Political Quotes

“I talked yesterday about the problems with national security that are now becoming acknowledged, not only by Members of the Congress, but also, for the first time in four years, by the President himself. Now that the President has admitted that there is a shortfall in funding for national security, the services themselves are coming forward and testifying, as they did today, and telling us what the problem is. They now feel that they are not circumventing their commander-in-chief if they lay their cards on the table before Congress. And let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, I was pretty shocked by the numbers and the situations that were described today by the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Air Force, and I want to share those numbers and those shortfalls with you. First I want to point your attention to what is known as mission capable rates. Mission capable rates mean when we have an aircraft carrier off the shores of the Middle East and we have planes on that carrier. We make an analysis as to whether or not its planes can fly out, hit their targets and return safely to the carrier. That is a pretty important part of our power projection with the U.S. Navy. Our mission capable rate, that means the ability of the airplane to fly off the carrier, wheels up, move that two or three or four hundred miles to its target, drop its ordnance and come back, that rate has gone down from 69 percent in 1993 to 61 percent today.”