Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I wanted to say I was walking by the floor when I saw the gentleman making his presentation, and those of us on the Committee on National Security were very impressed with your plan for the Joliet Arsenal. We have waived jurisdiction so it can go on down an expedited process to come to fruition. When the people of your congressional district have this great asset, and this program is completed, they will have one person to thank for it, and that is Jerry Weller. We appreciate your work on this, and anything that we can do in the Committee on National Security to expedite it, we are there, and I thank the gentleman.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, those are the guys on the front of Time magazine when they get captured; those are the guys that get dragged through the streets by our adversaries; those are [[Page H 8026]] the guys that are forced to write confessions under torture. One reason we built this stealth bomber and this stealth technology is so we would not have those guys being shot down and we would bring them home to their families. Mr. Speaker, with the conventional mission that the opponents of B-2 would like to go with, on a conventional mission to hit 16 targets, you risk 134 crew members. If you send one B-2, you risk a total of two crew members. If you send two B-2's, you risk a total of four crew members. I would say to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks], I would feel pretty bad about telling our Air Force personnel every time in the past, in this century, when we have had top technology, we field it. The best stuff we could get, we field it. Chuck Yeager shot down one of the first German aircraft, a jet aircraft, when he had a propeller driven plane. He was real happy to get into that X-1 that could go faster than the speed of sound in the late 1940's and drive American technology. Mr. Speaker, we have always given our kids technology. This will be the first time we will tell our pilots, ``You know, we spent $30 billion developing a technology that makes your plane virtually invisible to radar, but we decided not to give it to you because we think it is too expensive.''

Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely. The POW community has had an effect on the United States Congress, House and Senate, because members of the Hanoi Hilton, being so respected and so focused upon by our colleagues and by our constituents, have come to this body and made a difference. Mr. Speaker, our best scientists sat down and said radar was ``probably the greatest military invention of this century. We may be able to create a system that can evade radar; that can be invisible to radar.'' I have to say this as a Republican. We got after Jimmy Carter. We said that is so impossible, so incredible, such a tightly held secret, this was back in the 1970's, we said Jimmy Carter has done a disservice to national security to even mention that we could avoid radar. We got after him as if he had given away nuclear secrets, because that invention was such a fantastic thing. Mr. Speaker, we built the stealth aircraft, and my colleague mentioned the gentleman that was shot down over Bosnia. I know the opponents to B-2 say that that has no relevance, let us not think about that. Of course, that guy going down in that F-16, that Scott O'Grady, was the reason we built stealth, whether it was in a bomber or a fighter aircraft. One reason we did it was because these SAM missiles are mobile. They are mobile missiles. They move around. Our intelligence thought there were not any missiles in that particular place in Bosnia. Lo and behold, a SAM site turned up and took down the best pilots and the best planes we have at 20,000 feet. That is the reason we did the stealth technology. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] has gotten up on this floor, when we put up this big package or packages of 38, 45 and 75 conventional aircraft that are required to do the job of one stealth aircraft. Let us remember the reason for that, and the gentleman from Washington has gone through that, is because to support just a couple of bomb-dropping aircraft, like one of our first Desert Storm packages had 38 planes in it, only eight of them actually dropped bombs. Those were British Tornadoes and American A-6 attack planes from our carriers. Only eight bomb droppers. The other 30 aircraft had to handle the SAM missile sites. They had to handle the air-to-air in case Iraq scrambled some airplanes to meet them. They had to handle the radar jamming. We had this big armada of support airplanes to support just eight bomb droppers in this one task force. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] said, ``Yeah, maybe that is true, but we still have all those planes, so we can go in, instead of going with the one stealth bomber, we can go in with the 38 aircraft.'' He has not been watching the drawdown in the United States Air Force. At that time we had 24 air wing equivalents to project American air power. We now have cut down to almost half of that, to 13 air wing equivalents. We are down from 24 air wings to 13 air wings. Mr. Speaker, a whole bunch of those support airplanes that worked out in the gulf are now at the bone yard in the desert of Arizona. Those are not operational aircraft. If the gentleman from Ohio, [Mr. Kasich] wants to call them up, if we should have another Desert Storm, they are not around. We get to the final point, which is the multiplier effect that stealth gives you. The one stealth bomber can hit the same 16 targets. If you want to give it redundant coverage, you can use two bombers as a package of 75 conventional aircraft. Mr. Speaker, the last point the gentleman made before I came on the floor, and I was really taken with this, is he talked about people. He talked about the pilots. With that package of 75 conventional aircraft to do the same 16 targets as only one stealth bomber, you expose 134 crew members.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. I want to thank the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks] for the work that he has done on this system because he is one of the gentlemen who understands the importance of projecting American air power, and he has done a lot to make that power a reality. The gentleman from California [Mr. Lewis] also has been a very effective and articulate advocate for a strong air power. Air power is now very, very important to us. Let us go over a couple of those things, because the gentleman talked about the history of stealth. Jimmy Carter did, in the Carter administration, initiate the original work on stealth. I know people like Dr. Johnny Foster, Bill Perry, Paul Kominski, all had a hand in that, and the reason we tried to build a radar or a plane that could evade radar is because of our Vietnam experience. Mr. Speaker, in Vietnam we lost over 2,200 planes, and we all, all of a sudden, realized and recognized that Russia could market these SAM missiles, these surface-to-air missiles, to any Third World country around. With a few weeks of training, this Third World country, with its personnel, could put together teams to operate the SAM's and they could effectively shoot down high-performance American aircraft, and they did that by the thousands in Vietnam. America has always been the land of creativity, the land of innovation, and especially in military areas we have always been ahead of the rest of the world. Our best people, having watched those 2,200 planes go down with American pilots in them or having to bail out of them, some of them POW's--

