Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the long and committed service of Lieutenant Colonel James Weiland to the Illinois Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, CAP. It was in April 1956 that Jim joined the CAP as a cadet and through his high school years he attained the rank of cadet captain. He then served his country in the U.S. Air Force for 3 years before joining the CAP as a senior member.

During his service as a member of the Illinois Wing, Lt. Col. Weiland held several leadership positions including Group Commander, Cadet Program Development Officer Wing Director of Cadets. Prior to these challenges he served with distinction as Wing Assistant Director as well as Communications, Licensing and Radio Maintenance Officer. These challenges led to his being named CAP Communicator of the Year in 2008.

Beyond these significant accomplishments, Lt. Col. Weiland will again distinguish himself at the conclusion of the July 26, 2008, Illinois Wing Summer Encampment making this the 60th summer encampment he has attended since 1956. Since his first, Jim has missed only 1 year but served at two different encampments from 1962 through 1968. Through these many years Jim has led cadets as Encampment Commander 3 times, Deputy Commander 6 times, Financial Officer 44 times and Tactical Officer 6 times. These leadership roles have led him to eight different CAP encampment sites within the Illinois patron area. While these leadership positions were ample commitment alone, Jim also helped out with other responsibilities such as serving the encampment's communications and many administrative needs.

It is my honor, Madam Speaker, to recognize Lt. Col. Weiland's long service, unselfish dedication and hard work in support of the Civil Air Patrol and the Illinois Wing Encampment Program for nearly five decades. It can be said of this truly committed patriot, the Civil Air Patrol and many fine young cadets can all be said to have benefited tremendously from the distinguished commitment of Lt. Col. James Weiland.

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I'm ready to give him more time with that wonderful introduction, one that I don't deserve. But I thank the gentleman.

I asked Mr. King to let me take a little time from his time tonight to talk about a couple of wonderful individuals. The first person I would like to mention is, of course, a lady who has been a wonderful representative from my office for many years in Imperial County, which was a big part of my congressional district for many years, and that's Carole Starr. And Carole Starr, when I got my congressional district moved out to Imperial County from San Diego County and went literally all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Colorado River to Arizona, taking in the entire Mexican-California border, I found that I had a brand new constituency. It's a lot like the gentleman's from Iowa.

I had a large farming constituency, a community in Imperial County with people of great character and people with lots of issues that were vastly different than the issues of folks who live in San Diego, but also people with a wonderful sense of patriotism. In that big valley, Imperial Valley, we had the Naval Air Facility where the Blue Angels train in the wintertime, and where we now have one of the best training grounds of any location in the United States. We're adjacent to the big Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range, and an airplane or a group coming from any part of the United States to train can get up there and train 365 days a year in that good desert air.

We also have that wonderful farming constituency, probably the most productive land in the world, acre-for-acre, under irrigation from the Colorado River. It's a place where we have lots of people with great character. And communities like Brawley and El Centro and Calexico and Imperial and lots of other wonderful communities in Imperial County.

Running that entire county for our office was a wonderful lady named Carole Starr. I lost the Valley a few years ago, Imperial Valley, in redistricting, but Carole Starr was such a fantastic person, and today is quite ill, she's under the weather right now and is home resting in Imperial County with a very difficult ailment. But I just thought it would be important to take the floor and talk about Carole for a minute because she was such a big part of our operation in Imperial County and such a wonderful leader in that county.

You know, I had a pretty full office in San Diego County and usually seven or eight folks there in the office. Carole Starr ran the Imperial County office all by herself, and whether you were a person of means in Imperial County, or if you just hitchhiked in and just came in off of the freeway off-ramp, you could walk into our congressional office in Imperial Valley Airport in Imperial and knock on that door, and Carole Starr would greet with you with a smile and say, ``How can I be of service to you?''

And Carole weathered all these very difficult issues that we had, from the carnal bunt disease that took down our green crop one year, to the myriad problems with the Colorado River, the desalinization plant there at Yuma, the ongoing water struggles that always engulfed California politics, and of course, all of the day-to-day work that you find in any congressional office where you have folks that need to get that Social Security check or make sure that they get that particular veterans' service or have some help with the IRS.

Anybody could walk in Carole Starr's door, and they would be greeted with great professionalism, a warm smile, and a ``How can I help you'' attitude, and I always called Carole Starr the ``Star of the Valley.''

And you know, over the years, Mr. Speaker, when I would visit Imperial Valley with my family, and especially my two boys, Duncan and Sam, Sam started out when we got Imperial County. Really, he had just been born. He was a brand new baby, and over the years, he grew, and one of the things that we did many times when we were in Imperial Valley was we would always match up Carole, who stood about five three, with Sam. And Carole always wanted to see how fast he was growing and try to estimate when he would surpass her height.

I know one time, back when Dick Cheney came to Imperial County to work with me on some of the desert issues, and Carole Starr would always do a back-to-back with my son Sam to see how much he had grown over the last month or so. And on that occasion--and that was about, oh, I don't know, about 1992 or 1994--in fact, my son Sam Hunter at that point surpassed Carole Starr in height, and of course, he's been growing ever since. He's now about six two.

But Carole Starr was just a warm, wonderful person who had a trademark of directness and honesty and good will. And today, she lies quite stricken by a very severe ailment, and I just hope that God will hold her in the palm of his hand and take care of her and give comfort to her family because Carole Starr represented the very best of our outreach to our community.

And I know every Member of this body has several dimensions to their service. One dimension is what we do here on the House floor and what we do with respect to legislation and bills and the administration, whether it's Democrat or Republican. But the other dimension is how we relate to our constituents in our district, and just like the gentleman from Iowa, we all have about 700,000 folks in our district. And some of them have real pressing problems, and in some cases, we are the last resort for those constituents who have been to Federal agencies and have been turned down or stiff-armed or have no other options, and they come to us.

And sometimes we're able to help them, but we're only able to help them when we have great, wonderful people serving us in our district offices, and Carole Starr, who ran the entire Imperial County--and I called her the ``Star of the Desert'' because she truly was one of those people with a great, great heart and great professionalism.

Mr. Speaker, I'd also like to mention a couple of other individuals who are very important to me, and I know we've got lots of people retiring this year. We've got a lot of folks that have served here for many years. I just want to mention a couple of people, Jimmy Saxton and Terry Everett, two great personal friends and two great servants of this country on the House Armed Services Committee are, in fact, retiring.

You know, Jimmy Saxton came in, I believe it was in 1982 when he came into office, and I remember he replaced Ed Forsythe. In fact, when he went in to get the obligatory picture taken with then-President Ronald Reagan when he was a candidate for Congress, Ed Forsythe had passed away. And he was that well-known Congressman who had a butch haircut, and he wore a bow tie and was quite well-known on Capitol Hill.

And when Jimmy Saxton walked up to Ronald Reagan and said I'm running for Ed Forsythe's seat, Ronald Reagan, not having read the Washington Post all that much, said ``Go get him,'' and of course, Jimmy Saxton said, ``I can't do that, he's a decedent, and I'm running for the open seat.''

But Jimmy Saxton started a career in which he represented his Third District in New Jersey so ably, and he worked on environmental matters. He worked on local issues, and he protected those important military bases and gave them their best shot at surviving base closure, which he did very effectively, I might add, and he helped to bring the New Jersey back to New Jersey, that great battleship.

But I think Jimmy's most important work was done in the Armed Services Committee, in that committee and on the House floor. He chaired that very important Subcommittee on Terrorism. He traveled around the world. Every time you found two Green Berets or Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, Jimmy Saxton was there talking to them, learning what they needed, learning about operations, and then making a difference when we marked up the Defense bill.

And Jimmy Saxton will be sorely missed. He's now the ranking member on the Air and Land Forces Subcommittee that makes important decisions. To Chairman Abercrombie, he's the ranking member, and he of course is still the Jimmy Saxton of great diligence who puts in lots of hours, working these important issues.

And I'm going to miss Jimmy Saxton. He's one of those great public servants who gives so much more to this country than he gets, and he likes it that way.

And he's got a little bit of a back ailment right now. I think that's because he was probably the only guy in the history of New Jersey athletics who was about a 5-foot-9 shot-putter, held the State shot put record as a high schooler, weighing a whopping 160 pounds. And maybe Jimmy Saxton started out at six two or six three, but right now he's got a little bit of an ailing back because of that great prowess that he had with the shot put.

Jimmy Saxton is just a great, wonderful person, and he's helped to make the Special Operations that is now so important to war fighting and especially important to the war on terror, to make our Special Operations effective and to make it not only a leading command in many of the theaters, a command that is to be supported by the combatant commanders in those particular theaters, but also a supporting force when it's necessary.

And the way the Special Operations has laminated and integrated and worked with the line units in our war-fighting theaters has been a real part of the success of the American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of that was due to Jimmy Saxton. He is a guy who can look at an issue, without becoming parochial and without becoming polarized, get all the information and try to make a wise decision, using that great judgment.

And so I'm going to miss Jimmy Saxton, and more than that, I think this is country going to miss him.

You know, the other guy I'd like to talk about just briefly is Terry Everett. Here's a guy who came from a working background, went to work for a newspaper, was a writer and editor and, finally, a publisher and an owner of a little string of newspapers in Alabama and then ran for Congress and got elected. And Terry Everett is another one of those guys who, like Jimmy Saxton, has gone right to the heart of national security.

And as the chairman of the Strategic Subcommittee, and also a member of the Armed Services Committee who's on the Intelligence Committee, he has a unique understanding of the importance of space assets and what we have to do with space assets to maintain our economy and our security. And there's probably very few people, if anybody else, in the Congress who understands space as well as Terry Everett.

Terry Everett's not a guy you will find making speeches. He's always the guy with the shortest remarks at the press conference when he attends a press conference. But when you close the doors, when you're working on the Intel Committee or the Armed Services Committee, or a combination of issues that affect both those committees, he's one of the hardest working guys that you will ever see.

It's guys like Terry Everett that make this country's security apparatus run so well. They don't put out a lot of press releases, but they put out a lot of hard work.

And also, Terry's got that great sense of being able to work with people, gain their trust, find out what the issues are, and then work to resolve those issues. That's so important when you work with lots of intelligence officers, when you work with the Special Operations Command, when you work with the space command, and you have to not only do that but you've got to serve the people back home.

And Terry also, incidentally, is a master woodworker. I remember I was in his little woodworking studio there at his house in Alabama, and I was going to ask Terry if I could work on

some cabinets in his woodworking studio. And he said sure, and I looked down and there were some spots of blood on the floor. I said, ``What's that?'' He said, ``Well, that's just where I cut my hand kind of badly with that machine over there.'' He said, ``I leave that blood there just to remind me to be careful.'' I haven't completed my woodworking course with Terry Everett, but I look forward to that.

