Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton].

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. McCrery].

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Bartlett]. (Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 15 seconds to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan].

Mr. HUNTER. Reclaiming my time, I would not impute that same rationality to people like Saddam Hussein and Mu'ammar Qadhafi.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 15 seconds for one point, to make one point for my colleague. I just want to say to my friend, I did not state that we have not spent billions and billions of dollars. I agree we have spent billions and billions of dollars, but the American people are interested in the real state of play and in results. Right now we do not have defenses against missiles. Many of them think we have them. I think the work this committee is doing will bring about defenses, but we do not have them at this time. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of our time to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], the distinguished chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maine [Mr. Longley].

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan].

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon] for a response.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, let me just complete my point. My point is it does not take 10 years to just research a system. It takes 10 years to research and build a defensive system. So if you do not start now, if you are going to have the threat in 10 years, you cannot just have bare research at the end of 10 years. You have to have something in place when that missile is launched. That is the point that I am making. That means it is logical to start building a defensive system at this point. The last thing I would say is in 1987 a number of Republicans on the committee wrote the Nation of Israel, we wrote their defense minister. We said in a short period of time, at some point you are going to have Russian-made ballistic missiles from an Arab neighboring country coming into your country. We could not get any Democrat Members to sign it. We wanted it to be a bipartisan letter. They said the same thing you said, it is unrealistic. It was realistic, and a few years later it happened. So I think the tradition in this body has been to underestimate the speed of technology and technology implementation by our adversaries. That is my point. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes to respond to my friend from Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, let me just tell my friend it was Mr. Woolsey, who was the director of CIA for this President, a Democrat President, who said that within 10 years there would be a number of nations that had the ability to [[Page H5940]] deliver intercontinental ballistic missiles to the United States. As the gentleman knows, who watched the Patriot missile being developed in his own State, it was started in 1962, I believe, and delivered for the battlefield shortly before Desert Storm, it takes about 10 years to develop a missile system, and especially a complex antimissile system. So the first question I would ask the gentleman is, Does it not make sense to start developing systems now, if in fact you think the threat will be there in 10 years?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Hefley].

Mr. HUNTER. My colleagues, the ABM treaty is a promise, a treaty promise, that we will hold our citizens helpless and defenseless to a missile attack. In that sense it is an extraordinary treaty. There is no treaty that says we will hold our citizens defenseless to a tank attack, to a naval attack, to an aircraft attack, but we have a treaty that says we will hold our citizens defenseless to a missile attack. Now the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spratt] wants to elevate the ABM treaty to a Holy Grail, to an endorsement that is going to send a message, and the problem is it is going to send a message to one country, and there are now dozens of countries which are making missiles, unlike the situation that existed when we put the ABM treaty into its initial phase. So, we have a bill, and I would just say to the gentleman from South Carolina: If you were worried about the ABM treaty, you should have written General O'Neill. You should have said: Look at this bill, and, if you had any problems at all with the bill, if you had a response from General O'Neill saying this violates the ABM treaty, you could have carted it to Mr. Weldon, and he would have taken care of it. This bill does not violate the ABM treaty.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, let me respond to my friend and first say that the Republican budget, and that is this defense budget, adds money to housing, so I hope the gentleman is dissatisfied with President Clinton's budget, because that is the budget that we increased with respect to housing. Second, Mr. Chairman, Israel has housing shortages, but Israel devotes far more money to missile defense per capita than the United States does. That is because they live in a real world in which they have been threatened by missiles, they have been impacted by incoming missiles. It is that reality that is pressing us and compelling us to put forth the mark that we have. Missile defense is very important to our people in uniform.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, let me first say to my colleagues who have spoken about the reduction and the pending reduction in the Soviet arms arsenal, that was brought about by the Reagan and Bush administrations, which pushed forward with missile defense. So missile defense has not stifled arms reduction. It has produced arms reduction. [[Page H5949]] Second, the Russians are as worried as we are about the fact that we have this treaty between the two of us, and now you have dozens of missile makers around the world that never signed the treaty, and we both agreed to hold ourselves open, as open targets, for missile massacres on the basis that mutually assured destruction would deter war between Russia and the United States, but it says nothing about missile attacks by North Korea, by China, and by other adversaries. My colleagues, it is very important that we do not hold our constituents hostage to an agreement between two countries when you have many, many adversaries that have the capability of using that opportunity to hit the United States. Vote ``no'' on the Spratt amendment.