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman mentioned our ability to project power off aircraft carriers. I was reminded again, as we all were who watched CNN and read the front page of the newspapers, of American, I believe it was A-7 aircraft that were shot down by Syrian gunners. I believe they were using the same Russian-made surface-to-air missiles that are proliferated throughout the world. That was the pilot that, I believe, Jesse Jackson went over and rescued amid enormous publicity and self-promotion by Syria. The gentleman has made his point, but the point has really been validated every time we have had to send conventional aircraft into areas that maintain these surface-to-air missile sites. We have been shot down.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding, because I think the fact that seven former Secretaries of Defense have endorsed the B-2 has some significance. You ask yourself, ``Why would they do that?'' I think the answer is laid out in the history of the last 10 or 15 years. We review the Libya raid. The Libya raid followed Mr. Qadhafi's killing, terrorist style, of American soldiers in Germany. We had the goods on him. We knew that he had ordered these assassinations, these murders. When he did that, Ronald Reagan decided to strike him. But we found out we had a problem. I was being interviewed by British television, I believe, shortly after the raid was made, and I cannot remember the name of the interviewer, but in Great Britain, Maggie Thatcher had allowed our F-111's, this medium bomber, to take off from Heathrow Airport in Great Britain. But there was great consternation in Britain because they were letting us do this, because the Libyans had great terrorist capability, there had been threats that if anybody helped the Americans at any time, they would be struck, they were very worried about it, and I was talking to the commentator, I was being interviewed, and I said, ``Thank God for Maggie Thatcher. It's nice of her to let us at least use the facilities in Great Britain to strike this terrorist.'' The commentator said, ``Congressman, don't speak too soon. We've just taken a television poll.'' In Great Britain they apparently wire a sample number of television sets so when they ask a national question, would you vote so and so or would you do so and so, people can just punch the buzzer or the button on their set and that gives the BBC an instant poll. He said, ``We've just polled the British people and by a majority,'' they are against Maggie Thatcher having let our F-111's, which had already been done obviously, but having let the Americans use British air bases to launch this strike against Mr. Qadhafi. Here we had the British people, we had a great British stateswoman, Maggie Thatcher, helping Ronald Reagan, helping America to launch that strike against Qadhafi. But a little farther away, in France, the French decided not even to let us fly over their airspace, and they forced our F-111 pilots to fly to their border and then we had to skirt around their perimeter at a great loss of time and fuel, and fatigue of our pilots, because we were not even being allowed to fly over France to strike a terrorists who had murdered American soldiers. When we finally got to Libya, we made the surprise strike on Mr. Qaddafi. The U.S. Navy, in assisting with that strike, had moved about $6 billion worth of carrier task force components into the Gulf of Sidra, just outside of the Gulf of Sidra, and they launched naval aircraft from there. The point is that when the going gets tough, you cannot count on having a batch of allies that are going to let you use their airspace, let you use their runways, have their cooperation. The great thing about the B-2 bomber, and I think this is a reason the seven former Secretaries of Defense support the B-2 bomber, is that they believe in the ability to project American power early. That means when an armor attack starts, you stop that attack before you have to send a bunch of Marines and U.S. infantry over there to stop it with soft bodies. You do things quick. You can fly the B-2 out of the United States. You do not have to ask Maggie Thatcher, you do not have to ask the French, you do not have to ask somebody else, you can fly it out of the United States and you can make a strike in the Middle East. Now, you may have to recover in Diego Garcia, but we own the Diego Garcia base. We do not have to ask anybody's permission to land there, and you can project American power from our shores. That is what these gentlemen are concerned about. Every American father and mother who have children who may at one time be in the ground forces of the United States have a real interest in having powerful air forces.

