Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I know we are in the postcloture time on the Estevez nomination. I wanted to explain why it was necessary for me to put a hold on this nomination this last March. This is a very important position, the second ranking acquisition official at the Department of Defense.

Actually my objection does not have anything to do with Mr. Estevez personally, who I trust will do an admirable job in this very important position. But the reason I put a hold on the nomination was so I could try to get the attention of the Department of Defense to protest the Department's business relations with a notorious Russian arms dealer. For the last few years, the Pentagon has been buying helicopters, Mi-17 helicopters, from Rosoboronexport, a Russian arms dealer, to supply the Afghan military. But this is the arms dealer, of course, who is supplying Bashar al-Assad with the weapons he is using in Syria in that civil war to kill his own innocent civilian population.

The Pentagon itself has confirmed that Bashar al-Assad security forces have used these very same Russian-made weapons to massacre an untold number of civilians. Yet the Department of Defense has stubbornly refused--I do not think arrogant is too strong a word--stubbornly and arrogantly refused to end its relationship with Assad's personal arms supplier.

In fact, since 2011, the Pentagon has given more than $1 billion--$1 billion--to Rosoboronexport in no-bid contracts. It is planning to spend another $345 million on the company's Mi-17 helicopters in 2014.

Let me be clear. By purchasing Mi-17s from Rosoboronexport, our own Department of Defense is effectively subsidizing the mass murder of Syrian civilians, which is, by all accounts, simply outrageous.

To make matters worse, the Mi-17 program is apparently plagued by internal corruption. According to published news reports, there are at least two separate ongoing criminal investigations into the U.S. Army office that manages the procurement and sustainment contracts for the Mi-17s. Last month, I joined 31 of my congressional colleagues in a bipartisan letter to the Attorney General of the United States, urging him to utilize all available resources to support these criminal investigations.

For that matter, I have also joined with 12 of my Senate colleagues in a bipartisan letter to General Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, asking him for assurances that its contracts with Rosoboronexport are not being abused by corrupt Russian officials.

Americans have good reason to be concerned. It is their tax dollars that are being used to buy these helicopters from Russia for the Afghan military.

Russia has a particularly bad track record. They received an abysmal grade of D-minus in Transparency International's latest Government Defence Anti-Corruption Index. In 2011, Russia's chief military prosecutor publicly stated that 20 percent of his country's annual military equipment budget is being stolen by corrupt officials and contractors. One independent watchdog believes that figure could be as high as 40 percent.

In short, there are plenty of legitimate reasons and questions about why American tax dollars are going to Rosoboronexport. On a per-aircraft basis, the U.S. Army is paying Rosoboronexport more than double what the Russian military itself is paying to buy nearly identical helicopters. About 1 year ago, I convinced the Pentagon to conduct a formal audit of the Army's 2011 no-bid contract. Unfortunately, that audit went nowhere due to persistent stonewalling by--you guessed it--Rosoboronexport.

In other words, we still have a lot of questions and the Pentagon and Rosoboronexport still owe us a lot of answers which we don't yet have. One question is what prompted the Department of Defense to buy Russian helicopters in the first place? To my knowledge, there are plenty of American manufacturers of helicopters that would be anxious to compete for this no-bid contract. By relying upon Moscow to supply the Afghan military with essential equipment, we have given the Kremlin significant leverage over U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, equipping the Afghans with Russian helicopters will make it virtually impossible to achieve any real level of interoperability between the U.S. and Afghan helicopter fleets.

The Department of Defense has repeatedly and disingenuously claimed that a 2010 study of Afghanistan's helicopter requirements shows the necessity of buying Mi-17 helicopters from Russia. In fact, the unclassified portion of that study found that the ideal aircraft for the Afghan military was a particular American-made helicopter.

Why are we buying Russian helicopters when there are American manufacturers that can meet that very same requirement? It makes no sense whatsoever, and the Department of Defense has steadfastly refused to cooperate with reasonable inquiries into why in the world they continue to persist along this pathway.

The reality is the Department of Defense has plenty of alternatives to buying Mi-17s from Russia, but for some reason or reasons known only to them, they steadfastly refuse to consider any of these alternatives. The most sensible and cost-effective alternative would involve keeping many of the Mi- 17s the Afghans already have on hand and life-extending them, instead of retiring them early, which is what is happening now. In other words, Mi-17s that the Afghans already have are being retired early rather than being life-extended because of the Pentagon's stubborn insistence on buying new ones to replace these existing helicopters. In fact, a majority of the Mi-17s the Afghan military already has have more than half of their useful lifetime left in terms of flight hours, and they are being retired early so the Pentagon can buy these new helicopters to replace them.

It makes no sense whatsoever, particularly at a time when I know we are all concerned about our defense expenditures and making sure the Defense Department has the resources they need in order to keep America safe and maintain our commitments around the world. Why would the Defense Department be acting so irresponsibly as they are in the purchase of these Mi-17 helicopters?

While I don't have any personal objection to the nomination of Mr. Alan Estevez, I could not support cloture on the nomination.

Along with my friends and colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I am going to do everything I can to shine a bright light on the Pentagon's troubling relationship with a Russian arms dealer, which is also Bashar al-Assad's arms dealer from which he purchases weapons to kill innocent civilians in Syria. What reasonable person wouldn't be troubled by this tangled relationship?

Ideally, the Mi-17 program would simply be terminated. At the very least, it should be placed on constant and vigorous congressional oversight, and that would serve the interests of U.S. taxpayers and U.S. national security alike.

For all of these reasons, I could not support a cloture vote on the nomination of Mr. Estevez. I am going to continue to come back to the floor and use other vehicles.

I see the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee on the floor. I know we are going to be taking up the Defense authorization bill later on this year, and I will be reaching out to him and other colleagues on both sides of the aisle to try to bring an end to this troubling relationship with Rosoboronexport and to seek alternative means--hopefully, from American manufacturers--for this requirement for the Afghan military.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record two letters, one dated August 5, 2013, to GEN Martin E. Dempsey, and a letter dated September 16, 2013, addressed to the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

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