Howard P. "Buck" McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First of all, I want to join the chairman in thanking him for the working relationship that he and I have enjoyed now through 4 years and four national defense authorization acts. It is one of the main principles of our committee in that it is bipartisan, that we work together, and we produce a product every year--52 straight years, the National Defense Authorization Act.

That doesn't happen as a starting point, unless the chair of the committee takes the responsibility very seriously to make sure that our committee remains bipartisan. We have had a whole series of chairmen during my tenure who have done that, and Mr. McKeon has followed that tradition just as well as his predecessors. He has worked very closely with us.

We do not always agree, but we work closely together, understanding that, at the end of the day, we have to produce a bill. So I thank him for that, and I recognize that this will be his last NDAA. In fact, this is the Buck McKeon National Defense Authorization Act. Mr. Thornberry and I were proud to cosponsor the amendment in committee to name this after Buck, for his great service to our committee.

As always, I also want to thank the staff. I can't thank them enough for the work that they do and for the hours that they put in. They spent yesterday going through 320 amendments.

Their expertise that they bring to this process is invaluable, and someday, I hope that the House Administration Committee recognizes that and actually gives us the amount of money we need to keep them. That is just a little sidenote on a different piece of legislation.

This is, by and large, a good bill with one significant problem, which I will get to in a minute.

First of all, as the chairman notes, we are still at war in Afghanistan. I would say that I think, at this point, our continuing commitment to Afghanistan is up to the Afghan people and, most importantly, is up to the next Afghan President. We need the bilateral security agreement to be signed. It has been agreed to.

President Karzai has refused to sign it, but hopefully, the next President will. We have troops in harm's way, and this bill prioritizes protecting them. Nothing is more important than what we do here today.

I am also pleased that this bill prioritizes Special Operations Command and cyber warfare, recognizing, as we heard in the previous piece of legislation about Boko Haram, that the main threat that we face going forward is from terrorism and asymmetric threats.

I think we reflect that in this bill by funding those portions in the Defense Department that deal with those issues, and I think that is incredibly important.

However, we do have a budget problem, and put simply, we have a lot less money now than we thought we were going to have. So that means that 3 years ago, when the Pentagon was planning what they were going to spend over the course of a decade, they had a much larger number than they have now.

There are a whole bunch of reasons that number has gotten smaller, but it has. It will get even smaller if 8 more years of sequestration come to pass.

Now, the administration put out a plan 3 years ago when they looked out 10 years and said: What should our strategy be? Then they looked out 10 years and said: What are the likely resources?

When they put that plan out, they said: we know we are going to have to live with, roughly, $500 billion less than we thought we were. We can do it. Here is the strategy. Here is the plan that fits that.

Since then, the budget has been shredded. It has been cut by even more. The plan they put forward now recognizes the fact that it doesn't fund what they would like to fund because Congress passed a budget that cuts the Defense Department by more than they would like. In fact, the administration asked for an additional $28 billion this year and an additional $150 billion over 5 years, in order to fully fund that.

That, apparently, is not forthcoming, so what they did is they put forward a series of proposals to try as best as they could to save money in a way that protects our force, and they did it in a number of different areas.

They proposed a BRAC; they proposed about $2 billion in savings over 5 years to various personnel accounts; they got rid of the A-10; they got rid of the U-2; they proposed laying up 14 ships. Those were the main proposals out.

I am sorry. I forgot that they proposed shifting air assets in the Guard and Reserve to save $12 billion over 5 years. Those were the proposals they put on the table.

The problem with this bill is that it rejects every single one of those proposals. How do we make the money work on that? Primarily by creative accounting; with the Guard and Reserve, for instance, we say no changes can be made in 2015.

They weren't planning on making any changes in 2015 that were going to cost money, but if this stops them from doing it going forward, they are put into a deep hole.

On the 14 ships that they wanted to lay up, we raid the modernization account to pay for keeping those 14 ships operational. So we get creative about it, but next year, the reckoning will come, frankly, sequestration or no sequestration. If sequestration happens, it is going to be really bad; but even if it doesn't, we still will not have addressed the long-term needs of our budget.

