On the recordMarch 22, 2018
first of all, I think the session led by Senator Alexander and Senator Collins on the cost-sharing has been very helpful and shows the impact that would have if we went forward with it, but I want to talk about the funding bill itself. The first and foremost thing this bill does is it makes critical investments to keep Americans safe. It is the largest annual defense increase year-to-year in 15 years. It provides a pay increase for those who risk their lives in service to us. When we send our men and women who are willing to do that job in harm's way, we ought to do everything we can to ensure that they have every possible advantage. We don't want Americans to be in a fair fight. We want Americans to be in an unfair fight because we have stacked the fight in favor of people who are defending us. We lost the advantages we had over the last 10 years. We clearly have not funded the military at the level it needed to be funded. We haven't provided the training dollars. We let the equipment get old. I would like to think I have consistently been on the other side of that debate. We see what happens when we lose that advantage. We lost 80 personnel this year and last year, 2017, in accidents--in training accidents and other accidents--where people are asked to do too much for too many hours without enough training on the kind of equipment they are going to be using. We had 80 people lost in those accidents--four times as many people as were lost in combat.…
