National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak on the tragedy, on the ongoing crisis of sexual assault in our Armed Forces and what I believe we must do. There are several options before us, each of which has been the subject of lengthy and passionate debate, a debate that I think is healthy, and needed, and welcome here in this Chamber.

I commend my many colleagues--Chairman Levin and Senator Inhofe, Senator McCaskill and Senator Ayotte--for the very real progress, the very significant steps taken both in the base bill, the NDAA, and in the amendments to be offered by Senators McCaskill and Ayotte, serious and important steps forward to protect victims, to ensure that commanders are held accountable and to criminalize retaliation. A wide range of important and significant reforms that will make real progress towards addressing the ongoing decades-old scourge of sexual assault in the United States military.

As was said recently on the floor by another of my colleagues, this disagreement today is over one of more than a dozen important and needed reforms. But in the end, we have to decide. I believe the measure offered by Senator Gillibrand of New York, of which I am a cosponsor, is the right additional path forward. Because at the end, here is the bottom line: Sexual assault has been a disease, a corrosive and widespread and horribly negative influence on our military that has simply not been effectively treated.

I think this significant, dramatic step is the needed driver for extensive reform. I understand that the chain of command is essential, that it is central to the proper functioning and order of the military, especially during war time. In fact, the chain of command is nearly sacred.

But ensuring that our spouses and our siblings and our children can serve with honor and not have to face another enemy within our ranks is sacred. This is, in the end, a debate about justice--justice within our own Armed Forces, justice so we can fulfill that sacred duty of protecting men and women in uniform as well as they protect us.

Despite many years of good-faith efforts by leaders in our Armed Forces to work within the parameters of our current system, literally tens of thousands of sexual assaults are still occurring annually within our Armed Forces.

That is, frankly, unacceptable and it reflects a fundamental breakdown in order and discipline that in my view we cannot tolerate anymore. The current system, in this important and vital way, is failing. I understand the intense desire our leaders feel to fix what was broken and for our military leaders to atone for taking their eyes off the ball, to paraphrase the testimony of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

But, once again, this debate is not about them, about their commitment or about their strategy or about their determination. It is about justice. In America, justice must be blind. Whether someone receives it or not should not depend on the fact of whether or not he or she serves in the military rather than in other workplaces. We know the chilling facts, that according to the Department of Defense's own Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 50 percent of female victims state they did not report the crime in the first place because they believed nothing would be done, and one-quarter or 25 percent who received unwanted sexual contact indicated the offender was in their chain of command.

In my view, we strengthen our military when victims of sexual assault have the confidence to come forward and to report crimes and when we remove fear and stigma from the process.

We strengthen our military when we are able to deliver fair and impartial justice on behalf of victims.

When we know the military chain of command in this one area is failing, we should not continue to tolerate an exception we would not make in other settings. I came to this decision with great reluctance, recognizing as many in my family have, that the importance of the chain of command, the importance of respecting the unique and different traditions and structures of the military is something that we should only come to with great hesitation.

One of the responsibilities of serving in the Senate that I take seriously is my annual responsibility to review and approve candidates for the military academies who are selected by my independent military academy advisory board, and personally calling the top candidates to inform them that they will be the ones--of the dozens and dozens of highly qualified competitors, they will be the ones selected to go to the Merchant Marine Academy, the Air Force Academy; to Annapolis, the United States Naval Academy, or to the U.S. Military Academy, to West Point.

This is a moving experience each of the 3 years I have had the chance to do this. But this past year, the three top candidates for West Point, for Annapolis or for the Air Force Academy were all women--impressive, compelling, determined to serve our Nation.

Meeting with them and their families, the nervous and proud parents of these confident cadet candidates is also a great annual experience. It reminds me always of my responsibility to them. I promised their parents that we will support and respect them and their service. When we speak to the cadets and thank them for their willingness to serve, I am reminded we have a responsibility to not send them into an institution where they will face threats that we can and should address.

I believe I have a responsibility to send them into an institution I know is well equipped to respond strongly and swiftly to threats to their safety. Yet, today, I am not able to uphold that responsibility because we have not protected our men and women in uniform from sexual assault.

I thought of my picks for the service academies when I heard another Senator say to General Dempsey that the Senator would not advise a parent to encourage his or her daughter to join the military. What made this decision difficult for me to join Senator Gillibrand on this particular amendment was an unfortunate, tragic case.

Last spring while I was trying to decide which path to follow on this bill, my office received a gut-wrenching call from the father of a young woman serving honorably in our military. He was calling against his daughter's wishes, and only as a desperate last resort.

