most notably, of course, with her commitment to battling sexual assault and to getting the major sexual assault reform passed, which we passed last year, to set up a special prosecutor who will focus on sexual assault cases. That was a 10-year effort.

A lot of people, when they get involved in politics, they get frustrated that things aren't happening. They don't happen quickly. They get frustrated by the whole process. I have come up with the saying that, in politics and public policy, you have to be patient and persistent. Nobody personifies that better than Jackie Speier. She was absolutely doggedly persistent in getting the changes necessary to help improve the way we handle sexual assault and on a wide range of other issues that have helped protect the personnel who serve in our military.

Lastly, I specifically thank Anthony Brown, a past vice chair of the committee who has worked so hard on diversity issues. We were able, 2 years ago now, to finally get passed and put in place a commission to change the names of the military bases in this country and facilities, as well--not just base names, but those buildings, streets, and a whole bunch of other things that had been named after white supremacist Confederate traitors. He did the work to get that through the entire process, all the way to the point of having to override the President's veto to get that done.

Now we have a commission that is working on this issue. Certainly, it is crucial that they change the names, but what the commission is doing is they have held hearings all across the country in the communities where these bases are named to talk about the history, about how we got to this point, what is it that we are actually talking about, how these bases weren't actually named immediately after the Civil War--they were named at the turn of the 20th century when there was an effort to reestablish white supremacy--to really educate and include the community in the process and, ultimately, in the names that were selected. That never would have happened without Anthony's hard work.

We have some outstanding members of the committee leading us this year. I appreciate their service. Again, I thank Ranking Member Rogers and the Republican staff. We have worked well together--not that we don't disagree. We absolutely disagree frequently, but we do so in a way that allows us to resolve those differences, which is the essence of how a representative democracy is not just supposed to work but how it must work if it is to survive. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of that process.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support this bill. It is an outstanding product. Please vote ``yes.'' I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1224, I offer amendments en bloc.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Strickland).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I too urge adoption of the en bloc amendments and yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I think we need to get to a reasonable defense budget. Full disclosure: I don't support the effort to cut $100 billion from the defense budget. I think we have clearly articulated needs. But I think the President and the Department of Defense, when they put forward this budget, took that into account.

One of the things I have always been worried about on the Armed Services Committee is if we just give them more and more money, they won't spend it as well as they should. They will not have the fiscal discipline to go in there and make sure that the money is being spent wisely, which I have said many, many times is as important and, in many cases, more important than how much is spent.

Over the course of the last 20 years, we have not had a good record. Many programs have gone over budget and underperformed. We are getting better, but I think we need to live within our means.

The President put forward his budget. We ought to respect that budget and support it. It is more than enough to defend the country.

If we go back to the President's number, it is $813 billion, which is a significant 4 percent increase over last year's budget. It is not like we aren't spending money if we stick to the President's budget. I think that number should work, and I think that is the number we should stick to.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for offering that amendment and making the arguments she has.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for offering this amendment. I think it is incredibly important.

Mr. Garamendi outlined it quite well. There was a process to go through at DOD to determine what the budget should be. Once that process is done, we should respect that process, not allow everybody in the institution to say, ``Well, I would like to have more money.'' I can assure you that there would be unfunded requirements in every single aspect of government.

You have to make choices. That is what DOD does. That is what the budgeting process does.

What the unfunded requirements list does is it simply perpetuates the notion that you can never spend enough money. I submit that that attitude toward the defense budget--that whatever it is, it has to be higher--has a lot to do with all the inefficiencies, the lack of an audit, the number of programs that have gone overbudget and have underperformed, the number of programs that have never worked out the way we envisioned them.

If there was fiscal discipline in place, we would get a better result.

Allowing people to always ask for more, no matter what, undermines fiscal discipline. I also submit it undermines the effectiveness of the Department of Defense.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly support this amendment.

This amendment has to do with the retirement of nine littoral combat ships.

The Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, wants to retire those nine ships. An amendment was added in our committee that does not allow them to retire five of those ships. My amendment would strip that and would allow the Department of the Navy to retire the ships they want to retire.

We just heard a lengthy speech about the wisdom of our various service Secretaries and how they know what they need. Well, the service Secretary and the Department of Defense know that they no longer need these nine littoral combat ships. We should not be blocking their effort to save money and retire them.

The biggest reason we have a problem with this is these ships are not that old. But they have also not turned out to perform the way they were expected.

In particular, they were supposed to have antisubmarine capability, and they were supposed to have demining capability. They have neither of those. They have also turned out to have significant maintenance problems and costs associated with simply operating them.

The Navy has determined that it is better to invest in newer, more modern, more capable platforms, and we are blocking their ability to do that. The littoral combat ship has not lived up to its expectations.

Now, let me be clear, it is an extraordinarily difficult time to figure out how you build the right systems. But throwing good money after bad doesn't make sense, and that is the primary argument for not allowing the Navy to do this. ``Well, they just built them,'' almost whether they work or not, ``why would we retire them after 3 or 4 years?'' Because they are not working as expected, and they are not cost-effective.

Mr. Speaker, I urge that we adopt this amendment to allow the Department of Defense to do what they want to do: retire these ships and build a better, stronger, more capable Navy.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close. I understand the gentleman has the right to ultimately close the debate, so I will reserve the balance of my time, unless he is prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, in that time I will attempt to make three quick points.

Number one, in response to Mr. Gallagher, as he well knows, the LCS has literally no role in the counter China fight. It has no capability that will help us in dealing with China. So whatever your concern about China, LCS ain't going to deal with it. It may have capabilities elsewhere, but it wouldn't survive 2 seconds in a fight against China-- and we all know that--which leads to my second point.

The number of ships isn't the point, it is the capability of our overall systems. This amendment takes the money out of this and puts it into more munitions, which we desperately need, and puts money into more operation and maintenance within the Department of the Navy, which Congressman Waltz has correctly pointed out we also desperately need. This money is put someplace that is vastly better.

Lastly--I will come back to that first argument--the Department of the Navy is determined this is not where they should spend their money. But understand, we are hearing all these arguments about China, China, China, China--this is the point--build the capabilities and build the systems that can deal with the fight we face with China. The one thing you have to understand is the LCS is 100 percent not it.

Mr. Speaker, we can spend this money better and this amendment does that. I urge its support, and I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source