Political Quotes

“Today's congressional business is to deal with the defense authorization legislation. This is a critical bill, a real opportunity to balance our needs for a strong defense and care for our men and women in uniform, with the hard budget realities and unsustainable trend lines that we are seeing across the budget categories. But because we are ducking the hard tradeoffs in this Defense Authorization, tradeoffs that at least the administration--to its credit--and the Pentagon laid before Congress with their recommendations. We are going to have to resort to an amendment process on the floor to use these areas of opportunity to make longer-term savings and to use part of that money to address key priorities that are shortchanged. {time} 1015 Now, I have an amendment that would help support our Air National Guard. The Guard and Ready Reserves are a cost-effective way to provide support for our military establishments. They have proven their worth time and time again overseas, like in Iraq and Afghanistan, and here at home as they help us deal with natural disasters. The Air National Guard also operates a fleet of 130 F-15 fighter jets in installations across America, but more than half these planes rely on an outmoded, limited radar technology from the 1970s. That means that for many of our pilots, their radar is older than they are. It went out of production in 1986. It limits their capacity, and it breaks down more frequently. It is less reliable.…”