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"When we would eat hotpot, we would take out the solid fuel in the missiles," he told Radio Free Asia amid new reports of corruption.
Pilots that had to borrow parts off of museum planes to keep their operational aircraft going and other readiness problems that have been mounting. what happened was we cut the defense budget by 20% over the last eight years and that 20% -- the world did not get 20% safer, by the way. those cuts have had a deep, lasting effect on our military including training, maintenance of our planes and ships, and a number of personnel-related items. so on march 22 congress passed a bill to begin to turn it around. a lot of people think it was too much money and it was more money than i would have spent o...
Kremlin in beijing and north korea and tehran they are paying attention to? >> there were two huge mistakes in the obama administration. one was freezing our defense spending at the same time the iranians, chinese and russians are building up their forces. it is critical we rebuild the military. the second was appeasing iran. president trump ran on a ronald reagan peace through strength platform. he's starting to rebuild the military, but even this budget is not enough. it will fill the potholes, fix the readiness problems, get our planes back up in the air. f-18s, f-35's. we need more to conf...
Driving them. how bad is it? is humpty dumpty falling off the wall or has fallen the wall? >> there are clearly cracks and clearly strains and are starting to show. we have been at war for 17 years. the military has been at war, i don't know if the country feels that it's been at war. less than 1% of the population which makes the military, all volunteers, a guard, professional warrior class has been at it for years. leland: the equipment has been at it for years too. >> longer than many of them have been alive. the cracks are starting to show, mishaps, maybe not they're not directly related t...
You're absolutely right, we won't solve our readiness problems. we can't fix our ships and planes and so forth in three months or six months, but we can get on a good trajectory. in july the house passed a defense bill by the largest bipartisan majority in the last eight years that does exactly that. unfortunately what this three-month, stop-gap measure will do will cut the funding by more than $50 billion that was designed to fix those problems. so you can't just say -- i'll put it this way. we're doing more of the same that got us into trouble and that's what my primary objection is. >> in t...