Mr. HUNTER. Compared to the B-52, the B-1 is a baby.

Mr. HUNTER. I noticed a friend of ours, the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon], just arrived, another staunch supporter of B-2. But I think the gentleman has made an excellent point in that we have an article of leverage. We have a system that gives us enormous leverage. The last thing the American people want to do is have to send marines or infantry divisions to stop an armor attack. The way you stop an armor attack without using a lot of lives is with air power. The way you stop an armor attack with an absolute minimum of casualties is to use air power that has stealth. I am thinking, if you went inside Saddam Hussein's war room or maybe, later in this decade, inside North Korea's war room and you saw them making a determination as to whether or not they should strike American positions, it would be awfully nice to have one colonel in that North Korean intelligence operation or in that Iraqi operation say, ``How about the American invisible bombers? I'm kind of scared of them. How about the invisible bombers, that we can't take down with our SAM's, will they be here? Does anybody know where they are? Are they launched?'' That uncertainty is deterrence. That means you do not start it. The gentleman made one great point. The amount of money we spent on Desert Storm because we did not deter Saddam Hussein from striking, because he thought we were weak, was enough money to buy out the entire B-2 program of 80 airplanes and have a lot of money left over. If you were strong up front, you would not have to pay later. That is the point of having strong American air power, and that is the point of stealth and that multiplier of precision-guided munitions.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield, you mentioned the defense overhead. We have about 250,000 professional shoppers in the Department of Defense. Those are the people that engage in the acquisition of military systems. Roughly you have two Marine Corps of shoppers. They cost us about $30 billion a year. That means we have a procurement budget of about $45 billion that as you have mentioned it is down 70 percent. But for every aircraft or tank or weapon that we buy, we pay almost as much as we paid for that system to the Department of Defense for the service of buying it. That means if you buy an airplane for $100 million, you pay about $70 million on top of that to the shoppers in DOD for buying the components for that airplane. If we cut that bureaucracy down, the shopping component, if we cut it down in the same way we have cut the Army, we cut the Army from 18 divisions to 12 divisions, and it may go down to 10, and the news did not make Stamp Collectors Weekly, nobody knows about it, and we have [[Page H 8028]] cut the U.S. Army strength almost 50 percent. We have cut the Air Force from 24 to 13 air wings and the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] thinks they are still there. Nobody knows about these massive cuts we have taken in our force structure. If we took that same proportionate type of cut in the shopping corps, in the Department of Defense, the procurement corps, that means we would save about $10 billion a year. If we took 100,000 people out of the shopping corps, we would save $10 billion a year. That would buy 4 B-2 programs.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon]. He is a very articulate and a very strong supporter of national defense. I also thank the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks] who was really the father of this special order. Thanks to Mr. Dicks for taking this order up. I think it is important to talk about these things, because a lot of folks have 100 issues on their minds. They do not know what this vote is about until they actually sit down and think about it. And also the gentleman who was here earlier, Mr. Lewis. Mr. Lewis does not spend a lot of time talking on the House Floor. He is one of the smartest defense minds in this Congress and he is a real advocate for this program and one of our champions. I am glad he was up here discussing this with Mr. Dicks. I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks].