So, Mr. Speaker, those are a couple of great individuals who have really made their mark in this House, and they're going to be leaving us. We're sorry to see them go.

And incidentally, another guy who's done a great job on this committee, Rob Andrews from New Jersey, also. Great, great, wonderful individual, often was really a center of bipartisan cooperation on important issues. And you know, we'd be sometimes polarizing on the Armed Services Committee, with a Democrat position and Republican position. Most of the time we're bipartisan, but then we'd start to polarize. We'd all kind of wait to listen to Rob Andrews because he would look at the issue on the merits. And sometimes he'd come down on one side and sometimes he'd come down on the other, but you knew that his position was always a result of reason and was not necessarily a result of looking over and kind of counting the votes and trying to figure out where his team was going or where the other team was going.

We need folks like that in these difficult, partisan times to bring us together, find that common ground and move the country forward. And I always thought Rob was the very representative of that style that is so important to the success of this House.

So, Mr. Speaker, thanks for letting me take this time. It's always fun to come down and take a big bite out of somebody else's time, and I want to thank the gentleman from Iowa for letting me take some of his minutes here. I really appreciate it.

And the gentleman from Iowa, incidentally, is a very wonderful friend and a great colleague and a guy who really has been working this energy issue with great energy and was a wonderful host to those of us who spent our time in Iowa in that Presidential race, including those of us like myself who had rather short-lived campaigns. The gentleman from Iowa was always there, always gracious, always willing to put a group together, and helped to create that great forum that is Iowa politics. I want to thank the gentleman.

And I want to thank him, also, for his great help on the border fence, a very important issue. And he helped to push this bill that we finally got passed in 2006. We got a mandate to build 854 miles of double-border fence, got watered down a little bit by the other body, but we're still constructing. And we've got projects now in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. And the gentleman did a lot of work to make sure that happens.

So I want to thank him.

I thank you, and let me tell you, the State Fair in Iowa was wonderful. It was also wonderfully hot. That was a good little scorcher, the State Fair, but man, you had a tremendous State Fair. I've never seen one like it.

So I just want to thank you and all of the wonderful people of Iowa. The great thing about them, they'll always listen to you and they'll let you make your point. And they very much, I think, treasure the fact that they're one of the first primaries in the Nation. And where they point this thing has a lot to do with the final nominations for both parties.

It was a lot of fun. And let me tell you, campaigning in a State where you get to go to a lot of State fairs is not a bad deal. We had a great, great time in Iowa. And also going to the county fairs in the various counties. And I will say that in some counties there's a lot of road between fairs. But the gentleman takes that in stride.

I thank the gentleman. Thanks a lot for letting me take that time to talk about Carole Starr and Terry Everett and Jimmy Saxton.

I rise, Mr. Speaker, to talk about duty, honor, and country.

Many times, Members of this great body rise to talk about those who wear the uniform of the United States who have fallen in the Iraq or the Afghanistan theater and to recount their actions and to recount their mission and to praise their motive and their patriotism and their love of this great country.

I rise tonight, Mr. Speaker, to talk about an American who was killed on the 24th of this month, not wearing the uniform of the United States in the military service, even though he had served in the military for some 31 years, but who was killed in a deadly area in Iraq as an American contractor, an American who had worked as a contractor for the Department of Defense and then the Department of State, Steven Farley.

Steven Farley represented the very best of this country, and I have a picture here, Mr. Speaker, that I'd like to show the Members. This is him in his Navy uniform. Before he donned this Navy uniform and finished a career of 31 years in the U.S. military, he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

He was a man of service, and when he left his wonderful wife, Donna, and his family to go to Iraq, he told them that he understood that this was a difficult and dangerous mission. He worked on a provincial reconstruction team, and I think he represented a forgotten segment of this great effort, this effort to bring the sunlight of freedom to Iraq.

He represented those people that don't wear the uniform in this operation but who wear contractor uniforms, who go out into very dangerous places in Iraq. And in this case, Steven Farley was with three colleagues, working the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. He was in Sadr City, that adjunct to Baghdad that has over 1 million people in an area of great fighting and great turmoil and great danger. And yet when he came home to see his loved ones, he told them he knew that he was in danger. He knew that it might, at some point, cost him his life, but he told them that he thought the cause was a worthwhile cause.

His service to America represented all those wonderful aspects of duty and honor and country and patriotism, even though he wasn't wearing the uniform of the Army or the Marine Corps or the Air Force or the Navy, because he was serving that same goal, that same ideal, that same flag, and all of us.

Mr. Speaker, he came home a few weeks before, bringing some of the members of the city council of Sadr City to the United States to let them see what freedom was like, what this great experiment in freedom called the United States of America was like, to inspire them, to give them a model they could go back and use in this

fledgling representative government that is now taking place in Iraq.

He wanted to show them the American example, and Mr. Speaker, his example and the example of his family and the example of his great community, a guy from Guthrie, Oklahoma, it was the finest example that anybody can watch if they indeed want to model their country, their community, their town after a winning democracy, the United States of America.

So here was a gentleman who served in a very, very crucial area for the United States, and most of the work that we do here in the House of Representatives, most of our work is air-conditioned. I'm so proud of the members of the Armed Services Committee, most of whom have taken multiple trips to see the troops and the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we now and again go out and put our boots on the ground in some tough places, but most of the time, we're in Washington, D.C., or with our constituent cities and our wonderful communities. These Americans, Americans like Steven Farley, are out there for years on end in very difficult conditions, carrying the American flag.

So, Mr. Speaker, a number of us on the Armed Services Committee are going to be visiting Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming months, especially the summer months, when we take the district work period break. I will tell you one thing I'm going to do. When I go to Baghdad this time, I'm going to spend more time with those contractors, people who haven't necessarily been given all of the credit that they should be given by this body, by the House of Representatives. People talk about the contractors as if they were somehow mercenaries.

Well, Steven Farley represented the very best of this very wonderful force of Americans who help to establish freedom around the world. May he rest in peace. God bless his family, and thank you, Steven Farley, for your service to the United States.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor and pay tribute to the life and memory of a true American hero, John Rodger Barnes. John was a long-time resident of Southern California and passed away at his Indian Hills home on February 15, 2008.

John attended schools in Mansfield and briefly studied law at Boston University. It was there in Mansfield that he met and married his lifelong companion, Alice T. Barnes of Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1940. The young couple began their family at their home on a small farm there in Mansfield. When World War II began, John was working at Harvard University and in 1943 he joined the U.S. Navy, later serving in the Pacific Theater with the Navy Seabees. It was there on the island of Saipan, at Leyte, and later in the Philippines that he distinguished himself in fierce battle earning several medals for valor including six Bronze Battle Stars.

He also participated in battles at Tinian, the Lingayen Gulf, Luzon and Okinawa Island and was on a ship anchored near Japan when the order to drop the first atomic bomb was issued. Following the war, John returned to his Mansfield farm until 1950 when he and Alice moved with their 5 children to Patrick Air Force Base, Florida.

In 1959, John moved his family to Southern California but later joined the Chrysler Corporation as a leader in its tool and die operation. Following his retirement there he and Alice moved back to Southern California and lived at the Galleano Winery in Mira Loma until her death in 1997. The majority of his retirement was spent in Southern California where he continued to enjoy his good health, reading many fine books, watching the birds and squirrels, and penning scores of editorial letters to several local papers.

John was survived by his children Barry, David Harding, Doreen Elizabeth, and Ellen Judith, his brothers Sam and Peter and sisters Rosalee and Margot. His son John Rodgers and siblings Clarence, Jane, David and Thomas all preceded him in death.

The success of his children and grandchildren always gave John great pride often saying that they ``did well because I didn't interfere.'' A highly decorated combat veteran, a talented and distinguished technician and a loving and caring father, John imparted his values and virtues on his large and wonderful family, the several communities he served and the many precious lives he touched so gently. He will be truly missed by all so fortunate to have been touched by his kindness.

Madam Speaker, I want to let all of my colleagues know that, as most of them already do, that tomorrow is the United States Open, the great U.S. Open, the great tradition in golf competition. And it is going to be held at Torrey Pines in San Diego.

I thought this might be an appropriate time to pay tribute to those great golfers who have come to the San Diego area, and especially to talk about the dean of golf in San Diego, that great champion who won two U.S. opens, Billy Casper. We have had a number of great champions out of San Diego.

Madam Speaker, there is a line that connects Billy Casper and Phil Mickelson, who is one of the top contenders. He is going to be playing tomorrow. He is a great U.S. Open competitor who has been runner-up four times. He said the other day, I think it was on the Golf Channel, that he loves the U.S. Open. So far the U.S. Open hasn't loved him. But he follows a succession of great golfers out of San Diego.

We had ``Gene the Machine,'' Gene Littler, who won the U.S. Open in 1961; the great Mickey Wright, possibly the greatest woman golfer of all time, who won, I believe, four LPGA championships; Craig Stadler, who while he didn't win the U.S. Open, won the Masters; the great Paul Runyan, ``Little Poison,'' who at one point, even though he was outdriven about 100 yards on every drive by Sam Snead at the PGA Championships back in the thirties beat the Great Snead 8 and 7 by being so good around the greens; and of course the great Scott Simpson who won the U.S. Open in 1987. And that leads me to the guy who won the U.S. Open two times, really the dean of golf in San Diego, California, the great Billy Casper.

Madam Speaker, people don't understand how great Billy Casper was and is. He won 51 professional tournaments. During the heyday of the big three, that was Palmer, Player and Nicklaus, that period between 1964 and 1970 when those three golfers were winning a combined 35 victories, Billy Casper by himself was winning 23 victories, more than Palmer or Player combined and three more than Jack Nicklaus. In fact, I think it was the great Jack Nicklaus who said at one point that it should have been the big four.

Billy Casper is a guy who had the greatest Ryder Cup record in the history of American golfers and the best come-from-behind win in a U.S. Open championship in our history. And let me tell you just a little bit about that. It was 1966 at Olympic Golf Course in San Francisco. Billy Casper walked up to the tee on the last nine, the back nine of the last 18 holes of the last day of the U.S. Open. He walked up to the tee seven shots behind the great Arnold Palmer in his prime. And after he had finished that nine holes, he had shot a 32, he had tied Palmer who was only three over par on the back nine, and with a seven-shot lead, you ought to be able to win the U.S. Olympic with the 37 on the last nine. But he tied him, caught him by seven strokes in the last nine holes. And the next day, the great Billy Casper won the playoff against Arnold Palmer with a 69. That is the great Billy Casper, one of the great Americans of all time, one of the great athletes and golfers of all time, and our dean of golf in San Diego.

