National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2008

Floor Speech

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008 -- (Extensions of Remarks - May 21, 2007)

* Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. Madam Chairman, as we debate the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill, I am pleased to note the effort by my colleagues in working to ensure that our national defense funding and policy are focused on programs that will make our country safer and provide our troops in harm's way with the resources they need today.

* I support making sure that Congress wisely, as well as robustly, provide for our national defense, including ensuring dollars are spent on systems that will actually protect our Nation and our allies. One of those systems drawing new attention during this debate is missile defense. Our country has already spent over $100 billion over the last several decades to develop various missile defense systems. These Cold War efforts for which annual funding has increased from $3 billion in the late 1990s to nearly $10 billion have yet to bear fruit, even as our country faces the grave threat posed by terrorists smuggling nuclear weapons into our country across our borders or through our ports.

* Supporters will point to successful tests recently of portions of this system. However, we all know the challenges of replicating limited success from carefully and highly scripted tests in real world conditions. Given that participants knew roughly when the test target would launch, what they would look like, how they would fly and what they would do, it may be even more concerning that these systems missed as often as they did.

* I am troubled when I hear experts such as the Government Accountability Office report that while costs have grown, less work is being completed than planned. GAO found that ``too few tests have been completed to have confidence in the models and simulations used to predict performance.'' One year after establishing 2006 goals for the program, the Missile Defense agency informed Congress that it planned to field fewer assets, reduce performance goals, and increase the program's cost goal.

* Our citizens and our allies and their citizens are not made safer by rushing to deploy technology that ``may'' protect them when called upon.

* The solution to a flat tire is not to blow more air into it. We cannot afford to expend valuable national defense dollars to develop technologies that we know today will not work at a time when these funds can be spent to improve our homeland security, provide needed equipment for our troops in the field, or increase foreign aid to our allies.

* I am sure there is no need to remind my colleagues that the $8.1 billion provided in the bill for the missile system is more than is currently authorized for port security grants or included in the recent House-passed COPS reauthorization bill to put more police officers on our streets.

* Some have attempted to muddle this issue by inserting the nation of Israel into the missile defense issue. Our Nation recognizes the importance of our ally Israel and provides over $2 billion in foreign military aid to help that nation meet its unique security challenges. However, simply putting more unproven, insufficiently tested, and unreliable missile defense systems into the field does not make our country or our allies safer.

* I certainly believe the purpose of this $645 billion Defense authorization bill is to help make our country safer including assisting our allies. If we truly want to help protect important allies like Israel, let's develop and share with them defensive systems that will work effectively, reliably, and consistently. The history of this program has shown me that simply providing more funds will not accomplish that goal.

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