Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Let me just say to my friend, we have people with varying ideas. Our point to the gentleman from South Carolina is, doggone it, let us have some hearings. Let us bring the Secretary in. Let us bring our experts from the national labs in. And let us make a decision. But let us not go with the gentleman from South Carolina's own choice, his own favorite choice, a ground-based system.

Mr. HUNTER. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, let me just answer the gentleman by saying that two of the most prestigious scientists in this country, one from Livermore National Laboratory, one from Los Alamos, said that a space-based system could be achieved for $7.5 billion. Let me just say further to the gentleman that the term ``star wars,'' at least as used by a lot of people who have used it for the last 20 years, means anything that shoots down an incoming ballistic missile. If they have a problem with that, I do not understand it. But certainly this system that Dr. Perry talked about is a system that engages incoming missiles in space. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon].

Mr. HUNTER. My question was, Mr. Chairman, if we are going to rely on deterrence, as the gentleman has suggested with national missile defense, and not have a national missile defense, why does not that same reliance on deterrence, why is it not being used in the theater, and why does the gentleman not endorse it in the theater? Instead of having a theater ability to shoot down an incoming missile, why not just say ``We are going to launch on Baghdad when you send a Scud at us?'' I think that is a legitimate question.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, would my friend yield for one brief question?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank my friend the gentleman for yielding. Let me just say to him that if this were a motion to adjourn or some kind of a delaying motion, I would agree with him completely. I am just saying to my friend, and I hope he will accept this, I think this is a very important part of arms limitation. It got a lot of us riled up when we saw it happening. You and I know the difference between having a vote in which you have real numbers on the scorecard instead of an acceptance where we say, ``Well, we accepted it to get it off the table and under the carpet.'' I do intend to call a vote on it because I think it is important to have a vote. I guarantee my friend I will be short of words for the rest of the day.

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

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, in closing let me say to my friends, this cuts the President Bush, Powell and Cheney baseline for national missile defense by 80 percent, and this vote, if you vote for Skelton, will lock in that 80 percent cut. Vote no on all of the amendments pending except for the chairman's amendment. The question is on the amendment offered by the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Spence] to the amendment offered by the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton].

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

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I would advise my friend, the gentleman from South Carolina, also to work with the administration and try to change their opinion. What I would like to do and what others would like to do is change the position of the administration and not constrain theater missile defense. I think it is a very difficult thing to do right now when the threat is evolving rapidly, and I think also the multilateralization is a problem.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will continue to yield, since I am the world's greatest expert on my own opinion and my own perception, I think it is a terrible mistake to enter in, when Navy upper tier, I think the best theater defense system that the Navy is developing, is possibly going to be constrained under what the President's negotiators have proposed, I think it is a mistake to impose limitations on theater defensive systems when we have a rapidly evolving threat coming from China, from North Korea, from other sources. My own opinion is I think we should not constrain theater defensive systems. I think we need to have our intelligence personnel appear before us. I think we need to see if Secretary Perry is going to prevail, and if General Shalikashvili is going to prevail.

Mr. HUNTER. No, Mr. Chairman. If the gentleman will continue to yield, there were two concerns expressed by the Republican leadership. One is multilateralization, bringing in the former Soviet States, Byelorus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and others, but it was also the limitations that are projected to be placed on the development of theater defensive systems that has upset both our own military people, who are concerned about protecting American military contingents in theater, and a number of people, I think, on both sides of the aisle. Therefore, the Chairman's resolution, as I understand, is a sense of the Congress resolution advising the President that we do not wish him to place constraints on theater ballistic missile systems through the ABM Treaty.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, let me say to my friend, and I have a lot of affection for our friend from Missouri also.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for his comments. With respect to national missile defense, what is the gentleman's feeling with respect to what the former Soviet States are doing, and with respect to what China and North Korea are doing?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I also thank my colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], who is one of our experts on missile defense. The gentleman is talking about H.R. 7, the Defense Revitalization Act, part of the Contract with America that is coming up in a day or 2 on the House floor. He is one of the few Members of this House, Mr. Speaker, who has had the experience of being shot down by an enemy missile in his illustrious career in serving in Hanoi.