I will have a couple of amendments, one on BRAC and one on those 14 ships, that will give us an opportunity to, I think, make a better choice because the other way that we are able to preserve those programs is that we cut from the President's budget about $1.8 billion in readiness.

$1.2 billion is clear. The other 633 was to save the A-10, and it comes out of OCO. A good chunk of OCO goes to rebuild readiness; so basically, we take $1.8 billion out of readiness, which puts us down the path to a hollow force that none of us wants. As we go forward to conference, we are going to need to make some of those tougher choices.

I do thank the chairman for his work and for what is contained in this bill. I look forward to debating the amendments, and I look forward to--knock on wood--passing for the 53rd straight year the National Defense Authorization Act, as is our primary responsibility.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I just want to again thank the chairman for his leadership and thank all of the folks who have done so much hard work in pulling this bill together.

I will make two other quick points. One, to sort of reemphasize, we have heard a couple of times that this bill makes the tough choices. I can't see one at this point. You know, we have sort of dodged and bobbed and weaved. Some of that I actually support. Some of it made sense.

One of the issues that we have to wrestle with on the committee is how do we preserve the industrial base? When you are talking about making submarines or tanks or jet fighters, if you don't keep making them, you can't say, well, we are going to shut it down for 3 years and then we are going to start making them again, because that workforce is gone, the plants are gone. Those decisions do have to be made.

I just think at this point, on balance, in this instance, every single hard choice that the administration laid out on compensation--I know health care is difficult. I think that the men and women who serve in our military should have the best health care while they are serving and after of anyone in this country, and they will. But there is an important statistic.

In 1996, your average servicemember paid 27 percent of the cost of his or her health care. This year, that number is 10 percent. Why? Because health care costs went through the ceiling, but we didn't raise a single penny in costs for anyone serving in the military. Is that sustainable?

They also make cuts in some of the subsidies for the commissaries, subsidies for housing. They looked for places where they could save some money. Again, no BRAC. Again, the A-10 we keep. The ships we keep. I understand those decisions, but they are building up an awful bellwether.

And the final thing I will say is that I will again bring my amendment on closing Guantanamo Bay. The one thing we are slowly learning is that as we, fortunately, get fewer and fewer inmates in Guantanamo, it becomes more and more expensive to maintain what was supposed to be a temporary facility. Aside from all the arguments about how the international community feels about Guantanamo, arguments that President George W. Bush made when he said he supported closing Guantanamo, it is the sheer cost of maintaining that prison in such an obscure place. So I will again offer that amendment, and again we will have a robust debate on it.

But the one point I want to make on that amendment--we have heard people say, well, gosh, we can't release these people in the United States. We are not going to release them in the United States. We are going to lock them up, as we currently lock up over 300 terrorists, countless mass murderers, and some of the worst, most violent people this country knows. They are locked up in secure facilities. We can do the same with the dangerous inmates who remain at Guantanamo. But keeping Guantanamo open is not intelligent, both in terms of cost and in terms of our standing in the international community.

With that, I look forward to seeing how many of those 320 amendments the Rules Committee is going to throw at us, and I look forward to a robust debate starting this evening into the next couple of days.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Reserving the right to object, I just want to talk for a moment or two. I hear all that, and I am happy to have the amendment withdrawn. I think this is a bad idea from our side of the aisle. I have talked to a lot of people in the military, and they are deeply concerned about the notion of allowing people to be armed on base at all times. The command structure issues that you mentioned and the rights that are given up, this is something that we would strongly oppose.

I just want to make sure for the Record a colloquy doesn't put something in conference, okay? I don't know what the Senate is going to do. There is nothing in our bill on this. If there is nothing in the Senate bill, it ain't in conference. So, if you want to withdraw it and keep working on the Senate, that is fine. I just want to make sure that we don't have some record here that thinks that, with this colloquy, it makes this a conference issue.

The Acting CHAIR. Does the gentleman from Washington withdraw his reservation?

PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, point of parliamentary inquiry, a colloquy does not put an issue in a position to be in conference, does it? It has to be in either the House or the Senate bill?