I want to recognize my friend, Danny Burton who, while he is very modest, is a great athlete. He was the high school champion in Indiana, a guy we have all looked up to and a guy who also has some memories of his own about some of these U.S. Open champions.

I would like to yield to my friend from Indiana.

Let me ask my friend, Dan Burton, a lot of people have criticized Phil Mickelson because he is kind of a go-for-broke player. And they often say, as in some of the shots that he took in some of the closing holes in some of the majors, that Phil Mickelson didn't play the odds, that he didn't hit the safe shot. He went for the go-for- broke shot. And in some cases, it didn't work out. I kind of like that. Because that is really what we go to the golf course to see.

I thank the gentleman. And I will just say that it is a great day for Billy Casper, a great day for Phil Mickelson tomorrow, and a great day for the U.S. Open and all of our past champions.

I thank the gentleman.

Madam Speaker, I submit the following:

Requesting Member: Congressman Duncan Hunter.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658.

Account: Shipbuilding & Conversion, Navy.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: PMS 450, Virginia Class Submarine Program.

Address of Requesting Entity: Washington Navy Yard, Washington, D.C.

Description of Request: Adds $422 million in additional advanced procurement funding for the VIRGINIA Class submarine program. The Navy has a projected shortfall of 7 attack submarines beginning in fiscal year 2028. The provision of advanced procurement in fiscal year 2009 would allow the Navy to accelerate procurement of 2 submarines per year beginning in fiscal year 2010, potentially decreasing the shortfall to 6 SSNs.

Requesting Member: Congressman Duncan Hunter.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658.

Account: Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Fund.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Sierra Nevada.

Address of Requesting Entity: Hagerstown, MD.

Description of Request: Provide $50 million for the rapid fielding of additional Aerial Reconnaissance Multi-Sensor Platforms for tactical operations in OIF and OEF.

Requesting Member: Congressman Duncan Hunter.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658.

Account: Research, Development, Test & Evaluation, Navy.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: L-3 Communications, San Diego, CA; MBDA, Los Angeles, CA; Raytheon, Tucson, AZ; Boeing, St, Louis, MO.

Description of Request: The Affordable Weapons System (AWS) program is an advanced technology initiative to design, develop, and produce an affordable precision guided weapon. Phase II to begin September 2008 will study best material approach, conops and system architecture refinement, and a comprehensive risk assessment leading to a preferred system concept with a flyaway cost of less than $250 thousand. The results from the Phase I and Phase II study will support the development of an ICD leading to a new start program in 2010 with a 2016 first article delivery. An additional $15 million will support the Phase II contracts.

Requesting Member: Congressman Duncan Hunter.

Bill Number: H.R. 5658.

Account: Research, Development, Test & Evaluation, Navy.

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: L-3 Communications.

Address of Requesting Entity: 9925 Carroll Canyon Road; San Diego,

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my great friend from Washington for his kind remarks, and also thank the Rules Committee and the gentleman from California for his work on this bill too.

We have had a great opening session on the Armed Services bill. Our chairman, Mr. Skelton, who brought this bill up and brought it through the committee with a unanimous vote, I think is to be greatly commended. But let me register my objection to the Rules Committee's determination that one of the amendments that I had offered was not made in order, and that is the amendment that goes to the so-called tanker deal.

Let me just explain to my colleagues that this tanker deal involves hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The Air Force has determined that the European competitor has won the tanker contest. This buy could ultimately be in excess of some $30 billion, so there are enormous numbers of American jobs at stake.

As we went through the markup process, the Members on both sides indicated that they didn't want to try to pass something that would in some way prejudice the GAO protest which is being undertaken right now. But let me tell you as a guy who has looked at the industrial base and the fact that big pieces of our industrial base are moving offshore at a rapid rate, at some point that is going to affect our ability to defend this country.

This is a huge deal. It is a huge transfer of high-paying aerospace jobs, basically a massive economic stimulus package for Europe. Even with the 58 percent of the tanker work that is stated by the European company will be built in the United States, that still is 42 percent of the work that will not be built in the United States, and that is compared to the American company, which does about an 85-15 split.

Now Cap Weinberger talked about this formula that he used, that for every $1 billion you create of defense spending, you create 30,000 jobs. That means that the number of jobs at stake here, the difference between going with the European competitor or the American competitor, is well over 100,000 American high-paying aerospace jobs.

All my amendment said was this: It said that no matter who won, 85 percent of the work had to be done in the United States. That is important to keep our industrial base intact. For those folks that like the European competitor and the American company that was marrying up with it, that is Northrop Grumman, a great company that would be building the European aircraft, that would have been good for them, because they would then, instead of having 58 percent of the work done in the United States, they would have had, if my amendment had been offered and passed, that would have allowed them to get 85 percent of the work done in the United States.

That would have meant jobs for the American workers, and it would have meant that we kept a lot of that talent pool, that industrial base capability, in the United States. This would have been a huge win for American workers and it would not have prejudiced the present GAO protest that is underway right now.

So I am disappointed that this amendment was not allowed, and I hope at some point down the line the Democrat leadership will allow us to put this amendment up, which will help American workers, help the industrial base, and help to secure the defense of the United States.

Would the gentleman yield?

We've obviously cleared this on our side, and we totally support the distinguished gentleman from Missouri's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I would yield to myself such time as I might consume.

I would simply say that this is an important amendment and one that I support strongly, and I think most of the members of the committee support strongly.

This is a joint effort. It's not just a DOD effort, when we discussed the two warfighting theaters and the standing up of a government that will be an ally of the United States and will have a modicum of democracy. It's important to have the other agencies that are so critical to this effort, to the coordination of this effort, that is, the Department of State and the USAID administrator, to be involved to ensure that we do have coordination and cooperation.

At this time, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to yield to Mr. Forbes, the gentleman from Virginia, 3 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, we have one more speaker who I think is on his way. So if the gentleman from Missouri has another speaker, if we could pass and see if we can get our other speaker down here.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).

Mr. Chairman, at this time, I yield back the balance of my time unless the gentleman from Missouri needs it. I would yield it to his side.

Mr. Chairman, my speaker did just arrive. If I could impose on the gentleman, he is ready to go.

I would ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to retrieve my time.

Mr. Chairman, I would yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Chairman, I just want to say that the gentleman from Tennessee had it right in that the chairman has been a prime mover in forcing jointness with the military services. And it's only appropriate that, because this is an effort that requires other agencies, besides DOD, that we have a mechanism to get them together, move them together in a true jointness. I want to commend the chairman for his authorship of this.

At this point, Mr. Chairman, we have no more requests for time on this side. Unless the gentleman needs our time, I yield back our time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana, distinguished ranking member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee (Mr. Buyer).

(Mr. BUYER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, we have no more speakers, and we would yield back the balance of our time.

I thank my great colleague for yielding to me.

My friends, this is the age of missiles. The people that we listen to so carefully in our hearings are the combatant commanders. Those are the guys who are in charge of running military operations in the case of an attack on the United States or a military operation or a contingency.

Our combatant commanders have reported to us that we are short missile defense. Specifically, they have said that we should nearly double the inventory of THAAD and Aegis Standard Missile Interceptors. And I quote from Admiral Keating. He said increased inventories are needed, and he goes through these short-range BMD systems that are so key to countering this emerging threat, like the one that is coming from North Korea, like the Shahab-3 being developed now by Iran, and by the increasing short-range and medium-range ballistic missile inventories around the world.

This is crucial to the survival of our troops in theater and to the survival of the United States in wars that are going to occur in the future, and in the least we should listen to the combatant commanders and plus these inventories up. That is what the gentleman from Arizona's amendment does, and I would recommend it to all Members.

Vote ``yes'' on Franks.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I yield myself 3 minutes.

My colleagues, we are in a race against those who would build offensive missiles and in fact have built missiles.

I remember, I think it was 1987 when members of this committee, the Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to the leadership of Israel, and we said this--and I know this because I drafted that letter. We said, at some point in the future--and this was 1987, before the Gulf War. We said, you will be attacked at some point in the future by probably Russian-made missiles coming from a neighboring country. And even though you could defend against an aircraft attack, just as you did in the Bekaa Valley with your F-16s, you will not be able to stop a single incoming ballistic missile coming into Israel.

A few years later in the Gulf War, we saw just that. In fact, we saw ballistic missiles kill Americans. Some of them were shot down by deployed Patriots, but we saw missiles coming into Israel totally unprotected. We saw people being rushed to the hospital not from the effects of the missiles, but because they were so afraid that poison gas would be on the head of those missiles launched by Saddam Hussein, that many people went into the hospital with heart problems.

We are in a race, my friends, my colleagues, and we have seen the manifestations of that race on the other side. We have seen those TD-2s and those NoDong missiles and SCUD missiles launched by the North Koreans that fell into the Sea of Japan, the TD-2 having the ability now to reach some parts of the United States. We have seen the tests of the Iranian Shahab-3s. We have seen now the complicity of North Korea and Syria in developing nuclear weapons capability, which was stopped short by a strike that was made by our allies. We know that that throat through which the Iranian missiles might one day travel going into

Western Europe could be defended by the missile sites that we have now proposed to be established in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

We are in a race. Our combatant commanders tell us that we need to double the number of THAAD missiles and Aegis missiles. Incidentally, those sea-based missile system are testing out very, very well. We have had a series of successes.

The idea that we cut back on this one massive area of vulnerability, that we cut back on defenses against this massive area of vulnerability--and for my friends that said we want to use this money for quality of life for our troops, ladies and gentleman, I am the father of one of our marines who has been deployed, and let me tell you quality of life. It is when that family that is sitting there in Pendleton or in Savannah, Georgia, or at Fort Bragg or in Camp Lejeune knows that their family member, their servicemember is not going to be vulnerable to a short-range or ballistic missile attack. That gives you quality of life, because that gives you assurance that they are going to be able to survive that very, very real threat which is now being developed.

This is a misplaced amendment, and I would urge everyone to vote against it.

Mr. Chairman, I yield at this time to the gentlelady from California (Mrs. Tauscher), the chairman of the Strategic Subcommittee, 3 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield to a gentleman who's leaving us this year, but the guy who has accomplished so much in confidential briefings and sessions in which you analyze our space systems and our missile systems, and a guy who hasn't been elbowing his way into press conferences, but who does enormous work for the people of this House and for the people of this Nation, the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Everett). I would like to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman. He's the ranking member on Strategic.