Mr. HUNTER. But he managed to get five MiG's before they got him. I guest I would ask my friend, he has seen the language that places us square in the middle of the missile age. That is, it mandates that we develop theater defense against missiles, and we develop a national defense against missiles. I would asked the gentleman, what is your feeling with respect to our timing? Do you think we are coming too early, too late? What is your opinion with respect to missile defense?

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon] and then to my friend, the gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham], to ask first the gentleman from Pennsylvania about his feeling with respect to H.R. 7, the Contract With America, regarding missile defense of the Nation and missile defense of our theater forces.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for reminding us that the Secretary of Defense did say he could build a system for the type of attack that he expects in the context of expecting some type of an offense against the United States, what he calls a thin attack. He said he could do it for $5 billion in a couple in years, and I think that the gentlewoman who propounded that question, our friend Mrs. Schroeder from Colorado was a little bit shocked at his low number, because I think she came back and said, ``Wait a minute. What's it going to cost total?'' And he said, ``$5 billion total.'' In the context of the 5-year defense plan, that is roughly .004 of the total defense numbers, .004 of the budget. So that is not a number that is going to crowd out readiness or modernizing our military. The only thing that is going to crowd those things out is the President's budget itself. And the President himself has cut $9 billion just between FY 1995 and FY 1996 in modernization. So the President is doing the cutting. One slap of the pen by the President cutting $9 billion in modernization had doubled the impact on the modernization budget of building what Secretary Perry himself described as doable, that is, a missile defense nationally that will defend against the thin attack. So if we are asked would you rather have a defense that will defend against a thin attack or nothing, but absolutely naked, I think the American people say, give us something, give us some missile defense against that accidental launch or that third-world terrorist attack. I would be happy to yield to the fine gentleman from San Diego, my seat mate, Mr. Cunningham.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] for yielding. I have to say that you were my leader in the Reagan revolution on the House floor and did a wonderful job. The gentleman from Georgia, who has mentioned all the great accomplishments of Ronald Reagan, he himself standing here obviously is part of that Reagan record of accomplishment, because it was the great conservative message that he exuded that helped to bring the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] to this place and myself.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman. I know we may be out of time shortly. I just would advise my friends, I am going to take an hour and we can continue for a few minutes, if my friends have some other things to say. But you mentioned about the freeing of the world, a great part of the world under Ronald Reagan. The interesting thing is even though his adversaries classified him as a friend of the rich and the Republican fat cats and all of those derogatory things that they said, he really was a man of the people and not just a man of the average people in America, the middle class in America, but around the world. Because of his policies of peace through strength and pushing the Russian bear back and refusing to allow our allies to be intimidated by the Soviet Union and finally breaking down the Soviet Union, he created a situation in which literally millions of families around the world no longer had to sit huddled at their dinner table waiting for that knock on the door from a representative of their police state involving themselves in that family's affairs, taking off members of that family to the gulags, to the jails, to the prisons, because of their beliefs, because of their religious beliefs, their desire for freedom or their desire simply not to be ruled by a particular dictatorship or proletarian state.So Ronald Reagan freed literally tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people around this world who had very little relationship to the United States. And he did that, I might say, by rebuilding America's defense budget. I think it is appropriate that on his birthday, we reflect on the great things that he did in rebuilding national defense from that level in the 1970's, when we had 1,000 petty officers every month leaving the Navy because they could not support their families on what the Carter administration was paying them. I remember he brought us from that period when we had about 50 percent of our combat aircraft that were not fully mission capable because we had been cannibalizing those aircraft to get spare parts. And it is fitting and proper that we should talk about him today when President Clinton has dropped his defense budget on this Congress, because President Clinton's defense budget, I think, takes us back to those Carter days or starts us back to those Carter days. It is literally $100 billion in real terms, approximately $100 billion less than the budgets that we had in the middle of the Reagan administration. In fact, most of President Clinton's cuts that he gives great ballyhoo to have been taken from national security, taken from national defense. What did Ronald Reagan do? I can remember when the Soviet Union very aggressively in the mid-1980's was ringing our neighbors in western Europe with their SS-20 missiles. And they were greatly intimidating our neighbors. And Ronald Reagan moved forward against the advice of all the liberal Members of Congress and liberal pundits and liberal defense experts. He moved forward to put our own ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing missiles in Europe. That is, he stood up to the Soviet Union, and an apocalyptic situation was predicted by those on the left. They said, now you can have it. You are going to bring the country down. We are going to have a conflict with the Soviet Union. Yet a few days later, Mr. Gorbachev was on the phone and wanted to talk. Those talks blossomed into arms control treaties, real arms control treaties in which we trusted but verified. And they brought peace to a great deal of the world and ultimately resulted in our defense budgets coming down, although I think this President has taken them far below where they should prudently be. Ronald Reagan saved a ton of defense money by being strong at the right time. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Well, actually I think it would be very, very difficult for the United States to be engaged in two wars the magnitude of Desert Storm and win, and secondly, even if we won, it would be very difficult to win without taking enormous casualties. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said, as I recall, some months into the Clinton cutbacks that it would be very, very manner that we won it the first time, and there are two aspects to fighting this regional conflict.