She had been the victim of sexual assault and, as so many others, reported it to her commanding officer up the chain of command. As so many others, her case went nowhere. Her by-the-book reporting and patient waiting for results was met with delays, excuses, and nonresponse. Ultimately, during these repeated delays, she was physically assaulted after she had warned leadership she feared for her safety.

We took action and, ultimately in this instance, justice was done. A chain of command such as that isn't strengthening unit cohesion and morale, it is harming it.

After this particularly troubling case, I made a decision to join Senator Gillibrand as a cosponsor, to say to all of us, how can we accept this? How can this situation that has gone on for years be tolerated? How can we justify the status quo?

I am grateful for the leadership of the many Senators on the Armed Services Committee and throughout this body who have taken real steps to add significant improvements to the UCMJ and to the code that underlies our military and the requirements for leadership in the service to take on and tackle these very real problems of sexual assault in the military.

In my view, taking decisions out of the chain of command should only be done under the most serious of circumstances, but that is exactly what we have. We wouldn't find justice if this was the way that any other workplace in America operated. How can we argue that we have justice today for these thousands of victims in our military? The men and women who dedicate themselves to keeping us safe and protecting our rights deserve equal dedication on our part to their safety and to those same rights.

I wish to speak about three bills I am offering as amendments to the NDAA that all relate to a topic I have spoken to many times on the floor, to manufacturing and manufacturing jobs.

The first is the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, a bill I introduced last week with Illinois Senator Mark Kirk. It enjoys the support of the Presiding Officer, as well as Senator Blunt and Senator Stabenow. It is a simple but important objective, to require the creation of a national manufacturing strategy.

We need to know our country's direction as we try to support the growth in manufacturing. We have grown more than half a million manufacturing jobs in the last 3 years, an encouraging sign, but one we need to strengthen and support with a coordinated strategy between the Federal Government, State governments, and private sector to align all our investments in research and development, new skills, and new infrastructure, to make sure they are all heading in the right direction. Our leading competitors all have successful and well-deployed national manufacturing strategies. Whether Germany, China, India, South Africa, or Russia, they have all thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and prominently successful strategies, which we lack.

Our amendment would require that every 4 years the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 different folks, pull together and think through, research, and then deliver a national manufacturing strategy.

This amendment is bipartisan, simple, does not cost the Federal Government a dime and doesn't create a new program, Like the next two amendments I will speak about, it is a commonsense measure that I hope we will adopt.

Secondly, I wish to speak to an amendment I am cosponsoring with Congressman BLUNT to ensure small businesses are not subject to conflicting guidance from Federal agencies.

In the 1970s Congress passed a measure for the Small Business Administration to ensure that small businesses that get contracts from the government aren't actually fronts for much larger companies.

Last year we passed similar but distinctly different rules for the Department of Defense. Most of the time these two sets of rules can peaceably coexist, but in a few cases they come into conflict, creating significant compliance difficulties for very small business. This amendment would say that when both sets of rules apply to a small business contract, the SBA rules would apply, while DOD rules would not.

This amendment is bipartisan, has no cost, and will help small businesses focus on effectively delivering products and services without worrying about compliance.

Last, I wish to speak about an amendment I am cosponsoring with Senator Booker of New Jersey to ensure that our defense and intelligence communities maintain their vital technological edge. This is an important measure that would create more opportunities to train America's best talent and pave the way to new innovations.

Recently, the commission on R&D in the U.S. Intelligence Committee reviewed our current and future R&D capacity to support our intelligence community's vital work. Their unclassified report shows, in fact, that we have insufficient funding and a critical deficiency of human capital, of skilled workers, and the cutting-edge thinkers we need in this area. Specifically, for one example it said we may not have the kind and number of people we need to build the next generation of satellites to gather and process the intelligence upon which our national security relies.

There is currently a program run by the Department of Defense designed to address one element of this problem. It is called the Science, Mathematics & Research for Transformation Scholarship Program, or the SMART Scholarship Program. This amendment calls on the Secretary of Defense to report back to Congress on two things: Whether the SMART Scholarship Program, or similar fellowship and scholarship programs, are, in fact, providing the necessary number of undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math to meet the recommendations of the commission's report, and to recommend how those programs can be concretely improved. Those amendments have already passed the House of Representatives by a voice vote and would be an important if small step toward paving the way toward job creation and ensuring our national security now and into the future.

I urge my colleagues to support these amendments.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate on these important issues.

I yield the floor.

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