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon].

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks].

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman would yield briefly, Billy Mitchell did sometimes. He showed that technology had moved on and we had entered the era of air power. But he did not drop a sack of flour; he dropped enough munitions to totally sink and destroy three major ships, including one captured German battleship. He carried out his task with a little more enthusiasm than the people who have invested all their political capital in battleships or warships cared for him to do. In a way we are doing the same thing here. We are in an era in which we can avoid radar because of the great technology that freedom has brought us in this country and we are about to forgo that technology for some pretty silly reasons. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield, I want to say to the gentleman he has made a tremendous presentation for B-2, and I hope that all Members of the House, whether they are here or in their offices, have been watching this. I have two colleagues that have a colloquy to do. They are two strong B-2 supporters, so I am going to break off my comments at this time. I want to thank the distinguished gentleman from Washington, who is a conservative Democrat who stands for a strong national defense and he has done a great service in trying to keep American air power alive. We appreciate you.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield further, let us explain that for a minute. People need to know that in the old days, when we built these conventional bombers, they were not a lot different from the domestic aircraft that we build, so we could go to the gentleman, who is one of the greatest representatives that area has ever had in Washington, my colleague, and go to his hometown and talk to the Boeing management and Boeing workers, we could have gone back in the 1950's and the 1960's and said, ``We need a new bomber line and can you change your jigs and your tooling a little bit and build us a bomber,'' and they say, ``Yeah, we can do it,'' because the conventional bombers were not that much different from conventional aircraft, the type you use for commercial airlines. If you have got a picture of that B-2 bomber, everybody knows it looks like a bat. It is very, very different from anything. I have got a poster that has got it on this side, if the gentleman would put that up for us. I have a poster right here. The B-2 looks different and is different from any conventional aircraft by a very, very wide margin. So the suppliers, if you look at that bat-shaped aircraft and all the different composites and components and things that allow it to evade radar, you do not want your commercial aircraft to evade radar, you want them to use radar because you want your flight control people to know where that plane is at all times. So it is a totally unique, different aircraft. We did not do what we did in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s and go to our domestic aircraft companies and tell them to reconfigure their domestic production line a little bit, just like Rosie the Riveter did in World War II, and make a bunch of war planes. We have a very unique set of suppliers that make the thousands and thousands of various components that comprise a B-2 bomber. If we close down that line, those people and a lot of them are small businesses, are going to go off and do other things. And if we get on the phone and call them up 10 years from now and say, It looks like we made a mistake; we need more B-2's, it is going to be enormously expensive to get that line started up again.

Mr. HUNTER. Could the gentleman recite the names of the people once again who signed that letter?