How much time do we have left, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. Chairman, I started off by talking about that letter that the Armed Services Committee, Democrats and Republicans, sent to Israel in 1987 telling them that at some point in the future they would be attacked by ballistic missiles coming from a neighboring nation, probably Russian-made missiles, and that was a prophetic letter because in the Gulf War they were attacked. And I described some of the effects. Even though there wasn't poison gas on those missiles, they had an incredible effect, a traumatic effect on the citizens of Israel.

You know, we could have written a letter to ourselves and to our own leadership and the administration at that time and said, at some point ballistic missiles will be launched at the United States.

I don't take much comfort from Mr. Tierney's statement that he only wants to stop the funding of long-range missile defense systems, not short-range missile defense systems. We've had a series of successes with our long-range missile defense systems. We've had these collisions 148 miles above the surface of the Earth, the interceptor and the target missile both going about three times the speed of a .30-06 bullet. And because of the incredible dedication of our scientists and our engineers, we've been able to achieve some successes with these long-range missile defense systems.

The facts are, you have to defend against all types, against short- range, medium-range and long-range. And you have to try to get as many shots as you can at these missiles. If you can get them when they're taking off, if you can get them in the ascent phase, if you can get them in mid course, then you don't put as much pressure on that terminal missile defense system when they're coming in to American cities.

We are in a race, Mr. Chairman. And I would just remind my colleagues that the TD-2 missile, which was tested by the North Koreans, has the ability, according to some of our scientists, to reach parts of the United States of America. And our intelligence people tell us that Iran, it is estimated, will have, by 2015, the capability with ICBMs to reach parts of the United States of America.

Just in time is a concept for building products in our domestic economy. You get the steel just in time to build the car so that you don't have a big inventory of steel piling up. That saves you money. You're not paying interest on it. You get the tires just in time to put them on.

Just in time missile defenses is not a very good idea. We, in my estimation, we are behind the clock. And Mr. Tierney's amendment is a gutting amendment. We should vote ``no'' on this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman for bringing this amendment, and we lament the fact that our nuclear warheads are getting older, that we don't have a testing regime in place any longer and that that necessarily deteriorates the reliability factor. So the idea was let's build a reliable replacement warhead, and the fact that we haven't proceeded down that path is really a tragedy.

Now, I know the gentleman has $10 million in this amendment for this Reliable Replacement Warhead. He takes some money from the energy conservation program, which has many, many good aspects. I know that some Members are torn between these two important goals, one of developing energy

conservation on military bases, and the other developing this warhead.

I come down, Mr. Chairman, on the side of ensuring that this critical asset, which is a very, very important part of America's security apparatus, that is, a reliable strategic deterrent, I come down on that side. As a result of that, I support Mr. Pearce's amendment very strongly.

I rise in opposition to the amendment, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, Mr. Chairman, I want to congratulate Mr. Boren who is a great member of the Armed Services Committee for bringing this amendment, and I think we recognize a real problem with section 526, which is really a section, and his amendment does take away some of the onus of section 526.

Section 526 really weds us to high-grade Middle Eastern oil. It says that if you come up with other types of fuel that are alternatives, but that might have a greenhouse gas footprint higher than this high-end Middle Eastern oil, and there are very few types of petroleum-based fuels which do that, you can't use it.

Mr. Boren has taken some of the onus off of that by saying that if it's not predominantly that type of oil, meaning you can use, for example, tar sands from Canada and other types, that section 526 does not apply.

Now, the problem is, I'm reading the last of the amendment, and one of the conditions is that the contracts under which this petroleum product would flow says the contract--and I'm quoting from the last of the amendment--the contract does not provide incentives for a refinery upgrade or expansion to allow a refinery to use or increase its use of fuel from a nonconventional petroleum source.

And I think we should be doing everything we can to expand refineries. I don't think we've built a refinery in decades, and we all sat in this Chamber and watched gas prices go through the roof here not too long ago when they had just a couple of refineries down for repair.

So I know Mr. Boren's heart's in the right place, and he's brought us at least halfway across the river here. I guess what I'd like to see is the double Boren amendment that takes us all the way and eliminates section 526.

I congratulate the gentleman. I know a lot of our Members are going to probably support this because it, in fact, does take us part way home. I wish we could go all the way, and I thank the gentleman for his amendment.

I reluctantly oppose it because I would like to see the full loaf here.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield at this time 3 minutes to Mr. Upton, the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Chairman, I think we've had a good discussion, and I appreciate the gentleman's amendment and his contribution to the committee, and we would yield back at this time.

Would the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

You know, one aspect of this that I thought was troubling also was the fact that private contractors will have to disclose the amounts of money that their particular people make. That's going to go out, presumably, to others; competitors will see that. These aren't publicly held companies. I think that that's an intrusion we don't necessarily need to make.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reluctantly rise to oppose this amendment because of my great respect for the gentlewoman. But this Status of Forces Agreement is something that we've done now in over 80-some countries. And it's not a guarantee of security. It's not a guarantee of defense. It is not and should not be considered as a treaty. It is simply for the protection of American soldiers and American civilian personnel.

It sets out, for example, if you are sued, if you're charged with a criminal action, there has to be an agreement between the countries as to how people are treated, that is, how American personnel are treated, and under the agreement that Iraq has made with the United States.

Now, Secretary Gates has testified to us in the Armed Services Committee, and he has been asked about the SOFA, and he has said there are no security guarantees in this SOFA. We're going to have the same team that has done SOFAs, these Status of Forces Agreements, in many other countries, moving in to do the same Status of Forces Agreement that will go over the same types of things. And, again, this does not rise to the level of a treaty because this is not going to be an agreement with respect to security guarantees for Iraq. It will contain no security commitment, and it will not obligate force structure or troop strength or assure any other security guarantees.

So, Mr. Chairman, this is not a treaty. And I appreciate the gentlewoman's statements and her intent, and there may be at some point an agreement between Iraq and the United States that will be a treaty with respect to security commitments. This doesn't do it. What this does is protect American personnel. We need it and we need to negotiate it. We need to get it done. It's not a treaty, and we should not make it subject to ratification by Congress.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, once again, these Status of Forces Agreements, which are pretty run of the mill, do not manifest security commitments by the United States to protect the countries that they are made with. They talk about the treatment and describe the treatment of Americans with respect to getting licenses, licensing their vehicles, how they're going to be treated in cases of civil or criminal actions. Basically how the American who is in that particular foreign country, and again we have got 80 of them that we have done, how they are going to be treated by that host country.

Now, they are not security commitments, and if you have something that does, in fact, commit the United States to a security agreement with another country, and in this case Iraq, I have no dispute with my colleagues, that at that point you have a treaty, and a treaty, because it manifests commitments, has to be ratified.

But I don't understand why we are saying that the Status of Forces Agreement, which is going to talk about how our troops are treated in the same way that we talk about how American military personnel who are in Germany or Japan or 80 other countries are treated, how that now becomes something special because it's Iraq and, in the case of Iraq alone, we have to have a ratification by Congress.

I would reserve the balance of my time.

Once again, the gentlelady talked about a strategic framework agreement. That does manifest security commitments, and that does have to be ratified. But that is not the Status of Forces Agreement. The Status of Forces Agreement is simply about the treatment of American military personnel in that particular place. We are talking about two different things; one that has to be ratified and the other that doesn't. And I have heard no good argument as to why, of the 80 Status of Forces Agreements that we have around the world, why this one has to be ratified by Congress and none of the others have to be.

I reserve the balance of my time.

How much time do we have left, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. Chairman, I would just say to my colleagues, including the gentleman from Washington who spoke I think somewhat disparagingly of the President, this is part of the duties of an administration anywhere where you have American troops. You lay down rules of how they are going to be treated with respect to civil actions, criminal actions, licensing of vehicles, payment of taxes, all the things that affect a person who is now physically residing in that foreign country, whether it's an American civilian or a military guy who's stationed there. It's a necessary thing.

The idea that we are going to elevate this thing, which has been a fairly ministerial thing, to a treaty on the basis that the people who are speaking don't like the President doesn't make any sense. You know, when the Secretary of Defense comes in, testifies to our committee that there will be no commitments manifest in this particular SOFA with respect to security, he testifies to us to that effect, the idea that we say we are not going to believe him, and certain members of the other side don't like the President so they come down to say anything he does now has to be ratified by Congress, I think that disparages the process, Mr. Chairman.

We have got a fairly run-of-the-mill ministerial thing that we need to do and, once again, I say to my colleagues, this protects American personnel. The same team that has negotiated this with presumably dozens of countries and gone over the same ministerial stuff with respect to how people are treated in that country, will be talking to the Iraqi leadership and making that same negotiation on those same points.

So the idea that we now elevate this to a treaty; if a treaty is coming with this strategic framework, that does have to be ratified by Congress, and should be ratified by Congress. But let's not mix the two up. Let's protect our personnel and then let's move to this ratification or this decision of what any security commitments might be.

I would reserve the balance of my time.

Just one other point, and that is in the U.N. Security Council Resolution, under which our troops operate now, which provides for how they are treated in Iraq, expires in December. That is why we need to have a Status of Forces Agreement. If we don't have, and we now elevate this to a treaty, and Congress doesn't act on the treaty, they will lose their protection when the United Nations provision expires.

It doesn't make sense to put this onus on them, that somehow we are going to raise this thing to a treaty level and Congress, by golly, is going to have to now ratify it before we can decide how an E-5, a sergeant with a couple of stripes, living in Baghdad, how he is going to be treated with respect to the laws of that country. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

I think we ought to leave this thing alone. When we go to any treaties that actually manifest security commitments by the United States, certainly that has to be then ratified by Congress. This isn't one of them. It will be the 81st SOFA that we have had without requiring Congress to ratify it.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, first let me express my great respect for the gentleman who is offering this amendment. He does wonderful work on the committee and truly has a heart for those who have been impacted by the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On that point, I would say I remember the time we were in Fallujah and a young Marine captain came up to us with some language he had written. In fact, his name was Kevin Coughlin. He thinks he has traded up. He moved on to the FBI from the committee staff. But we were so impressed with the language he had written to protect translators that we brought him back with us and made him part of the HASC staff. He did leave us a ``Dear John'' note after he left to go to work for the FBI, but a great young Marine captain. And he felt the same way we had, which is that our translators needed to be protected.

We have a program which protects them. Now, the question here is, are we going to mandate employment for them? That is the way I read this particular legislation. I don't think that is the right way to go.

I think that, first, a lot of these folks have got great initiative. They are happy to be in a free country. If we have a program to help make sure they know of all the job opportunities that are available and perhaps help them with language, make sure that they are connected with folks that are recruiting our people who need those language talents, I think that is great.

