Political Quotes

“First, we are on a downswing with respect to defense spending. The force structure that we have now has gone down from 18 Army divisions that we had during Desert Storm to 10. We have gone down from 24 fighter airwings to only 13, roughly half the air power that we had. We have gone down from 546 naval vessels to 346. We are at what I would call the bottom of a dangerous downswing. In this bill, we have tried to pull up the modernization levels a little bit and we have done that. We have not done it as much as we would like to. I think we have been too constrained by the budget. I think we are going to pay for that in later conflicts. But this bill is better than what we had before. With respect to supercomputers, the gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Gejdenson] talked about this saying it was just totally off base. We have had about 80 supercomputer transactions in which the Chinese and the Russians have received American high performance supercomputers over the last couple of years.”