C. W. Bill Young: “I think this might be a good time to address this issue that we heard all last year, and we are hearing it again now…”

“I think this might be a good time to address this issue that we heard all last year, and we are hearing it again now, that we are talking about things that the Pentagon does not want. That is not true. I want to unroll this scroll sometime during the debate, and I am going to show you several thousand items that the Pentagon said they really needed but could not be included in the budget because they had a political number that said they could not go beyond that number. Here is what Secretary Perry said when he presented the fiscal year 1997 budget. He said: If there's more money put into the defense budget, I would urge that it be done the same as they did last year, which is not add new program * * * but rather move forward programs that are already in the budget. That is what I asked them to do last year, when they were putting more money in. And by and large, they did that. And that is what we did this year. So do not come on the floor and try to tell our colleagues that the military does not need these things or does not want them. They were given an artificial political dollar amount and they had to abide by that. We do not have to abide by that.”