Mr. HUNTER. Do not forget Dick Cheney, the guy who won Desert Storm.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield further, the gentleman asked me what type of decision this would be if we decided to cut the B-2 bomber and eliminate it. I think that if we decide with this great technology, this ability to evade radar, having this technology in hand and giving it away, stopping it and terminating it, would be just as dumb as if in 1941 when we looked at our defense budget, we looked at all the things we were doing in 1941 and 1942 and we made a determination to stop spending money on radar. Radar was the greatest military invention of this century, the invention of the atomic bomb notwithstanding. The ability to evade that radar, to evade losing 2,200 pilots like we did in Vietnam, or 2,200 planes shot down, to evade having to watch your pilots being paraded by our adversaries on international television, to be able to bring your aircraft back so they can run another sortie, to give that away is just as dumb as if in 1941 some staff guy had said, ``Hey, I've got a great way to save money with the 1941 defense budget. Let's stop spending money on radar. It is one of those whiz bang things, and I think we need to have more horses in the cavalry.''

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield, that is roughly 5 percent of the procurement budget. We spend between $20 and $30 billion a year just for professional shoppers in the Department of Defense.

Mr. HUNTER. God bless them.

Mr. HUNTER. Which cost us about $6 billion in capital investment. Then when we flew those F-111's, those conventional aircraft, out of Great Britain, first there was a big political debate over whether they should even let us fly out of Great Britain because they were afraid of Libya. Finally, Maggie Thatcher, God bless her, let them fly out. Then France told us we could not fly the aircraft over France so we had to go around the perimeter of France, and we loose one of those aircraft. Probably one reason we lost it was just simple fatigue on the part of the pilots, because they had to do all these silly things because of international politics. If we had flown one B-2 aircraft out of the United States, we could have done the same job as that entire carrier battle group that had a $6 billion capital investment. I am for carrier battle groups and I am for force projection in a number of ways. But the point is that one thing we can always rely on its being able to fly out of airfields in the United States, and if you have got a bomber that will make it all the way and hit the target, you have quick reaction time, and that means deterrence. American mothers and fathers who do not want their youngsters to have to go out there and be part of an infantry division that stops a frontal assault believe in deterrence. Americans believe in deterrence. That is why the American people have always believed in the nuclear deterrent. That is why they have always allowed us to build these pretty ugly looking machines, because they did not want to have to fight the war. If you have enough B-2's, you will not have to fight some wars.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman would yield on that point, and I think it is important that our colleagues understand this, that when you go in, as we did in Desert Storm, and you have that package of conventional aircraft there, one of the first packages that we sent in to cover a number of targets in Desert Storm was a package of some 38 aircraft. Now, we sent in 38 aircraft, and I think half of the aircraft, four of the aircraft that actually dropped the bombs on the enemy targets, were A-6 aircraft, and the other four aircraft were British Tornadoes. So you had four bomb dropping aircraft. Then, to accompany all those aircraft and support them, you had 30 support aircraft. The 30 support aircraft did all kinds of stuff. Some of the support aircraft had to jamb enemy radar so they could not put SAM's on them. There were other support aircraft to suppress the SAM's themselves, to destroy surface to air missile sites. Then we had other aircraft there to engage enemy aircraft, so that if the enemy painted you with their radar and sent up interceptors, you could hold off the interceptors. We had to send out 38 planes just to get 8 planes that would actually drop bombs on the target. Now, when you send in your stealth aircraft, you do not send any of these support aircraft in with them. In fact, if you sent in a support aircraft with them that was conventional, that did not have stealth, the enemy aircraft would paint the escort plane. We found out that we actually knocked out targets on a 36-to-1 ratio, stealth aircraft over conventional aircraft. And I would tell the gentleman that Mr. Kasich admits that, who is a good friend of both of ours and is a proponent of this amendment to kill B-2. He says, Do not worry about that, because we have all those conventional aircraft, so we can send in the groups of 38 and 40 and 50. I have news for our friend. We have cut down the Air Force now in the last 3 years from 24 air wing equivalents to 13. We have cut the conventional Air Force almost in half. When Mr. Kasich reaches out for all those support aircraft, all those EA-6B's and all those A-6 aircraft, and all the tankers and all the other aircraft that he says we can afford to risk, they have been sent to the bone yard. We will have to go out to Arizona, pull them out of the bone yard, fire them up [[Page H 7983]] or get them back from military sales because they are gone.