But I think the idea, at least the way I read this thing, that there is mandated employment, I think that is

going a step far. I think it is something we haven't done for other folks. In this case we have taken people and their families who helped the United States and we have relocated them in the greatest country in the world with the freedom to travel all these new roads that they have never been able to travel before.

But I think, for one thing, that the idea of guaranteed employment, if they have got a lot of spirit and a lot of initiative, that is the first way to kill spirit and initiative, is to give a guaranteed lifetime job to someone. I think we ought to take these folks who have this great energy, they have obviously displayed a loyalty to the United States, help them hook up with these thousands and tens of thousands of employers, including those in the government, but not have a program that guarantees employment.

So I thank the gentleman for the spirit of his amendment.

I would reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode).

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the remarks of both Mr. Israel and the ranking member. I am just looking at the language, and it says ``shall offer employment.'' So it clearly says, if I was going to read that as an agency head, I would say that means I must hire these folks.

Again, this committee worked to make sure that they got over here, that they were protected and that their families were protected, and I am glad we did that. I will offer my small offices. We have had jobs fairs at Bethesda and Walter Reed for our returning wounded warriors where we bring people from industry and we bring people from the agencies and we try to get them together with our wounded vets who are returning and help them to match up and get jobs. I would be happy to do the same thing with respect to these interpreters. And, indeed, interpreters have special skills. This should be something that can be done.

The only thing I would object to is the mandated job. We don't offer that to our veterans. I just think that is a step a little bit too far. But I would be happy to work with the gentleman in terms of helping them to access jobs.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, we are in the middle of a war in which the battlefield situation changes on a daily

basis. The idea that the gentleman has given us a requirement for the administration to project until 2068, for 50, 60 years as to what is going to happen on the battlefield and what the casualties are going to be; and I believe he has laid out 23 considerations.

When you get out that far, Mr. Chairman, this becomes basically an editorial against the war, and I think there are other ways you can put that if you want to frame that particular position. But the idea that we are asking as we sit here and try to figure out what gas prices are going to be in 2 weeks, the idea that we are going to figure out how Iraq is going to be situated half a century from now, I think that is simply something that trivializes our debate on this very critical issue.

And let me tell you, 23 factors if we actually put this thing in law, the idea that we are supposed to have our people in uniform devoted to figuring out how to succeed in their mission, how to take care of our people, to have them out there trying to be seers of the future for half a century with respect to a war that is changing on a weekly basis is an enormous burden on people who wear the uniform.

So, Mr. Chairman, I think we should all vote a resounding ``no'' on this, and let's do analyses that are relevant, that can be utilized. But the idea of sending our people down the pike for a 50-year look at the future I think is not going to be good for this committee and I think it is not going to be productive for the security of the United States.

I reserve the balance of my time

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I yield to Mr. Castle, the gentleman from Delaware, 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentlelady from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito) 2 minutes.

Reserving the right to object, Madam Chairman, I will not object, except I want to talk to my friend about what he calls earmarks.

A couple of years ago when our guys started to get hurt with roadside bombs in Iraq, we realized that there were no jammers to jam those electronic signals that detonate the 155 rounds that were blowing up American Marines and soldiers, no portable jammers. That means while we had the big jammers we carry in the trucks to protect convoys, there were no jammers to protect that squad of Marines or soldiers working through a courtyard in Ramadi or Fallujah.

This committee put in $10 million for 10,000, jammers which we researched and developed, manufactured and deployed in the field in 70 days. Those were earmarks.

Now, if the gentleman's assertation is true, and the whole theme of his argument here is if the Pentagon doesn't request it, it's not needed, I disagree with it. This is what the Pentagon had for portable jammers for our troops: zero.

I can tell the gentleman about the system that we put in that has had a very salutary effect on the ability of the enemy to hurt our troops with mortars, also so-called earmarks. I can tell the gentleman about our surveillance programs that we added to, also so-called earmarks. I could tell the gentleman that I put in the defense budget a couple of years ago, along with my good friend Ike Skelton, an increase in U.S. Marine Corps, taking them up at that point to 180,000. Today nobody suggests that we should somehow discharge those Marines because we added them above and beyond the President's budget. In fact, the President now has come back and said, you know, you guys in the Armed Services Committee were right, and because of that, they put in a request this year for 7,000 more Army troops and 5,000 more Marines.

So I would just say to the gentleman it's our job, our responsibility under the Constitution, to build this defense budget. It's not the Pentagon's. In fact, the Constitution doesn't mention the Pentagon.

Now, what I do with the initiatives that I put in, I put them on the Internet. How's that for disclosure? I think at least a couple hundred people see that. Now, with respect to how many people see these, we put out the directive report language. Everybody sees that. But you mark up your subcommittees only a few days, sometimes as much as a week but rarely longer, before you go to full committee. And so the tables that have all of the numbers in them, and it's got hundreds and hundreds of entries, are available to any Member that wants to come by and ask for them. But we're not going to put those out to the press and cause a massive circus of contractors and media people swarming the committee when we're trying to get our job done. We have never done it like that.

But the disparaging way in which the gentleman talks about things that we put in, some of which are crucial to the survival of your constituents, the young men and women who joined the Marine Corps and the Army from your district, I think is misplaced.

The building of the defense budget is a very important thing. It's a thing that we do often in disagreement with the Pentagon. We have put in additional aircraft carriers when you had Presidents who didn't want to put them in because we thought they were important to the survival of this country, and we turned out to be right. We have increased end strength in the Army and Marine Corps. We have done most of the work on UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. That means you don't get pilots shot down. That means you're able to disperse many more platforms that can gather information.

The things that we put in the defense budget are generally done after a lot of thought, a lot of analysis and, generally speaking, they have been very good for our troops.

I'd be happy to yield.

We did authorize them.

Let me take back my time and explain to the gentleman why it's important to have report language. You start programs and you also put policies in place. If you put those in the bill and those are locked into law and then you get a call from the administration and they say, You know, we looked at this thing and there's not enough long-lead materials to build this. You are strait-jacketed. The administration can't come back and say, We want to reprogram. At that point, you have to change the law.

If you have a policy, and here you have wars in two theaters, if you have a policy you have to change, you can't just call up and you can't work the policy out with the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps. You now have to go back and change the law. If you have looked at the reprogramming requests that are made by the Pentagon, they are usually made with respect to some factor that has changed. You would have hundreds of changes that now require changes in the law, and in a very real way, having report language that gives flexibility to the administration, is for their benefit.

Now we can put all this stuff in the law if that is the requirement to do it. But it doesn't make sense, either for us or for the administration. That is why you have it, because you have changing situations and you have got to have the flexibility for people to call up and say, You know, we just developed another system that is better than that one. Let's not continue to fund that in a straitjacket. Let's go ahead and reprogram and go to the other one. Or maybe we have a priority. Maybe we need ammunition, maybe we need more ammunition. So we want you to take money from this program and put it into ammunition. You can't do that if everything is in statute.

Be happy to.

If you take the gentleman's argument to its ultimate conclusion, that means the portable jammers, the ones that only weigh a couple of pounds that we gave to our marines to save their lives so they can carry them, because you can't carry the 150-pounders on your back when you're on a patrol, they would not have gotten those because they weren't in the Pentagon's budget.

The point that I am making is that the Pentagon often misses things. They don't have always the best judgment in this world. I point to guys like the chairman of the Defense Appropriations in the full committee, Mr. Lewis, who, by many people, is considered one of the fathers of the Predator. The Predator aircraft has saved lives because it's allowed us to do recon and striking without having to have a pilot out there who may be shot down and have to be recovered. That was a program that required a lot of pushing against the will of the Pentagon.

So I disagree with the gentleman's argument that somehow anything the Pentagon disagrees with is illegitimate. We've had, in many cases, a better idea than the Pentagon, and the increases in the Army and Marine Corps are two of the great examples. This committee said you have to increase it, and we increased it. You call that an earmark. Today, the administration calls it the right thing to do.

Be happy to yield.

Let me just say to my friend, I believe in disclosure. That is why I put every initiative on the Internet. I think you have got to disclose things and you have got to be able to be accountable for those things. I think that's absolutely true.

That's right.

Sure.

Taking back my time, I don't think we are going to be appropriating any melting shirts, or authorizing any melting shirts. We do serious stuff. And when you have a defense bill which is over $500 billion and it has thousands and thousands of provisions in it, I would say that the number of changes we make actually is fairly minimal.

If you look at the massive amount of money that is spent on defense, the change that we make in scoping the defense bill, which is not only our prerogative, it's our mandate, it doesn't say: You shall accept and rubber-stamp what the Pentagon puts out there. And experience has shown us. And, thankfully, we have followed our mandate because we have put in systems that have saved lives, that the Pentagon didn't think about, and we have put in more systems that have made us more effective at fighting the Nation's war that the Pentagon didn't think about.

We have got members on the committee, I would say to my friend, who have taken five, six, seven, eight trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. They see things. They write down notes. We have our professional staff with us. We were out there looking at the Fourth Division and we saw some of their trucks whose armor consisted of two layers of plywood, with sandbags in between. That is why we went back and on an initiative we put together double-hulled trucks. To my knowledge, none of those double-hulled trucks has yet been penetrated by any enemy shrapnel from a roadside bomb. We do things in response to what we think the solders and sailors and airmen and marines need.

So I agree with the gentleman that we should all be accountable for what we put in a bill, whether it's a defense bill or something else, and you have got to stand up. If it's a bad one, you take the heat for it. But just saying anything that doesn't come out of the administration is, by definition, illegitimate, is absolutely not accurate.

I can just tell you this. If you end up with an administration that you don't agree with, like some Republicans who didn't agree with what President Carter did with defense spending in the last part of his term, when we put in, along with some pretty discerning Democrats, an extra aircraft carrier, and if you want to straitjacket this body, where a President that you don't agree with, who you feel is cutting defense spending to the bone, and maybe beyond the bone, where, as a rule, if he or she doesn't agree or doesn't put that out as a defense budget, you consider it your duty to not add a single cent, then I think we are putting ourselves in a position where we are disserving the people that we represent, because our job is to put together a defense budget.

Absolutely.

Taking my time back, I would just say to the gentleman, I put my initiatives, and I don't call them earmarks because I don't think they are illegitimate, I put them on the Internet. As I learned in my ill-fated national campaign, people aren't paying a lot of attention to my Internet site. But I had it there for millions of people to see. And I think that is the appropriate thing to do.

