As the Senate begins to consider the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2014 this week, the Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member warned that a few contentious issues would be up for debate but that his colleagues should not hold up the bill’s progress because of those issues or unrelated ones.

“I’m a little disturbed because I don’t know exactly when it’s going to be coming up, I don’t know how many objections there will be, I just know that there are some people who would want to use this since it is a must-pass bill.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in a floor speech.

Photo: Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Inhofe said the NDAA is “the most important piece of legislation Congress considers each year” and that, since the committee marked up and passed the bill “in pretty fast order” with an “overwhelming bipartisan majority,” the full Senate ought to do the same.

The three issues that Inhofe suggested would be controversial relate to Guantanamo Bay, sexual assault and military justice reform, and the proposed East Coast missile defense site.

“I strongly oppose this section that would loosen restrictions on the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the United States or to countries like Yemen that remain vulnerable to al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates,” Inhofe said.

“The Senate bill includes 16 provisions that are specifically targeted to improving the tools the [Defense] Department, the services, the commanders have at their disposal for fighting sexual assaults,” he said. “It includes 12 provisions to make important improvements to the military justice system and the Uniform Code of Military Justice…The commanders’ influence in discipline is necessary, and we’re all going to keep that in mind as we look at some of these amendments.”

And lastly, Inhofe mentioned that even though the bill includes provisions to establish an East Coast missile defense site, “I remain concerned that we are vulnerable to a growing ballistic missile threat from the Middle East” because of previous budget decisions.

Inhofe also spoke about sequestration, previewing amendments that he and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) might propose. He said Sessions has an amendment that would increase military funding by 1 percent. And Inhofe has a budget-neutral amendment to “reduce the impacts of [sequestration in] fiscal year 2014 and 2015 to a more manageable level and shift the remainder of the required cuts in the remaining years.”

“I remain committed to ending sequestration of our military men and women,” he said. “My amendment does not fix sequestration, nor will it impede my continued push for fixing sequestration. We’re going to continue to do that. It’s immoral that we’re not doing it. However, the damage being done to our military is so egregious and reckless under the current sequester mechanism that I have no choice but to take this step to avoid an even greater readiness catastrophe that would seriously damage our national security.”

Inhofe said he spoke to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno about the amendment, and the general said the proposal would actually save money in the long-run because right now the services are being forced to make cuts now that will be costly to undo in the future–breaking multiyear contracts now means buying the same number of platforms later will cost more and take longer, and creating a backlog of maintenance and unit training now will be expensive, if even possible, to catch up on later.

Inhofe said he hoped to speak to Sessions soon about merging their two amendments together so they could “hopefully come up with something that will be sellable to this body.”