Madam President, in recent years we have witnessed some very serious and troubling discussions in the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. We have noticed how American fighting men and women are being committed to engagements of all kinds all around the world. We know that the budget for the Defense Department has come down dramatically.

I was one saying when the Berlin Wall fell we could probably save 30 percent or more of our military budget because we could cut back and still maintain the force we needed. We were in a position where we were supposedly able to pursue two major regional contingencies at once. That was the theory.

Unfortunately, as we went farther and farther into more assigned missions, it became very questionable whether we could even do that. We asked questions from both sides of the aisle in our Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearings about the resources we were providing for the Department of Defense. I believe it was about 2 years ago about this time of year we had then-Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen before our committee, a former member of this body. We all respect him greatly.

I asked point blank: Mr. Secretary, do we have the money that is necessary to support our fighting men and women?

I believe his answer was something like: We do not have the resources available for the missions we have been assigned.

That was the beginning of the realization we had grossly underfunded the Department of Defense.

I am very pleased we have a defense supplemental before the Senate. I know these are tight times. There has been an

effort to work with the administration, with the bipartisan leadership of both bodies, to find how we can provide vitally needed resources for the Department of Defense. My personal view is we may not have provided enough. That is why I have offered this amendment.

On May 24 of this year, the Associated Press ran a story on cannibalization, the lack of military spare parts. According to a GAO report, the Pentagon system for dispensing spare parts for airplanes, tanks, and other equipment is broken and officials are not sure how to fix it. At least 154,000 times a year a military mechanic takes a part from one airplane and puts it on another because a new spare part is not on hand, according to the GAO.

This cannibalization is a very questionable process. It is a waste of time and money. It costs 1 million extra work hours a year and risks damaging the aircraft, as well as the morale of the mechanics doing the work, several testified. Once cannibalized, a multimillion-dollar aircraft can sit idle for months or years, said Neal Curtin, GAO Director of Defense Issues. In one case, about 400 parts were removed from a plane that eventually had to be shipped by truck to the maintenance depot to be rebuilt. Witnesses said the cannibalization is widespread because the services are trying to maintain readiness on an aging fleet in a time of increased deployments.

LTG Michael Zettler, Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Installation, said cannibalization is only used when it is absolutely mission critical, and acknowledged in a prepared statement that it is done more than is desirable but blames some of it on design problems showing up years after abuse, resulting in a widespread need for more parts than specified, and fewer companies are making fewer parts--having left the market during the Pentagon 1990 downsizing.

Pentagon spokesman RADM Craig Quigley said: You do what you need to do given the availability of parts. It is largely an issue of funding. I use the family car as a good example. The older it gets, the more repairs you will do, but it is expensive to buy a new car.

This GAO report follows an earlier report that said the Department inventory management is ineffective and results in excessive stocks of some parts more than others. Though the problem has been under scrutiny since 1990 and the services have formed committees, study groups, and programs to fix it, no one has the statistics on how big the problem is, according to the GAO Director. Because they view cannibalization as a symptom of spare part shortages, they have not closely analyzed other possible causes or made concerted efforts to measure the full extent of the practice.

The Pentagon has been unable to document how many times it is done, the reasons, or how much time and money it has cost. It also cannot determine which cannibalizations are necessary, what alternatives are available, what improvements or changes need to be implemented, to what extent morale would be increased by reducing the workload.

My point in going through that article is simply to note that we are in a sorry situation where we are preparing to send our air men and women into combat without the spare parts we need. We grab a part from a Hangar

[Page: S7382] GPO's PDF Queen, another aircraft that is increasingly disabled, and take that one part to keep the planes flying. That means the planes we are cannibalizing are less and less able to carry out their assigned mission. My amendment is, I believe and I hope, a responsible amendment which adds $1.430 billion for the fiscal year to the Defense Department. I believe the money is desperately needed by forces and can be spent in what remains of the fourth quarter of the current fiscal year. The amendment is operative only if and to the extent that the President declares it an emergency. The President would have control over whether to spend these funds. They could only be spent in the current fiscal year on problems which are very serious and which we understand from our sources are in dire need.

This amendment includes funds that will be directed exclusively to operations and maintenance and personnel accounts of each of the four services. This is money the Pentagon, in our view, needs right now to ensure that critical repairs and training are not delayed further. Our troops need to believe there is truth behind our words and that help is, indeed, on the way.