The Acting CHAIR. That is a matter for debate.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. All right. Well, if the purpose is to withdraw the amendment, I will withdraw my reservation of objection.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I am very sympathetic to the problem. This is certainly something that the Afghan Government should not be doing. As I understand the amendment, however, this would require the U.S. Government to reimburse those private companies and then seek reimbursement from the Afghan Government.

At the end of the day, that is the problem and concern that we have on our side is that if we want to take all the deliberate steps that we can to try and require the Afghans to repay this money, that is great--I can see the little gathering of staff over there that disagrees with me, so maybe we will have to work on this. But as I understand it, if that reimbursement cannot be achieved from the Afghan Government, this would require the U.S. Government, the U.S. taxpayers to reimburse these companies. For that reason, I would be opposed unless someone can convince me otherwise.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time.

The problems are there in the drafting of this amendment. Yes, first it does ask for the Afghan Government to step up and find money and do this; but if they don't, it does put DOD in the position of reimbursing them. You can say that would just come from money that they would give to Afghanistan anyway, but that money they are giving to Afghanistan, I am not sure if that is true, first of all. Second of all, whatever money we are giving Afghanistan, we are giving it to them for a reason. So I think there is a problem here.

There is also the problem of do we have a list of these contractors who have been illegally taxed versus legally taxed? How do we sort through all of that?

I am not going to belabor the point. I am going to oppose the amendment. I know how this works. I am going to lose. We will work it out in conference. I do have serious concerns about this amendment and the way it is written and urge a ``no'' vote.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I strongly oppose this amendment. It really doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

What the bill does is it says you can't touch these things since until 2021. Now, we don't like that in the first place because this is micromanaging, again, DOD's ability to make decisions about how best to make sure that we maintain our nuclear deterrence. This is a fine example of why DOD is going to be in so much trouble down the road. Any effort they make to save money is going to be blocked by parochial interest. The people who are from there will rise up and say: No, you can't do that, basically because it negatively impacts my constituents.

The thing that is truly awful about this one is it doesn't negatively impact constituents. It says 2021 sunset. And it is not a hard stop date, regrettably. It is 2021 when it sunsets, and any Congress that wants to extend it between now and, I guess that is 7 years from now, can go ahead and extend it.

DOD should not be forced into a position of saying if a silo exists it has to be maintained forever, which is basically what this amendment says. It says it is completely impossible that under any set of circumstances might it be in the best interest of the Department of Defense and the national security of this Nation to get rid of even one silo. That doesn't make any sense.

The underlying bill more than protects the parochial interests of the sponsors here by making sure that DOD can't touch it until 2021. But that is not enough. They have got to offer an amendment to strip it out so that it goes on forever. That simply doesn't make any sense. This is, again, micromanaging for parochial interests. It is just like when DOD wants to move five C-130s from somewhere. The people from there rise up and say we have to stop them. No, we don't. We have to let DOD make intelligent decisions to spend money wisely to best protect national security. At a minimum, we ought to be able to have a sunset 7 years from now without having to remove even that tiny little possibility that a sensible decision might be allowed to be made by the Department of Defense.

I urge opposition of the amendment.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, there are a lot of competing interests for public lands. Certainly, national security is one of them, but it is not the only one. There is domestic aviation, and there are all kinds of considerations.

This is not terribly binding, as it is a sense of Congress, and so it does not change the law. I do, however, think it sets a bad precedent that, somehow, the Department of Defense is going to hold sway over public lands over all of their interests, regardless of what they are.

We have had many, many interests in our public lands. Certainly, defense is one of them. I don't think it should be paramount. Therefore, I oppose the amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

It sort of depends on why the Forest Service wants to limit that use. If there are other legitimate interests in the area and if the Forest Service doesn't want them test-firing whatever it is they are test-firing, I think we need to have a balance between those interests.

It is conceivable that the Forest Service might have something they are trying to protect that the DOD has not thought about, and I think a balance of those interests is better than making one agency paramount over others.

The Forest Service does not know much about the Department of Defense, but I would submit that the Department of Defense doesn't know much about what the Forest Service is trying to protect. It is a matter of both sides doing their jobs and striking the proper balance, so I would simply urge a ``no'' vote.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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