I just want to assure the gentleman of something so that he rests easy, to some degree. The people of this committee are really hardworking people. I think we have got one member who's been to Afghanistan and Iraq something like 13 times. I haven't been there that much, but I have been there a lot. They spend a ton of time working for the uniformed people of the United States. They make lots of notes and they do lots of analysis.

Let me tell you, the way you put together a defense budget is you have got somebody sitting in the Pentagon, and somebody comes over and sits next to him and says, You know, here's a system that the company I am working for would like to have in the defense budget. And they make a case for it.

None of this stuff is derived through a stainless process. We are all people. The only thing that really makes this government go is accountability, and people should be held accountable for the things that they put in the bill. The vast number of folks that put things in the defense bill put out press releases with respect to what they put in. They don't hide that. People put in provisions that have a value to the military. If you go down the line and analyze them, I think that you would concur with that.

So I want you to know this is a committee that really does its homework. It's got a great staff that works very hard, and we have done a lot of things that have saved soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines on the battlefield, who

would not have been saved if we just rubber-stamped the President's budget. I guess that is my point.

I thank the gentleman.

I withdraw my reservation.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chairman, I would just say to my colleague, I have great respect for him and I agree with the purpose of this amendment. I disagree to some degree with the offset, which is from missile defense. You may have heard a number of us here making the case for the importance of missile defense.

So I would hope as we move along to conference, we can find another offset for this. I do support very strongly your purpose. What I would like to do is find another offset for this.

Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Thornberry), who has been a member of the committee and also the Intelligence Committee.

Madam Chairman, let me go over the adequate safeguards that are currently in place. The contract must specify the interrogation support. All support must be in accordance with applicable law and policy. They must be trained and certified, in- theater training. They must be closely supervised and monitored. They will not oversee, direct or monitor interrogations. They operate only in fixed facilities. They must submit a written interrogation plan. And, lastly, they are subject to prosecution.

Let me say to my friend from Virginia and the author of this amendment, because they are both friends and I know their hearts are in the right place, I have observed one interrogation, one of the first times I have seen an interrogation. It was an older lady reading a children's book to a detainee.

I said, ``You gotta be kidding me.'' I expected all the classic stuff like we see in the movies. And our escort said, ``Are you kidding?'' They said, ``This lady is one of the most effective people we have, and she does extremely well.'' I believe she was a contractor. She sure as heck wasn't a uniformed service person.

Now, my point is that there is a lot of psychology, that there is a lot of art to this, there is a lot of human relations. And if you have prohibitions against coercive behavior, and we have got rows of those in all of our manuals, if you have got somebody that you can contract with who can walk into a room and walk out maybe 2 days later, maybe 8 days later, maybe 6 months later with information that will save the lives of your troops and advance the mission, who cares if that is an elderly lady who happens to be a civilian and may not want to join the Army?

I yield to my friend.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, I would just say to my colleagues that you do have to be certified, you do have to be trained, you have to be supervised, and you are subject to prosecution. So our special operators have laid down a pretty strict set of guidelines. And the last thing that I saw coming from the department was that this would severely hamper Special Operations' capability if it was passed.

Now, that may be because many of the things Mr. Thornberry talked about with respect to language, with respect to availability. I think we should respect what the warfighters say about this and get more information before we take a vote like this.

Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I am going to yield to Mr. Thornberry, but first let me just say this. I respect the gentleman who just made the statement who has been in Iraq. But my son was in Iraq, also, and on two missions, two tours, and Afghanistan. And one important fact that I think comes out when you talk to folks who have been there is the exigency of the battlefield. That is the

need to do things quickly, to be creative, to be able to move quickly to save the lives of your comrades and to carry out your mission.

Now, let's think about this. You have to videotape interrogations. What happens if you have got people coming in, moving in a pincer movement against a particular area, maybe some buildings, maybe you have got some machine gun fire, and you have been hitting IEDs, and you capture somebody and you have got people in movement. And you have to bring up then the video cameras to interrogate before you can have a successful interrogation. And what if you don't have video cameras? You are going to have people who are deterred from being able to do that because they are going to be worried that somehow they are going to be found in violation of the rules.

Now, we have got a letter here from the Under Secretary of Defense who says that the Defense Department very strongly opposes this requirement to video record all intelligence interrogations. They say: This requirement runs contrary to sound Defense Department policy, which relies upon careful selection and empowerment of the chain of command to execute the mission. Currently, commanders video record interrogations only after determining that the environment is conducive and the recordings will add value to the mission.

I might add that if you have interrogations, especially if you have got special operators who are out among the population and you lose one of the recordings, then you expose them to enormous risk.

So the idea of making this not discretionary and mandating it I think doesn't make a lot of sense.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman, and then I will yield to Mr. Thornberry.

I thank the gentleman for his answer. But if you have a situation where you are doing intel interrogations close to the battlefield, which you are in many places, a matter of minutes or hours could make the difference between life and death. And if you don't have video equipment available, which you wouldn't have in many of those cases, you could still have what I would call a disastrous result.

I yield such time as he might consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).

Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I want to yield very quickly to Dr. Gingrey. But first, we have that list, and any Member can go look at it but it is not made available to the public. And I think there is a safety issue here. I think there is a safety issue with respect to the families, the children, the wives of the folks that attend this particular institution.

And you know something else?

We applaud our military people regularly. We acknowledge that they're some of the most honorable of citizens. We trust them with the lives of our children and in battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And yet it seems like the amendments that come up show quite a bit of distrust. We don't trust our interrogators, so now we're going to videotape them as if they were stealing candy at a 7-Eleven because we don't trust them.

And here we don't trust these great military folks that run WHINSEC who, I think, are going to have a salutary effect on the leaders that come from other countries that come to this school.

Americans are the best. Our military people are often the very best ambassadors for this country. And the idea that we continue to try to close down the best ambassadors, so that the people who will offer schools to them are people like Hugo Chavez, I think that doesn't make a lot of sense.

So as much as I respect my colleague who is offering this amendment, I would hope that my colleagues would vote against it.

I would like to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Gingrey.

I yield an additional 2 minutes to the gentleman.

I yield the gentleman an additional minute.

Madam Chairman, I would like to yield at this time to another gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Westmoreland) 1\1/2\ minutes.

Madam Chairwoman, I would like to yield to Dr. Gingrey such time as we have left.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I have a lot of respect for the author of this amendment, and I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to keep a corporation from basically employing through a subsidiary American citizens who are not contributing to the tax withholdings.

Is that right?

I understand that.

The way it's drafted, it appears to me that it's a flat prohibition, and any organization with even one U.S. citizen might be precluded from using this business form, which I think is a far more anticompetitive approach than the gentleman might want.

My feeling is this, that if we approve this amendment, I would hope that the gentleman would work in conference to make sure that it's narrowed to this focus on making sure that these companies pay taxes and that it doesn't have some kind of exclusionary or unintended consequence.

Will the gentleman work with us in conference?

In that case, Madam Chairman, we do not object to this amendment.

Madam Chairman, I yield back.

Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chairman, I would like to recognize the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun) for 5 minutes.

How much time do we have?

I would yield myself such time as I might consume.

Madam Chairman and my colleagues, we have general officers, flag officers who go over to Iraq, Afghanistan just as they have gone to every war theater we've fought in. They talk to their colleagues. Their colleagues give them the facts as they see the facts. They come back. They repeat those facts, the ones that they concur in, and they draw conclusions.

Now, they do that on dozens and dozens of talk shows and other media outlets throughout the United States. Some of them are for the operation and some of them are against the operation.

The idea, and this sounds like something we might want to adopt for our campaigns because I've found myself falling prey to this now and again, thinking what my opponent said was propaganda, what I said was the absolute truth. But how about the General McCaffreys who come back, having talked to their friends in theater, and they come back and give their set of facts and they say, therefore, we don't think things are going well, as opposed to the general who goes over and talks to friends in the theater, some of them the very same people, and they come back and say our conclusion is that things are going well.

The idea that we take this great resource, and I understand this is directed at general officers who go over to the theater, come back, appear in the American media, and give their take on where they think this war is going. I think that's a great asset for this country, and I say that, even though I've appeared many times opposite general officers and flag officers who have the opposite opinion from mine. But it's a great resource to have people that have that background and are able to look at the situation and come back and give their opinion freely.

The idea that the people who agree with the operation over there are giving propaganda, but the generals who have come back and said that we think there is a problem with this operation, and there are quite a few of them, that somehow their point is right on and they are precisely accurate and they are serving the public, that's nonsense.

You've got to let your general officers go over, make an evaluation, come back, give that evaluation, and we get to cross-examine them in committee, as we often do. We'll have people on both sides who have seen the same wars and the same operations and come to different conclusions.

The idea that we are going to label the people we don't agree with propagandists and the ones that agree with us are philosophers and statesmen is kind of a zany idea.

Let's let all of our general officers, let's look at them as a great resource, whether they agree with us or not. I've always said that, even about the folks that come back and have a totally opposite view from mine. I've always said this is a great resource to have retired military people with a long background, who go over, have these insights, make an evaluation and come back and give us that evaluation.

Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, we've had it on both sides on the Afghanistan and the Iraq operations. We've seen guys like General Zinni come back and give a viewpoint totally opposite the administration. Yet I listen to that gentleman. I greatly respect him. I think he's got a lot of wisdom. I disagree with him in some cases.

But the idea that we call the people who disagree with us propagandists and the other ones great seers and statesmen and philosophers doesn't make any sense.

Let's let everybody come back and exercise the right to free speech, and let's not have any of these inhibiting amendments.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, how much time do we have remaining?

Madam Chairman, let me say this: I have always greatly respected the ability of our guys, this great resource that we have of flag officers--and nonflag officers, incidentally, NCOs and company grade officers--to go over to a warfighting theater and come back and bring you the news, whether it's good or bad. In fact, I've hosted forums in the Armed Services Committee when I brought in dissenting officers who would come back and tell us what they thought was wrong with the war because you've got to listen to it. If you're going to shape good policy, you've got to hear both sides to these things.

I would just say to my colleagues who say, well, these people were hosted; they came over and they were hosted. Listen, you have respected people like General Zinni and Barry McCaffrey and other respected leaders and generals, and they go over to a warfighting theater, you can bet that they are hosted by their colleagues that they grew up with in the military, fought alongside with, and that's absolutely appropriate. And you can bet that they were given transport and they got to look at the operations, they got to give their analysis. And you know something? That has value. I always want to see the guy that thinks that the operation isn't going well and listen to his remarks and his comments.

So the idea that we're going to label the guys who we don't agree with as having been ``propagandized'' and we're going to label the guys we agree with as being seers and prophets and truth tellers, that just doesn't work.