Mr. HUNTER. Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. My colleagues, for those who have complained about the $600 hammer, you are buying the $600 hammer today. You are paying for it. The difference is you are paying for part of it from the vendor and you are paying for the rest of it in the 300,000-person army that is the Pentagon bureaucracy that oversees this so-called competition. We are only spending about $40 billion a year in major weapons procurement. We are spending $30 billion a year, almost as much, in this army of personnel who are needed to oversee this very complex, heavily-regulated paperwork heavy system that we have created. So you are buying a $600 hammer, do not fool yourself. You are buying it right now. That means when you buy an aircraft that cost $200 million, you pay the Pentagon $100 million for the service of purchasing the aircraft. We are not going to be able to cut down this army, which is incidentally twice the size of the U.S. Marine Corps, if we do not cut the corresponding amount of paperwork at the same time. Please defeat the Collins amendment.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon] for giving me some time. [[Page H5867]] Mr. Chairman, this is a very ticklish subject and a very ticklish issue that requires a lot of balance. This is the money that we send to the Soviet Union and the aid we send to the Soviet Union for the purpose that rises in this Congress of helping the Soviet Union to dismantle and basically move the loaded guns that they have aimed at America's cities and America's military installations away from the target, and ultimately to unload those guns and take the bullets apart; that is, do away with the intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at the United States and dismantle those missiles. Now, this is tough and it requires a lot of balancing, and I think it requires some very close scrutiny. The reason it requires close scrutiny in balancing is because the Soviet Union, at the same time that they are dismantling a number of their weapons as a result of their arms accord with us, with the United States, they are also pursuing modernization programs for new nuclear weapons. The last thing the United States wants to be involved in doing is inadvertently giving money to the Soviet Union not to get rid of the old stuff, but to build new stuff, new weapons aimed at the United States. We know at least in theory, that for every dollar you give the Soviet Union, if they have a requirement under their treaties to dismantle a certain number of weapons, which they in fact have under the arms control treaties negotiated over the last 10 years, and they do not have to use that dollar in dismantling the weapons, those dollars, which are very dear and scarce in the Soviet Union, can then be turned toward modernizing and building new weapons. Because of that, the committee thought it was prudent to cut about $171 million out of the President's request. I think we have done the right thing, and I think the message to the administration is you had better give us more oversight or we are going to cut more next year.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I want to start out by thanking our great chairman of the Committee on National Security for his wonderful leadership through the hearings that we held, the many briefings, discussions, the inner workings from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans working to do what is best for America, and I want to compliment the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], ranking member of the full committee, for his hard work, and my counterpart, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton], who did so much to put together a good package that will give national security to this country. My colleagues, we lived through the 1980's and rebuilt American defense because we believed in a policy of peace through strength, and at times that policy was very heavily criticized. When the Russians were ringing our allies in Europe with SS-20 missiles, and many people here at home, particularly members of the leadership, some leadership in the Democrat Party, many leaders in the media, urged that we appease the then-Soviet Union, urged that we cut back on weapon systems, urged that we terminate our ICBM systems and our bomber development, thankfully, the leadership in the House and many Members of Congress did not go along with that policy. We believed in a policy of peace through strength, and we stood up to the Russians in Europe. We put where we start moving forward with our plan to put Pershings and ground-launched cruise missiles in. In Central America, where we moved to deny the Soviets and their proxies a foothold on our own continent, in Africa, in the deep water, with the rebuilding of our American Navy, we challenged the growing Soviet fleet, and interestingly, because we stood up to the Russians, we brought about peace through strength, and the Berlin Wall came down, and then we had a conflict in the Middle East. No Russians involved, purely a conventional conflict, and all of the systems that the Members of this Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations had put into the pipeline that were heavily criticized by the media in this country, the M-1 tank that ran out of gas too soon, the Apache helicopter that needed too many spare parts, the Patriot missile system that took too long to develop; all those systems, when deployed on the sands of the Persian Gulf, proved to be very excellent systems. They saved American lives, they brought home the great majority of those body bags that we sent to the Middle East empty. Well, we have moved to continue that rebuilding of national security, and let me tell you, Mr. Chairman, On our subcommittee, at your direction, we have rebuilt ammunition accounts, we have rebuilt precision guided munitions accounts. Those were those precision guided systems where you do not drop a hundred bombs on a target. You send one in at a bridge or that particular radar site and knock it out. We rebuilt American sealift. We started to add ships to our sealift accounts. We