Consider this pressing challenge, the parts shortages and cannibalization from other pieces of equipment to which I just referred, specifically to aircraft. It is required throughout the military to keep our aging equipment going. To give an idea of the impact of the shortages, the GAO report found that shortcomings in spare parts increase maintenance costs by forcing maintainers to do things such as cannibalize needed parts from other aircraft, taking parts from one airplane to another to get one operational, meaning it takes two airplanes to get one ready to go. That essentially doubles the maintainer workloads, turning one repair into two.

Parts swapping also pushes costs up by increasing part failure rates. Components are more susceptible to breakdown when they are removed from one unit to another. Previously-installed parts have shorter in-service life than new parts.

When maintainers cannot do what they have been trained to do--that is, to fix airplanes--that leads to lower retention rates. The people who are in the job of doing the very critical work--making sure we provide the very best machines for our pilots--leave and go into the private sector. It is demoralizing to watch the mission-capable rates of airplanes drop due to a lack of spare parts. The maintainers want nothing more than to be provided the equipment and parts they need to do their jobs.

I applaud and thank the President for his initiative in submitting this supplemental, but I do differ with the administration's view that the funding currently provided is sufficient. Saying we will solve the problem in fiscal year 2002 is not going to help the problems we currently face as a result of the circumstances we have created. Our troops are tired of hearing us say help is on the way, only to be disappointed when it never comes.

It is time for us to show them that we, indeed, want to provide them the resources they need efficiently and safely to do the missions we give them. There are far too many examples of services being forced into situations where they must borrow from operations and maintenance accounts just to keep operations going and to purchase much-needed spare parts and equipment. Meanwhile, infrastructure continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate.

I will have printed in the RECORD excerpts from testimony of our most senior military personnel before the House Armed Services Committee in September of last year. For the benefit of my colleagues, allow me to read just a few.

From Admiral Vern Clark, Chief of Naval Operations, Department of the Navy:

I currently have a backlog of ..... $5.5 billion in infrastructure. ..... We are currently not funding this account sufficiently so that we arrest the growth in critical backlog and we have to do better.

General Shelton had this to say:

We can ill afford to take away from the current readiness accounts today. In fact, in some cases I think you've heard the Chiefs say they've still got shortfalls. ..... We have got to find a way--and that means more money to be able to modernize the force.

Madam President, there are quotes from other members of the Joint Chiefs, and others, pointing out just how far we have come and how much further we need to go. This amendment before us provides $27 million for the Marine Corps. During last month's testimony, General Jones, the Marine Corps Commandant, told me he would have to find this money elsewhere by reprogramming funds if he did not receive it prior to the end of the fiscal year.

Real property maintenance shortfalls remain incredibly high. Just consider a recent report that two-thirds of the Army National Guard installations will maintain a status of C-4, which means ``significantly impairs mission performance.'' Installations continue to deteriorate because the funding we are providing is not sufficient to halt the decline.

Madam President, the current supplemental does not begin to reverse the slide in real property maintenance, and we cannot be sure future budgets will either. My colleague from Delaware, Senator Biden, refrained from offering an amendment to this supplemental that would have added $204 million for additional Blackhawk helicopters, but he made the point our Army aviation program is in deep trouble and is in dire need of additional funds if we are to get it back on track.

I came to the floor a month or so ago to point out that in the National Guard in Missouri, 75 percent of the helicopters are not operational. If we were running a museum, that would not be bad. But we expect our National Guard to be ready to be called on in a national emergency, and I can guarantee in our State of Missouri, and every other State, when there is a natural disaster, whether it is a flood, tornado, fire, or some other disaster, we want to be able to call on the National Guard. Three out of four planes in the Missouri National Guard are not airworthy. That means not only are they not ready, but the men and women who are supposed to fly them cannot train in them.

This is a serious situation that affects all branches of the Active and Reserve and the Guard. No matter where we turn, we find pressing needs both in our readiness accounts and in our modernization accounts. That is why I think it is essential we plus-up the current supplemental. Every dollar counts. I hope we can find support for it. I know the Members of this body understand the situation. I have been assured by people at the Pentagon that funding I seek to add could and would be used to fund current needs, and therefore I ask my colleagues to support this amendment that adds slightly more than $1.4 billion to the supplemental.

I reserve the remainder of my time.