Joe Cunningham: “My point is, why are we here in this position? Why are we here today asking for more and more money? Eight years of the…”

“My point is, why are we here in this position? Why are we here today asking for more and more money? Eight years of the Clinton administration and 124 deployments has nearly devastated our military. The cruise missiles, we do not have JDAM kits for precision-guided weapons today. We have 37 ships tied up that we cannot repair with deferred maintenance. Mr. Speaker, 124 deployments. Look at Haiti. Most people have seen Blackhawk Down. We got our rear-ends kicked out of there and we lost 19 rangers in the process. We got our rear-ends kicked out of Somalia, 5 times in Iraq, bombing an aspirin factory in the Sudan. All of these different deployments put us over $200 billion in debt for defense. And guess what? At the same time we deployed in defense, our national security forces, our CIA, our FBI, they also have not been able to modernize.”