put in extra fighters this year. Last year we bought fewer fighter aircraft than Switzerland, that great warmaking power. We kept that industrial base alive. We tried to keep our sealift going. We put in basic things like trucks so that the army can be mobile, operation quickly. So we have started, Mr. Chairman, in the procurement subcommittee, moving ahead with the resumption of that policy that has not failed this country of peace through strength, and let me just say to my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], the ranking member of the full Committee on National Security, it is true that there is a State earmarking of this reactor that will build tritium. On the other hand, my observation is not too many States have been asking for the reactor and, as a matter of politics, probably would not. But I think it is clear that the Clinton administration itself has said that continued tritium production is an important thing, and it is important that we move forward with the way to do that, and I personally think that the reactor is the way to go, not the accelerator that has been proposed by the administration. So, my colleagues, I think we put forth a good package for the United States to resume this policy of peace through strength, and I would urge all members to support it.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I think it is important for use to recognize why we should spend 1 percent of the defense budget each year of B-2's. Mr. Chairman, we are back where we started. We look at the last week's Time Magazine and we see Scott O'Grady on the front of it. This is why [[Page H5879]] we started this program. Because in Vietnam we lost 2,300 Scott O'Gradys, and we lost them to the most important revolutionary technology development in this century in war fighting, the radar. That radar, when coupled with surface-to-air missiles, took down thousands of American planes in Vietnam. But we are the Americans. We say we are creative. We are innovative. And we got together, Democrats and Republicans, on the political side, our best scientists throughout this country, and we built an aircraft that could evade the SAM missiles and could be invisible to the radar. And that is what the B-2 is. And because of that, as the gentleman from Washington has said, one B-2 bomber can knock out the same 16 targets that it takes 75 conventional aircraft to knock out. We have got one question to ask ourselves tonight, in fact, in a couple of minutes you will make a very important vote. Because there are young men and women out there now training to be bomber pilots. You are going to make a decision as to whether or not they are flying a 40- year old aircraft, the B-52, or whether they are flying an aircraft that will protect them. If you say no, for the first time in this century we are telling our young people, we invented a technology that would protect you in wartime but we are not going to give it to you because it is too expensive. Vote for peace through strength. Vote for an affordable program. Vote for the B-2.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, today we are going to be voting on a very important measure, the measure offered by the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] and the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] to cut the B-2 bomber, and that vote, I think, is very much related to an incident that happened just a few days ago, and that was the shooting down of the F-16 aircraft that was carrying our pilot, Scott O'Grady, over the skies of Bosnia. During Vietnam, Mr. Speaker, we lost 2,300 aircraft, shot down, most of them picked up on SAM radar, surface-to-air missile radar, made in the Soviet Union, and hit by SAM missiles. So we developed a new technology, an ability to evade radar. That is a stealth technology that is embodied in the B-2 bomber. If we deny the B-2 bomber to our pilots, we are going to be doing something we never did in the history of American aviation, and that is tell our pilots and the crews that we had a system that could have protected them, but we did not do it. We did not buy it because we thought it was too expensive and they were not worth it.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words, and I rise in opposition to the amendment. Mr. Chairman, let me just take issue with the theme that was offered by my friend and colleague from the Los Angeles area and apply it to our situation in San Diego. In San Diego, we have the Scripps Institute, as has been said a number of times by the gentlemen from California, Mr. Filner and Mr. Bilbray and Mr. Packard, the best scientists in the world with respect to oceanography. Those scientists over many years have affirmed and reaffirmed that you do not need to do this $2 billion treatment program for the cleaning of San Diego sewage. We have literally thousands of projects throughout the country where you do have pollution problems, where you are begging for dollars. In the defense nuclear weapons complex, we have a $6 billion budget that has been submitted to us by the Clinton administration to clean up the nuclear waste that has been reposited through the years at our defense weapons installations. You have a lot of places where we can use this money. Here we have our own scientists, the best scientists in the world, who are not rebutted scientifically by anybody, saying, you do not have to spend $2 billion doing this. I have been in these meetings with EPA over the years, as Mr. Bilbray has. The basic theme that has come from them time and again in the meetings has been, we do not care what the scientists say. You have got to do it because it is the law. Here we are affording our colleagues and the taxpayers to do what is right, to do what is consistent with science, to do what is consistent with public safety and to save $2 billion. If we cannot understand that this blind adherence to this rigid philosophy that has made EPA frankly an enemy of many communities in this country, if we cannot understand that this philosophy needs to be changed, then we are going to be spending billions in the future that we do not need to spend.