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Why is the President abandoning the defense of our troop concentrations around the world? Because that is exactly what you are doing when you give up one of your most promising technologies.

Mr. Speaker, one other thing the President is doing that is very disturbing is this. Right now the ABM treaty does not limit the production of American theater missile defense systems. Yet, his negotiating team is now working with members of the f ormer Soviet Union to limit the theater defense systems that we can set up around the world to protect our troops. That does not make a lot of sense.

I can simply say that, without naming names, that I have talked with a number of our military experts, people in the service and out of the service, who are very, very worried that this President, in his haste to make deals, is making a deal that we are g oing to regret because it is going to stop programs cold that could have defended Americans in time of war.

Therefore, the President should review this Navy Upper Tier Program which he himself, which his own analysts have said is a very, very important program.

Mr. Speaker, finally, when the President did this bottom-up review program, he went through all the requirements, or his experts went through all the requirements of things we would need for a strong defense establishment in the coming year.

One aspect of that review covered ammunition. Ammunition is kind of important. You need ammunition in time of war, and you need lots of it, because you have to sustain your troops. A three-month or a six-month or a nine-month war is a lot different from a two-week war, and you expend ammunition sometimes very quickly.

According to the Army's own study, the amount of money that this President is going to spend on ammunition is about 50 percent of what we need. According to the Army's own study, we are seeing the collapse of about 80 percent of our industrial base that m akes ammunition.

Now, doggone it, you have to have ammunition in time of war. The fact that you have got smart, sharp, well-trained troops doesn't mean anything if their guns are empty.

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And yet this budget that was presented today by Secretary Perry gives us about half the level of ammunition that the Army's open study says we will need in times of war. That is the President's open review, this so-called Bottom-Up Review board.

So in this very important area of sustainability, the President is deficient, and his Secretary of Defense, while he is an excellent manager and he has taken this little shrinking pot of money that the President has given him and he has tried to manage th at reduced amount of money as effectively as he can, he is giving up American capability. You have to have capability to keep your troops, to have quality of life, to equip them well.

That means have modern equipment. We are not giving them modern equipment, because we are putting off modernization of Army and Air Force and naval systems. You have to be able to lift them. That means you have to be able to carry them into a theater in t imes of combat with either ships or aircraft and you have to be able to sustain them until they win the war for you, and that means they have to have lots of ammunition.

They have to have stand off missile systems like the ones that the President is canceling to keep your pilots from being at risk. You have to have fairly modern aircraft so that they do not break down on you when you need them the most; you do not have to retire them off the carriers leaving gaps in those carriers.

And this President, on the whole, is failing to provide that capability, and in doing so, he is doing a disservice to the American people who look to Congress to provide for the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps to protect this Nation.

But he is also doing a disservice to the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, because ultimately in a conflict, their ability to stay alive and come home, as the vast majority did in Desert Storm, is a function of our modernization, ou r sustainability, our readiness, our airlift, and our national will.