We've all been surprised. As you look at this array of general officers, often you'll say, I would have bet that that guy likes the operation. You talk to him and he says, ``no, I don't like it, I think we're there for the wrong reason, I don't think it's going to work.'' And the guy that you thought probably is not going to support it says, you know, I've seen this, this, this and this, and I agree with the operation.

You want to listen to all of them. And the idea that we're going to crunch down on them and also the idea that somehow Don Rumsfeld got these people in a room and told them what to say, if you believe that, you don't believe in the independence of these general officers. None of them are used to having people tell them what to say. They're independent. They're a source of information to us. They're a valuable resource. And we ought to respect all of them. We ought to urge them all to go to theater, come back with their remarks and their comments.

Absolutely. I would be happy to yield to my friend.

May I ask unanimous consent that he be given an additional 30 seconds.

Madam Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment.

I want to say that we've looked at this on our side, we think it makes sense, and we concur with it. I want to congratulate the two gentlemen who are the cosponsors of this particular amendment. We support it.

Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time unless they want to use some of the time on their side.

Would the gentleman yield?

If the gentleman will yield, and I'd hoped that Mr. Spratt would concur with this. It is important, I think, for the Members of this body, because the first thing we ask when we do intelligence briefings, we say, How far away is that Nation or those particular people from developing enough material or having enough of a program to build a weapon, a device, a nuclear weapon. So in commonsense language that is the question we ask.

So the gentleman has put the word milestones, as the gentleman from New York said, in this particular report. I would hope that we could define that as we go into conference in terms of material necessary to build a device, and to receive some specifics on that so that we don't have a vague question that the community may have a problem in determining precisely what we mean.

Mr. Speaker, we finished this defense bill today and we have got a couple of gentlemen who are retiring from public office. We have two gentlemen from the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Andrews and Mr. Udall, who are leaving the committee to run for the U.S. Senate, and I want to commend them and wish them the best. But we also have two gentlemen who are retiring from public office, and that is Mr. Jim Saxton and Mr. Terry Everett. I thought it would be proper at the end of this bill to talk about them because they are remarkable people.

Jimmy Saxton is a guy who probably has learned more about our Special Operations Forces and their needs than probably anybody else in Washington, D.C. He is the guy who is the chairman of the first Terrorism Subcommittee, which oversees Special Operations, whether it's our SEALs, our Rangers, our Special Forces, or others. He took it upon himself to learn everything that he possibly could so that he could go back to the committee and put together a defense bill that gave them what they needed.

Jimmy Saxton is a guy with a great heart. He is a lifelong friend of mine. We have been political allies and personal friends for many, many years. If you ask Jimmy Saxton for a favor, he just does it. He doesn't ponder it, he doesn't have to analyze it or calculate, he just does it. That is a wonderful quality to have in a good friend because you can get lots of them from them.

I have always made it a habit to exploit Jimmy Saxton for political favors because he is always there, ready to help. What a dear, wonderful friend Jimmy Saxton is.

Terry Everett, I have said this on several occasions, but this is a guy who is so critical to this country because he is a guy who shuns the limelight, shuns cameras, but works in closed rooms in classified session is in both the Intelligence Committee and the Armed Services Committee with that cross-pollenization of information and the right classifications and can see the right documents and the right information, that he is able to put together a coherent policy that will allow us to protect American interests in space, and by doing that, make sure we protect Americans who depend on space for our military eyes and our economic eyes.

Terry Everett is going to be hard to replace. In fact, I don't think you can replace him. He is also like Jim Saxton, a dear friend of mine. We have been political allies and personal friends, it seems forever, that great guy from Alabama. I went back to see his house one time that he built by himself, and when I walked into his woodworking shop, which is massive, and he has got more machinery than the average saw mill, I noticed there was some blood on the floor. It was dried blood. I said Terry, What is that? He said, Well, I almost cut my thumb off one time and I just left that blood there to remind myself to be safe.

Well, Terry Everett is one of those guys who's able to do all this great work for our country, working on space, working on missiles, working on missile defense, and also knowing the personalities, the people that populate the Pentagon and our intelligence agencies and Capitol Hill, and being able to weave all those people and all that technology together in a way that he has had such an impact on our national security.

So, like Jim Saxton, Terry Everett is going to be a man who is irreplaceable. Let me tell you, in my memory, both of these great Americans are irreplaceable for what they have done for their country and what their personal friendship has meant to me.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Current Resolution 355, 110th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until Tuesday, June 3, 2008, at 2 p.m.

I thank the gentleman. And I do want to say there is a gentleman here who's got more knowledge than I have on this defense bill, and he just spoke. I want to give my thanks to Chairman Skelton for doing a great job of putting together an excellent bill which passed unanimously out of the Armed Services Committee.

He followed very strongly what I call the two tracks that we're on. The first track is to provide for the warfighters in the theaters that are currently in progress in Afghanistan and Iraq and around the world, where we're fighting the global war against terror. We do so very well in this bill in terms of putting in lots of extra money for MRAPs, for force protection, for defense against mortars, against roadside bombs, and all the other things that are important aspects and dimensions of force protection.

Then we also provide for what I call over the horizon. That means that we've provided, with the very able chairmen of the subcommittees and the ranking members, for continued equipment buys in critical areas and put in extra money for submarines, which we will have low numbers in the next 5 to 10 years, but are a very important part of American leverage in foreign policy and a very important component of warfighting. Putting in extra money for C-17s, for that airlift that is so critical, for giving a good solid buy on F-22s this year and Joint Strike Fighter.

Also the report that I've received back from the Marines is that the first V-22s are now in theater in Iraq and that they're working very well. The Marines like that doubling of speeds that they now have over the CH-46 helicopters. That's accruing to their benefit in lots and lots of operations.

The chairman and the chairmen of the subcommittees and the ranking members I think have done a great job of filling out both tracks of both the near term and the long term in this bill.

I thank Mr. Skelton for his kind words. Let me tell you, one of the real blessings in serving in this body is to be able to serve with a great partner, whether you're the chairman or the ranking member. The chairman has done a wonderful job in putting this bill together. The man from Missouri is an outstanding leader in national security, and I applaud him for his great career.

I know we also have two members retiring, Mr. Saxton, who for many years chaired the Special Operations Subcommittee, very important subcommittee, is now ranking on Air Land. And Mr. Everett, who is ranking on Strategic. Jim Saxton, I have watched him go around the world visiting with our special operators, ensuring that they had what they needed.

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for his great service on the Armed Services Committee. You can trade up anytime you want to and come back off that old Rules Committee and come back to Armed Services.

But Mr. Saxton has done yeomen's work in providing for special operations, for operations that aren't given ticker-tape parades in which a number of people know about and are briefed on, but which are crucial to our Nation's security. Those men and women who serve in those very important positions in special operations can be thankful they had Jim Saxton over these years to be supportive of them. And he is still supportive of them in his job as ranking member to Mr. Abercrombie on Air Land.

Similarly, Mr. Everett has an insight and understanding of matters relating to space and missile defense that I think are matched by very few people in this country. And Terry Everett is the master of the closed briefing. He makes very few speeches. Terry Everett is not a guy you look to for long speeches, he's a guy you look to for hard work, for thoughtful analysis, and for doing the right thing when it comes to making sure that as we move into the next 5 to 10 years, we have what it takes in missile defense and in space to ensure America's security.

I want to applaud those retiring members of the committee and once again thank my chairman and all the members of the Armed Services Committee who make this such a great bipartisan committee.

I think we need to support this rule and move this great package down the road.

To my great friend, I don't deserve this honor that he has recommended here of naming the bill. I'm just an ordinary American, but I get to serve with lots of extraordinary Americans, and the gentleman from Missouri is one of those extraordinary Americans. He talked about the jointness that he's trying to bring over from his great work on the Goldwater-Nichols bill, of bringing our services together to act jointly, and extend that to the other agencies which are so crucial in this operation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to bring them in also in a way that they act as a member of the team led, most of the time, by the Department of Defense, but nonetheless, one that requires cohesion and jointness and a culture of working together as a team.

I want to commend the gentleman for the fact that he has been the corporate historian, if you will, for the House of Representatives and for the Armed Services Committee, who often brings us back in debate or in hearings to events that transpired in conflicts 100 years ago sometimes, or World War II or Korea or Vietnam, and reminds us that we shouldn't have to learn the lesson a second time. So I want to give my great thanks to this great American, Ike Skelton, and to all of the members of the great Armed Services Committee and the chairmen and ranking members of the subcommittees who put together such a great bill. A couple of them are sitting here next to me. I know Jim Saxton is leaving. He was the first chairman of the Special Operations Subcommittee, the Terrorism Subcommittee, and traveled the world and the country and every base where we had SOCOM people stationed, talking to the teams, talking, whether they were Green Berets or Rangers or SEALs or other operators, trying to understand what they needed from Congress in order to be effective. He worked to get them that equipment, and now, as the ranking member of Air, Land, he continues that mission.

And, of course, Terry Everett, that guy who doesn't make long speeches but spends a lot of time in classified sessions working and understanding on the issues surrounding space, and how those issues relate to national security. Probably nobody else in the country knows as much as he does on those issues.

And, of course, we've got a couple of members, as the chairman said, moving on to other offices, Rob Andrews and Mark Udall, and we wish them the very best.

Mr. Chairman, this is an excellent defense bill, and I concur with the gentleman from Missouri that we should have a unanimous vote in the House of Representatives, just as we had under his leadership in the Armed Services Committee.

It does a couple of things that are important for us. It works toward the warfighting theaters, which are very important, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places in the world where the global war on terror is taking place. But, at the same time, and in those, in that category, we put in extra money for MRAPs for these armored vehicles, for protection for our troops, for jammers, for all the things, for new surveillance capability, new anti-mortar capability, all the things that would go to force protection, and also make our troops more effective in those theaters.

But beyond that, we pay a lot of attention and put a great deal of focus on modernizing the military and looking over the horizon to challenges that may go far beyond the current theaters.

We continue to fund the F-22, which the reports now coming back from the operators are to the effect that the F-22 is doing extremely well, a high performance fighter aircraft with lots of capability, lots of legs, lots of firepower, but especially lots of sensor capability, which we're finding to be extremely valuable.

The V-22, which is this platform that the Marines wanted for years because it goes roughly twice as fast as the CH-46s that it's replacing, are working extremely well in theater. The Marines are getting from point A to point B in half the time. They're able to carry out their mission more efficiently and effectively. They like that particular platform. And across the board, we are replacing and modernizing our military equipment.

