it s like a large fanny pack we wear during abandon ship. i can go home and tell people i drove that aircraft carrier. i got us from paint a to point b and i was there during hurricane relief for irma. we ll go to the star board deck and you ll learn one of our small tasks, preserving the ship. we have the saltwater coming on board and it is always causing a problem and we have metal here and we need to take care of it and preserve it. i m on the deck of the carrier called the catapult. this system was my ride off when i was flying f-18s. today they ll have me drop a plate in it, clean it and put back together the piece of it
landing, she had flown all these f-18s. landing an f-18 on that strip on an aircraft carrier, that is one of the toughest skills to master in military aviation. can you just talk about how her background and her instincts came into play. absolutely. this was an unfortunate circumstance. when you re at altitude and the cabin decompresses, you default to the training you received, going through the-check list and maintaining control. aviate, navigate, communicate. by that the first thing you have to do no matter what is happening, you have to fly the airplane. and then figure out where do we need to go? how do we get to where we need to go safely and as quickly as
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 confront the russians, chinese and iranians. leland: is our lucas tomlinson and jennifer griffin, half of u.s. navy couldn t fly today. quite literally not ready to fight tonight. that is not just naval aviation, u.s. marine aviation divisions.
spending caps, sequesters that kept it capped for some time. now the pentagon will be getting billions of dollars for missile defense for about 20 more missile intercepters in california. they already have 44 in the ground there. with the north korea threat, they think they need more missile defense. more submarines built. 34 additional ships, planes will be bought, helicopters, dozens of f-16s as well as f-18s and blackhawk helicopters. so this is a period of reset for the military and the largest pay raise for military troops in over a decade. about 3% pay raise. but also important to point out, sandra that this bill was 2,232 pages long. the president said no one had had time to read it. it was clear the president had not read it.
and so, and this is necessary. we have already done. this we have authorized it. and a lot of people don t understand how that works. but it s got to be appropriated. it s got to be in this bill. and it will be. we got to keep in mind, jon, a lot of people don t know what obama did to the military. i don t really say this critically of him because he is, you know a very proud liberal and liberals really don t care that much about the military. but we went down to the point at the end of last year only 33% of our ground brigades, i m talking about the u.s. army now, could be deployed because of the maintenance problems and those problems. same thing with aviation brigade and the same thing of our f-18s that the marines use. 62% of them couldn t fly. now, we have changed all that without this budget, we have changed it just by upgrading putting new emphasis on military so that we are way ahead now from where we were a year ago. let s keep in mind that, you