On the recordJuly 23, 2013
As Members of Congress, one of our greatest responsibilities is to keep our country safe and invest our resources wisely, especially when it comes to securing the safety of our country. The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program is a missile system that is supposed to be designed to deflect missiles from rogue states like Iran and North Korea. That would be great if it worked. It is a system with a long history of failure, and military leaders have expressed doubts for years about the viability of this program. I encourage my colleagues to support my amendment, which would return the funding level for the GMD program back to the Pentagon's own request level in the fiscal year 2014 Defense appropriations bill. Specifically, my amendment cuts funding for the GMD missiles by $107 million and applies those savings to deficit reduction. Lacking a single successful test intercept since December 2008, the GMD program is simply a failure so far. These repeated failures unfortunately have not stopped us from continuing to authorize over $1 billion for the GMD program to purchase 14 additional missiles on top of the 30 we already have in the NDAA Act of 2013. The Government Accountability Office has noted that the testing of the system to date has been insufficient to verify that it will function as intended, and there was a most recent test failure on July 5 which supports that assessment from the GAO. Americans want a missile defense system we can count on.…
