Dan Coats: “I do not intend to talk any longer than necessary, until we get a signal that we are ready to go to final passage. I…”

“I do not intend to talk any longer than necessary, until we get a signal that we are ready to go to final passage. I don't want to hold anything up. I know a lot of people have planes to catch and commitments to make, and are very anxious to finalize this bill as quickly as possible. But, in that we were in a quorum call and not quite there yet, let me just take this opportunity to say how profoundly disappointed I am that we were not able to do anything to move toward additional base closings. I doubt there is a Member in this body that doesn't understand that we have too much capacity. We had a force structure designed to address the cold war. The threats have changed, the force structure has been reduced, but the base infrastructure has not been reduced accordingly. As a consequence, with a fixed top budget line, that means we have to spread our resources around in areas that are not essential and sacrifice areas that are essential. We do not begin to have the amount of money needed to modernize our forces. We have been talking about this for years and we keep postponing that. The quality of life for our soldiers, particularly in housing, has suffered. The state of our military housing is deplorable. Nearly two-thirds of current military housing is substandard and substandard by military standards, which is even below civilian standards. I am ashamed at what we ask people who commit to serve this country to live in; how we ask them to live.”