Floyd Spence: “Mr. Chairman, we have been fighting for a long time to rebuild our military. We have been in a deep hole, and we are…”

“Mr. Chairman, we have been fighting for a long time to rebuild our military. We have been in a deep hole, and we are trying to dig out of it. This year, for the first time in 15 years, we have got a real increase in the defense budget. And now people want to try to take away part of that. Reference is made to the Cold War and the fact that the Soviet Union has dissolved now and so we do not have all these threats we had and it will not cost us as much to defend against them. I would like to remind my colleagues that the world now is more dangerous, in spite of what he says, than it has been during the Cold War. We still have the Cold War threats of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, but now it is more varied. Instead of just coming from the old Soviet Union, now it comes from Russia, from China, from North Korea, Iraq. And the list goes on. We cannot defend against any of those properly. In addition, we have new threats, weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, bacteriological.”