Now there are some things that we need to do in this bill, and I would hope we could do on the floor. We did cut some $300 million out of missile defense. Mr. Chairman, we live in an era of missiles. This is an era in which we will see, in the coming years, the Iranians continuing to improve on the Shahab missile classes, which already can reach parts of Europe, at some point will be able to reach all of Europe, and will be followed by missile classes that, at some point, will be able to reach the United States.

We also have seen North Korea throw a pod of missiles into the North China Sea, and the Sea of Japan; some of which have capability, if they put more sections on those missiles, ultimately, to reach American allies and the United States itself. So we're entering the middle of what I would call the era of missiles. And having defense against missiles is a key part of the American defense system.

We've had these wonderful successes where we've shot down missiles that are traveling, where the interceptor and the missile it shoots down 148 miles above the surface of the Earth are traveling roughly three times the speed of a 30-06 bullet, and we've had collisions in mid flight. We saw a great demonstration when we took down the rogue satellite that had to be destroyed to avoid possible collateral damage. We took that down with a sea-based missile system that worked very well.

We clearly are moving along in the right direction in trying to put up defenses as the offensive systems become more sophisticated. But I think we need to continue to move down that path.

We did cut money out of the European-based missile systems and other systems, and I would hope that we could restore some of the missile defense money in this particular bill. I know Mr. Franks will be offering that.

Similarly, the FCS program, I think, is an area we need to restore dollars. Mr. Chairman, we have a number of en bloc amendments and amendments that will be offered by members that I think will, in fact, make this bill even a little bit better than it is.

I want to finish by thanking the chairman for putting together a great bill in the Armed Services Committee, for moving it down the road very quickly, and getting it to the House floor.

This is the bill that provides our troops with the tools that they need to get the job done. And that's why it's important, that's why this committee acts in such a bipartisan fashion, and we follow the bipartisan model of the gentleman from Missouri, Ike Skelton.

I would reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the gentlelady in putting this bill together and recognize the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton) who, every time I talked to him over the last 4 or 5 years, he was meeting with a different group of special operators trying to figure out what they needed and where they needed to go and tireless in pouring himself into an airplane to get to yet another base and meet with more troops.

He's done a wonderful job as the ranking member of the Air and Land Subcommittee. We're going to miss the gentleman from New Jersey.

I would like to yield him 5 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland who is the ranking member on the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee, Mr. Bartlett.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman who just spoke for his great work on this bill, and I yield for 4 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama, who is the ranking member on the Strategic Subcommittee, formerly the chairman, and again a guy who has spent thousands of hours in closed-door sessions, with no press releases attached and no cameras present. He's a guy that's pretty easy to elbow out of the way at a press conference because he usually isn't there. But he has served countless hours in the service of this country, understanding some pretty complex things about space and national security, and he is the gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Terry Everett, and the country needs more people like this gentleman.

I yield the gentleman another minute.

I yield the gentleman an additional minute.

I want to thank the gentleman who chairs the Seapower Subcommittee for the great work that he has done and turn to another gentleman, the gentleman from New York (Mr. McHugh), who has served for many years, first as chairman, and then ranking member of this very important Personnel Subcommittee which oversees the policies of those 2.5 million Americans who serve in uniform. The gentleman from New York has done a great job, and I would like to yield 4 minutes to Mr. McHugh.

Mr. Chairman, I want to add my thanks to the great gentleman from Texas for his hard work.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to another gentleman from Texas (Mr. Thornberry), who has done a great job in working through the very difficult issues of the Terrorism Subcommittee.

Mr. Chairman, at this point I would like to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin), ranking member of Oversight.

Mr. Chairman, I want to add my thanks to the gentleman from Hawaii for his excellent work, and I want to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Forbes),

who is the ranking member of the Readiness Subcommittee.

Mr. Chairman, the last gentleman who spoke, I want to thank him for his kind words. But I am reminded that the chairman has been the guardian of professional military education and his work has been to try to make sure that our officers have a context in which they can place the activities in this very real war that many of them are engaged in in our history and to see situations that have gone before and to gain insights from that history, and I want to applaud the chairman for that.

I want to yield 3 minutes to another gentleman who has been a great worker on this committee and a leader, a guy who has moved over from the Rules Committee, finally traded up and got back to the Armed Services Committee, the gentleman from Georgia (Dr. Gingrey).

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman who just spoke for his kind remarks.

I want to yield 2 minutes to another gentleman who has come back from the Rules Committee, traded up to come back to the Armed Services Committee, the gentleman who has such a large set of military facilities in his district and pays so much attention to those facilities and to the national issue of security, the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Cole).

I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks).

Mr. Chairman, I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. Chairman, we have, I believe, no more speakers left, so at this time let me just say that our ranking members and our chairmen have covered the waterfront of what this bill does. They've taken it from personnel, the pay raise that the chairman started off talking about, the 3.9 percent pay raise, the end strength increases in the Army and Marine Corps, the quality of life increases that we've delivered to our people in uniform, to the equipment side, to the force protection that we are sending additional to Afghanistan and to Iraq, MRAPs, extra armor capability, extra technical capability to be able to defend our forces and help them accomplish the mission, to the modernization side, the platforms that we are building with the modernization part of this budget, to the readiness part of this budget, which is so critical to ongoing operations, and to some of the technical aspects of the budget that I think the Strategic Subcommittee spoke to so effectively, including the programs that involve space, involve missile defense. And so, Mr. Chairman, I think we've described the bill fairly effectively.

And I think also we've described the people. At least I want to make sure we understand how wonderful the people are who put this bill together, not only the ranking members and the chairmen of the subcommittee and our great chairman of the full committee, Ike Skelton, the man from Missouri, but also the wonderful staff that we have that's worked long hours to put together what is a very large bill, in many cases, very technical, and yet they did it with great precision, and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

Let me just say in my closing seconds here, Mr. Chairman, that I talked about the horizon that I think we face in terms of military challenges. I think that part of that horizon must require a focus on China. The fact that China is now outbuilding the U.S. in submarines by more than 3-1, with their acquisitions from the Russians, it's much more. They're acquiring great technical capability, and they are building an industrial base that, in many areas, such as building warships, could outstrip the United States very quickly in production.

And just as our great chairman mentioned, that it takes more than just a military to win wars and to carry out foreign policy, it's going to take some changes in policy to maintain the United States as a premier military force in the world. Some of those changes are going to require changes in our tax law, in our tariff law that will allow our industrial base to stay in the United States, that will stop these companies that are key to national security who are being advised right now by their financial advisors to move their production offshore, changes in our law that will cause them to stay in the United States, because the environment, the business environment in the United States and the tax environment will be such that they will not be induced to move offshore.

Also, with respect to the hemorrhage of technical information which is going on with the acquisition of American companies on a very selected basis by companies and by nations that are targeting American military technology. This committee has moved toward stopping that hemorrhage by adopting several important provisions with respect to security, site security at companies that do classified information. But there's much more work to be done there, and I know that the committee is moving in that direction and undertaking a great strides in that direction. But that's a direction that's going to require the participation of the entire body, Mr. Chairman, in fact, the entire government. So we have a big challenge ahead of us.

Again, I want to thank the chairman for putting together a bill that passed unanimously out of the Armed Services Committee, and should pass unanimously off the House floor. So once again, a job well done to the gentleman from Missouri.

I would yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I might consume.

Mr. Speaker, I join the gentlelady from San Diego, my seat mate, Mrs. Davis, in this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, the Bible tells us, greater love hath no man than he who lays down his life for a friend. Close behind are those who have served America in war, been captured, been held for long periods of time incommunicado sometimes, from their own colleagues in the particular prison or internment camp, and certainly from their loved ones back in the United States. Those who have to endure in this case, as our POWs did in Vietnam, beatings, brutality, harsh interrogations; and yet those Americans have, in most cases, come out of that furnace of incarceration strengthened.

Indeed, as the gentlelady has mentioned, Pete Peterson, John McCain and our own Sam Johnson, who serves with us today, are examples of Americans who endured great difficulty and great hardship, and yet were strengthened and were inspired and had a certain energy that propelled them into this body, and in other cases into the other body, into the U.S. Senate, and they became national leaders.

Mr. Speaker, James Michener wrote in his book, The Bridges at Toko- Ri, when the subject of that book, the hero, the guy who had flown off to hit those bridges again and again didn't return because he'd been shot down, in the book, the commander of that aircraft carrier walks out on the deck after it's clear that this pilot's not going to return, and he reflects and asks himself the question, where does America get such men? People who will join the military, who will get into these high performance aircraft, in the case of a Navy pilot, fly off a carrier, which is a little postage stamp floating at sea, go through enemy air defenses and in a very dangerous situation, hit the target and then try to find that small floating postage stamp once again to recover.

And of course the counterparts to those Navy pilots are Air Force pilots and Marine pilots who fly off that tarmac, and, in the case of North Vietnam, encountered new technology, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles which were extremely deadly, and knowing that if they didn't get back out to the ocean, where they could at least, if their plane was hit, where they could at least parachute into the ocean, they had a high likelihood of being captured. And again and again and again they got into those aircraft and undertook those missions.

Sam Johnson was one of those guys and was shot down on his 25th mission. As the gentlelady said, he earned in his service to our Nation two Silver Stars, three Legions of Merit, the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star with the V device. But he earned something more than that, and that's the gratitude of every American, certainly every Member of this body, and in a way he's very symbolic of this incredible group of heroes known as the American POWs from Vietnam, because he's a lot like a lot of the others that I've met, Mr. Speaker, and I know you've met a lot of them too. Self-effacing, modest, great character, and continuing to serve this country.

So I think it's absolutely appropriate that on this 35th anniversary of Operation Homecoming that we honor everyone who served as an American prisoner of war, and especially honor the one who serves today in the House of Representatives, Mr. Sam Johnson.

I would reserve the balance of my time.

I would yield to the Republican leader, Mr. Boehner, the gentleman from Ohio, as much time as he might consume.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the Republican whip, Mr. Blunt, the gentleman from Missouri.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wittman) 2 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I would like now to recognize the ranking member of the Veterans' Affairs committee, Mr. Buyer, for 2 minutes.

Thank you, Mr. Buyer, for your very eloquent statement.

Mr. Speaker, at this point we have one speaker remaining, and that's the man from Texas who stiffens our spine, who gives us resolution when we start to lose our resolve in this House of Representatives, who reminds us that freedom isn't free and that we achieve peace through strength.

I would like to yield the balance of our time to Sam Johnson, the gentleman from Texas.

(Mr. SAM JOHNSON of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

We have no more speakers and would yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.