NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 1997
(Senate - July 10, 1996)
Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I regret that the Senate again has produced a bill that is gravely flawed. It suffers from many of the defects associated with last year's bill. I voted to favorably report the bill out of committee in the hope that the bill would be improved when it was considered on the floor. While agreement was reached to eliminate unacceptable missile defense provisions from the bill, the bill remains fundamentally flawed. As a consequence, I will vote against its final passage.
With respect to missile defense, I am pleased with the agreement announced by the majority leader on June 28th to drop sections 231 and 232 from the bill. These sections related to U.S. compliance policy for the development, testing, and deployment of theater missile defense systems, and to the demarcation between theater and strategic missile systems. I am also grateful to see that the language in the bill in section 233 with respect to the mutilateralization of the ABM Treaty has been dropped and converted into a sense of the Senate.
I understand full well, however, that we will soon be back on the floor debating many of these same ill-advised proposals placed in another bill. I intend to speak in more detail about those proposals at the appropriate time. For now, I would just like to restate my conviction that it would ill serve the interests of our country--and surely not the interests of our taxpayers--to follow the misguided missile defense plan that the majority appears determined to pursue in the weeks ahead. As far as I am concerned, the missile defense language I cited above would have made for bad law if enacted on this bill--simply moving this language into another bill will not change this basic quality of the proposal.
The bill contains more than $11 billion in unrequested funding with huge increases in the procurement and research and development accounts. For the most part, these additions are based on the Services' so-called wish list--lists of programs the Services would like to see funded if additional funding were made available. I agree with some of the spending decisions, but I do not support this approach to defense budgeting. It undermines the objectives of Goldwater-Nichols by encouraging the submission of separate spending priorities for each service that are set without regard to our unified command structure's warfighting needs. Moreover, I cannot support the magnitude of the increase in funding especially when we are spending billions of dollars on programs we do not need now and some we may not need ever.
The additions in procurement include $750 million for the DDG-51 destroyer program, $701 million for the new attack submarine program, $351 million for the V-22 program, $249 million for the C-17 program, $240 million for the E8-B program, $234 million for the F/A-18 C/D program, $204 million for the C-130J program, $183 million for the Apache longbow program, $158.4 million for the Kiowa warrior
program, $147 million for the MLRS program and $107 million for the F-16 program.
The additions in research and development include the $885 million for missile defense programs to which I already alluded, $100 million plus-ups for the Comanche Program and Army Force XXI, $305 million for the national defense sealift fund, $147 million for the Arsenal Ship and $116 for advanced submarine technology.
The bill contains more than $600 million in unrequested military construction projects, an annual temptation that Members cannot seem to resist, even though there is no compelling reason to move these projects forward. I think it is particularly damning that at least $200 million of these projects not only did not make the initial cut of the budget request but also did not make the second cut of the services' wish lists. We are authorizing an additional $600 million in military construction projects just so Members can say that they have brought home the bacon.
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