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Floor Speech

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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I will begin by saying that I do not agree with everything in this bill, but the committee passed a bill worthy of support.

I especially commend Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Rogers for navigating a markup that was 16 hours and 12 minutes long, including the debate of almost 900 amendments.

The House Armed Services Committee agreed on a bipartisan basis to increase our national security topline by over $35 billion, accounting for the damaging impacts of inflation or our military, and the rising threats we face today. I am particularly proud of the decisive final bipartisan vote of 57 to 1 that passed this bill out of committee.

Unfortunately, this bipartisan national security effort is in peril. The Rules Committee has allowed a series of particularly harmful and sometimes unrelated provisions that Speaker Pelosi would like to, once again, tack to the backs of our servicemembers, endangering Congress' support of their service and our national security. I specifically hope during our floor debate we can move to exclude these harmful riders.

As to the committee mark, we started once again with an anemic budget request from the Biden administration that in the Seapower portfolio requested only 8 ships and proposed the retirement of 24 ships, many of these ships well before the end of their expected service life.

Fortunately, with the additional topline funding provided, we authorized 13 battle force ships and rebuffed the administration's request to retire 12 ships early, committing ourselves to growing the Navy instead of shrinking it. We also invested in our strategic deterrence capabilities, providing funding for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and the B-21 bomber programs. In the end, this is a strong Seapower statement.

Before I conclude, I specifically thank Chairman Joe Courtney, and thank him for his leadership in the Seapower Subcommittee. He is a navalist. He is a teammate and a dear friend who has the vision to see our national security perils and the political fortitude to respond to our most serious threats.

My friends, this is good legislation that, in its current form, is worthy of support. We must remain focused on delivering a bill that provides the resources our servicemembers need to advance the common defense of our Nation.

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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this amendment.

Again, this is really about making sure that there is the proper workforce placed in the right areas where the work is to be done.

We have heard time and time again today that the unavailability of skilled workforce in many areas is causing delays in construction jobs. The last thing we need is delays in military construction jobs because of this inconsistency in the availability of a skilled workforce.

It also undermines competition. Competition is a good thing. Why wouldn't we want to open it up and make sure that everybody who has the capability to do this work is able to compete? I think those things are incredibly important.

When we don't have competition, we know that that increases the cost to the United States Government. Why would we want to increase costs on these projects so we do fewer projects?

There is already a backlog of these military construction projects. This will only add to the backlog. It will only make it more difficult to complete these projects. It will add to the costs. It will add to delays. All of these things are counter to what we need to be doing.

With a backlog of these projects, we need to be assuring that there is competition reducing costs and reducing timeframes.

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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I have to speak in opposition to this amendment. The bottom line is that the LCS does have capability. It has a mine-hunting capability. It has a fast-attack capability. That is a capability that we would give up at a time when we need that capability.

If you are going to do away with that capability, the question is, with the savings that you accrue, which is about a half-billion dollars, what are you going to do with those dollars to create comparable capability today? The answer is, you can't do it.

It takes 6 years to build a destroyer to replace the capability that the LCS has today. And if you take that half a billion dollars and you put it in savings, the question is: Where would you spend it today? Well, we see some of the places where the Navy would like to spend it.

They would like to spend almost a half a billion dollars in fixing a building in Hawaii, one of the Pacific fleet command buildings. They are also looking at--OSD would rather put $3 billion in climate change, and for that matter, invest $2 billion into a $15 an hour minimum wage.

I would argue that getting rid of ships that have a capability that does have an impact to counter the Chinese is what needs to be done today rather than waiting 6 years to build a ship that in some way, shape, or form could counter that--in turn, trying to spend these dollars to repair a building, for climate change, or for minimum wage increases. Folks, China is at our doorstep today. That is the threat that we face today.

My opposition to this is about, Why are we giving away capability that we need in the face of Chinese capability that is at our doorstep?
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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time both sides have remaining?
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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I respect the chairman, but he is wrong.

This ship does have capability against China. It is capability that is operable today. If you get rid of this ship, you have nothing. The replacement for this ship is 6 years out. You can't fight something with nothing.

Getting rid of this ship is the wrong thing to do. It has its challenges--let's fix those challenges. Let's get this ship operational. Let's get it out there. We know that it can do the job in a variety of different ways.

Even if it is not in the Indo-Pacific in a direct role, it can be in other ways that will free up ships to be in the Indo-Pacific to do their role. This is the wrong effort to retire these ships--all nine of these ships.

Let's make sure we stand by the agreement that we came to in the committee and go to keeping the five ships.

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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

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