W. Todd Akin: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have to say that I understand the importance of trying to control spending in this…”

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have to say that I understand the importance of trying to control spending in this government, and I am very much thankful to the gentleman from Arizona to be wanting to do that. The concern that we have is that when you take a look at where we are in terms of our military right now, we have some very big problems. Just standing back away from it and looking at it for a little bit, if you say, how many troops do we have, how many ships do we have, how many aircraft do we have, and you compare where we are today with where we were 20 years ago, in 1990, we have half of what we had in 1990. So we have reduced our military in half. We have the same number of ships today as what we had in 1916. Now, one of the reasons for paying attention to earmarks was so that we would pay more attention to doing a good job of oversight. This committee has really worked hard at oversight. We have identified areas where we think the Pentagon was wrong, where the President was wrong, and we have taken that money out. Now we are going to be punished for taking it out by having it taken away. The point of the matter is we are redirecting the money, but we are allowing a certain amount of flexibility. The places where this money has got to be spent are, first, ballistic and cruise missile defense. This is a very, very big deal for the Navy. The Chinese have very high- speed cruise missiles. We have to be able to defend against them.…”