Mr. HUNTER. It was a very short war because the United States has overwhelming force, and that was the point that I am getting to, that you reap a couple of benefits from having a vastly superior force. One is that you close the war down quickly by winning with overwhelming force, but the second is you do not bring a lot of young Americans back in body bags, and it was projected that we could have lost 40,000 people in Desert Storm, but because we were so successful in building enough weapon systems in the 1980s, like the M-1 tank, the Apache helicopter, the Patriot missile system, we were able to win quickly, and that saved thousands of Americans' lives.

Mr. HUNTER. I do not have the exact figure on the number of American casualties, but I believe the number of American KIA, killed in action, was less than 200, and interestingly almost a majority of those, or a majority of those casualties, came from the Scud attacks, just a few ballistic missile attacks which were made by Saddam Hussein, and that brings out the question as to why this President is cutting back on our antiballistic missile capability because we saw with just a few launches Saddam Hussein was not only able to show the world that he had offensive capability against the United States, but he was able to bring about our largest number of casualties when his Scud missiles hit the American barracks. So this President has cut back on theater ballistic missile defense systems, and that means our ability to stop an incoming missile that is launched by an enemy that is coming into our troop concentrations. Our old Patriot system was kind of a model T. It was kind of a model T Ford, and the incoming ballistic missile, the SCUD system, sold to Iraq by the Soviet Union, was kind of a model T also. They were both fairly slow moving in terms of modern warfare. But by golly, we shot down those missiles, a number of them in midair, and saved a lot of our troops. We had varying success, but at least we had something to shoot some of those missiles out of the air. This President ought to be accelerating the program. Let me tell the gentleman, you have the theater high-altitude defense program, this great Navy program where we already have the radars on the ships. We have to train them to be a little different. You have the missile tubes for the standard missiles. We need a little modification, and we can turn that system on the Aegis ships, which the President is cutting, we could turn those into theater defensive systems. So if we have a marine America amphibious force on the land in the Persian Gulf, say they just made a beachhead and are there with their tents and operations and artillery and are setting up, and SCUD missiles start coming in, our Aegis ships can back off of the land a little bit and throw up a protective umbrella around those marines with their antiballistic missile defense systems, they can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles that come in to threaten those marines. That program is called the Navy upper-tier program, the high end of this Navy program, which has a Navy lower tier that is kind of like the Patriot missile defense system, but the Navy upper-tier program that can shoot down the fast-moving incoming ballistic missiles, has been cut down to $30 million by the President. That may seem like a lot of money, but that allows us to basically terminate the program. It gives you just enough money to terminate the program, pay all the contractors you owe money to.