The real problem is that Clinton cut the military in half.
STATE OF MILITARY PREPAREDNESS IN AMERICA
http://www.house.gov/hunter/stm4-def.htm April 23, 1998
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, we are getting closer and closer to the anniversary of the invasion of South Korea, and I reflected back the other day when I was at my aunt and uncle's house in Fort Worth, Texas, because on one of their dressers they have a photograph of a young marine; his name was Son Stilwell, a Marine Lieutenant killed in Korea, one of the 50,000-some casualties KIA that we suffered in that conflict.
I reflected on that this pending anniversary. We are on the eve of when I listened to our Secretary of Defense and President Clinton's defense leaders as they presented a declining defense budget to the U.S. Congress. The situation, I think, is a lot like it was in those days in 1950 before that June invasion. To set the stage, Mr. Speaker, we have come down, we have slashed defense and cut down on our forces dramatically since Desert Storm. We have cut from 18 Army divisions that we had in 1991 to only 10 today. That is, incidentally and coincidentally, the same number of Army divisions we had when Korea was invaded.
We have gone from 24 to only 13 fighter air wings, so we have cut our air power almost in half under the Clinton Administration. And we have cut our naval vessels from 546 to 333, about a 40 percent cut in naval vessels.
Now, the theme in 1950 and the reason that so many defense leaders from then Lewis Johnson, then Secretary of Defense, right on down, the theme that they propounded as they presented this declining defense budget to the U.S. Congress, and said that it was adequate, was that somehow we were the dominating nation of the world with respect to high-tech, and nobody would mess with us. Of course, we had at that time the nuclear weapon. Nobody else presumably had that until a few years later.
Yet we were shocked in June when the North Koreans invaded South Korea and almost pushed the South Korean forces and the Americans that tried to stem the tide into the sea. We tried to hold them up at the Osan Pass, the 25th Infantry Division that we flew in, MacArthur flew in from Japan, was cut to ribbons. The commander, General Dean was, in fact, captured by North Korean forces.
We held the Pusan Peninsula by our toenails and finally started to push it up to the northern part of the peninsula. Then, interestingly, the theme that the leaders had that nobody would mess with us because we had the high technology and the nuclear weapon was further devastated when the Communist Chinese invaded South Korea.
The point isn't that we are any dumber than we were in 1950 and/or maybe we were dumber than we are now, and maybe we have leaders today that know something those people didn't know. My point is that the events of the world are unpredictable and that we today are taking a high level of risk by dramatically cutting our defenses.
The American people need to know that. They need to know that the massive savings, so-called savings that President Clinton is showing the world proudly and showing the American people proudly, the millions of dollars that he has pulled out of programs, have primarily been pulled out of national security.
We have dramatically cut back our national security. And we do not know what this world is going to bring us. I am reminded of the fact that when we had our assembled intelligence apparatus and our intelligence leaders in front of us, and we asked them a few simple questions, such as which of you predicted the Falklands war, none of them could raise their hands. When we asked which of you predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union, that was in all the papers. None of them could raise their hands.
And when we asked them which of you predicted the invasion of Kuwait, one of them actually said before or after the armored columns started moving? We said, no; before the armored columns started moving. None of them had predicted the invasion of Kuwait. It is not that they are not smart, it is not that they don't have a lot of resources at their disposal. The facts are that unexpected things happen in this world.
We are still living in a very unstable world, and we have a declining military to face that unstable world with. One reason we were able to bring home to the American people so many of the soldiers and sailors and marines who went over to Desert Storm, and the reason we didn't have to fill up those 40,000 body bags we took with us in fighting the fourth largest army in the world, was because we were so strong we won the war decisively in a very short period of time with very limited American casualties.
Mr. Speaker, we are taking a big chance today, because under the Clinton Administration's leadership, we have cut our military almost in half. If the balloon goes up today, we cannot win a Desert Storm war as decisively as we did just a few years ago.