Washington, DC – House Armed Services Committee
Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) delivered the following
statement during House consideration of H.R. 4986, the
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year
2008. H.R. 4986 was approved by the U.S. House of
Representatives on a vote of 369 to 46:
“I rise today in strong support of the
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008,
which we will consider today for a third time on the House
floor, and which has been revised to address the objections
expressed by the President.
“I strongly believe that this bill is one of the
most important pieces of legislation passed by this Congress,
and one of the best defense authorization bills I can recall
during my time in Congress. I'm so extremely proud of
the members of the Armed Services Committee, and of all of
those who worked hard in and out of the Armed Services
Committee to make this happen. And I also want to thank
the staff for their hard work to get us to today, with a bill
that will be signed by the President.
“Last night we disposed of the President’s
veto of an earlier version of this bill. That veto was
a surprise to all of us. Today we move on, and send a
final version to the President that his aides have indicated
he will sign. The changes to the conference report
which passed this House on a vote of 370 to 49, and passed
the Senate 90 to 3 are minimal. Only one section,
Section 1083, dealing with claims against countries that are
or have been state sponsors of terrorism, caused a problem
for the Administration and led to the veto.
“Today’s bill includes a compromise on that
provision that allows the President to waive the application
of that section to the government of Iraq, while also
expressing the sense of Congress that the President should
negotiate with the government of Iraq to satisfy the many
legitimate claims that American citizens have against that
country and its former leader, Saddam Hussein. The only
other changes made to the bill were those required to make
retroactive the pay increases and many benefit improvements
provided for military service members and their
families. Those provisions will be made effective as of
January 1 of this year, as would have been the case if the
bill had been signed by the President.
“This is a good bill. As a matter of fact, I
think it's the best defense bill in decades that this
Congress has put forward. It's good for our troops, good for
our families, it will help improve readiness of our Armed
Forces, and it will bring new significant oversight to the
Department of Defense in areas where oversight was sorely
needed in the past.
“Let me begin by saying that the Armed Services
Committee has remained committed to a tradition of
bipartisanship, and we appreciate that, and we have all
throughout the year. Special thanks to our ranking
member, the gentleman from California, (Mr. Hunter) who's
been such a great help through the years.
“When the 110th Congress began, we laid out, from
the Armed Services Committee, six strategic priorities, and
we have met them in this legislation. The bill before us is
the culmination of our efforts. It addresses strategic
priorities in important ways. It includes a 3.5 percent
across-the-board pay raise, it protects the troops and their
families from escalating health care fees, and includes well
over 100 other measures, both large and small, regarding
quality of life. It is especially important because it adopts
the elements of the Wounded Warrior Act which passed this
House earlier in the year 426 to 0. And I think that that, in
and of itself, is a major victory for those in uniform.
“It addresses readiness. It establishes a new,
high level board of military officers, the Defense Materiel
Readiness Board, to grapple with the growing shortfalls
confronting the Armed Forces. The bill allocates $1 billion
to a Strategic Readiness Fund.
“The bill will bring much needed oversight to the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does so by instituting new
reporting requirements developed on a bipartisan basis.
“The bill builds on the successful passage of
H.R. 1, which fully implemented the recommendations of the
9/11 Commission. The bill authorizes the funding required to
carry forward that act by continuing, and this is important,
and expanding the Department of Defense's cooperative threat
reduction program and the Department of Energy's nuclear
nonproliferation programs. These programs address perhaps the
single largest threat to the American homeland, the threat of
nuclear terrorism and other weapons of mass destruction, and
we address that very carefully in this bill.
“We also include $17.6 billion for the mine
resistant ambush vehicle, which is known as MRAP, to protect
our troops in Iraq and in future conflicts. It does a great
deal in the area of funding for our various ships, including
production of two Virginia-class submarines per year by 2010,
and adds eight C-17s to meet the needs of the demands of
global power projection.
“One of the most important elements of this bill,
in addition to the money and the hardware, is a requirement
that the Department of Defense perform a quadrennial review
of its roles and missions. The first time this was addressed,
and the last time it was addressed thoroughly, was back in
1948 at the behest of President Harry Truman and his then
Secretary of Defense, James Forestal. The review we require
in this bill causes a full examination as to whether the
Department of Defense is truly developing the core
competencies and capabilities to perform the missions
assigned to it and whether those capabilities are being
developed in the most joint and efficient way by the military
services. Much has changed since 1948. Technology has changed
and has blossomed and mushroomed, and that's why it's
important that we update, by way of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the Secretary of Defense, the Key West agreement that was
met back in that year of 1948.
“I am very, very pleased with this bill. I
think that history will say that this one was a
comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive, Defense
authorization bill that our Congress has passed in
decades.”
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