David Perdue: “I rise today to talk about what turns into a perennial topic, and that is how we fund our military. We are in a…”

“I rise today to talk about what turns into a perennial topic, and that is how we fund our military. We are in a situation that in the last 45 years, we have only funded the Federal Government four times on time. Yet we see a situation where the world is more dangerous than at any time in my lifetime. We face five threats across five domains--this has increased over the last 15 or 20 years--and at the same time, we have been at work for 20 years against terrorism. That war has not abated. It has not gone away. It is still there. We now face five threats--primarily, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism--across five domains: air, land, sea, cyber, and now space. Yet, with that backdrop, the world being more dangerous than at any time in my lifetime--and I remember the Cold War. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. These are things that, in my childhood, really imprinted on my brain how dangerous the world can be. Yet, today, I say with some qualification, the world is more dangerous than at any time in my lifetime. Yet, three times in the last 50 years--the last three Democratic Presidents cut spending in our military by 25 percent. That was in the late 1970s, in the mid-1990s, and just in the last decade. This is devastating. We saw that in readiness in January of 2017. Two- thirds of our F/A-18s couldn't fly. We had only 3 Army brigades ready to fight out of 59. This was a devastating thing we did to the U.S. military, and it hasn't gone away today.…”