[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 124 (Friday, July 28, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7979-H7985]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              {time}  1545
         SIEZE THE OPPORTUNITY: CONTINUE B-2 BOMBER PRODUCTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fox of Pennsylvania). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from 
Washington [Mr. Dicks] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of 
the minority leader.
  Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, tonight I rise to address my colleagues and 
the American people on what I consider to be the most important defense 
decision that will be made by this Congress in this decade. This 
summer, the Congress will case a deciding vote on one of our most 
critical issues facing the future of our Nation's defense capability. 
What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Nation's only 
bomber industrial base and our ability to not only fight and win two 
major regional conflicts, as our current war fighting plans require, 
call for, but to deter such conflicts from arising in the first place.
  During the time of diminished resources and diminished threats, we 
are confronting the temptation to abandon efforts at maintaining our 
technological superiority. In the case of the B-2 Stealth bomber, seven 
former defense secretaries have issued a strong warning that such a 
move would risk one of the key factors that will allow us to meet 
future defense requirements. This is a warning that the President and 
Congress should not ignore, in my judgment.
  I have long been convinced, as have many in Congress, that the wise 
move at this time would be to harness the giant technological advances 
represented by the B-2's design and its capabilities in order to meet 
the new and difficult conventional power projection requirements. The 
wisdom lies not only in retaining the newest and least vulnerable of 
all the weapons we have already paid for, but also in the economic 
reality of defense downsizing.
  When you have fewer and fewer weapons and forces, there must be an 
even greater premium on technological superiority. Herein lies the 
essential reasoning for last year's congressionally led effort to build 
at least an additional 20 Stealth bombers, a force consistent with 
recommendations of several comprehensive defense studies, one done by 
Rand in Los Angeles, and on bomber requirements and with the 
recommendations of the seven Defense Secretaries made to President 
Clinton in January.
  Simply put, 20 B-2's do not represent enough bomber capability to 
meet our 

[[Page H 7980]]

Nation's future needs, even when supplemented by B-52's and B-1's. In 
conventional war, time plays the central role in guiding choices and 
measuring success. The significance of this maxim is magnified by the 
single most intriguing ``what if'' question of the Persian Gulf war: 
What if Saddam Hussein had not stopped at the Kuwaiti border and 
quickly proceeded into Saudi Arabia and elsewhere at a time when the 
United States and Allied forces in the region were minimal? Though we 
remember clearly the great victory of 500,000 allied troops over 
Saddam's Republican Guard, we should remember that we had nearly 6 
months with which to ship troops and materiel into the gulf.
  If Saddam's military advance had been immediate through Kuwait into 
Saudi Arabia, there is no doubt the cost both in terms of dollars 
expended and lives lost would have been much more severe on all of the 
allied nations, including the United States, in order to expel him. We 
cannot base our military capabilities on the assumption that we will 
have a long period to build up forces and unimpeded access to in-
theater basing.
  We were very fortunate in the gulf that the Saudi Arabian people had 
airbases, had port facilities. But if that had not been the case, we 
would have been faced with a much more daunting challenge.
  If the B-2 currently in production could have been deployed to the 
Persian Gulf, as Saddam Hussein was threatening to invade Kuwait, I 
believe the Iraqi dictator would have had a much more difficult 
decision to make before crossing the border into Kuwait. With a fully 
equipped fleet of Stealth bombers, the President could have launched a 
strike force of B-52's from either Whiteman Air Force Base or Diego 
Garcia, and with one aerial refueling they could have engaged Saddam's 
prized Republican Guard.
  In a Rand study, a simulation was conducted utilizing B-2's against 
one of Saddam's advancing armored divisions, consisting of 
approximately 750 combat vehicles.
                              {time}  1600

  The B-2's, armed with sensor-fused weapons known as skeet 
conventional munitions; they are currently in production and now coming 
into the inventory; managed to destroy 46 percent of those 750 combat 
vehicles, not only halting the armored division's advance, but 
inflicting so much damage that the division could not be reconstituted, 
and the people at Rand, I asked them had there ever been any other 
combination of conventional weapons that could stop a mobile division 
in the field, and their answer was, ``Congressman, there is no other 
combination of conventional weapons that could have stopped a moving 
division.''
  Extending the Persian Gulf scenario, which is clearly the type of 
conflict most representative of our national security challenges in the 
years ahead, we should look at how we would repel the invading Iraqi 
forces if Saddam had not given us a 5-month head start. We know the 
advantage of Stealth fighters, the F-117's with smart weapons, gave us 
when the allied attack actually began, but without the long-range 
Stealth-bomber capability in the early August days of the Iraqi 
advance, what assets would we have used?
  The answer is an expensive one, and this is the one that this 
administration is proposing to the Congress and one that I think is 
very, very foolish. With the existing fleet of bombers, primarily B-
52's that are now as old as their pilots' fathers, expensive standoff 
weapons would have been used capable only of hitting a fixed target 
rather than being able to engage moving divisions. Each of these cruise 
missiles would have cost 1.2 million, and usually an airplane would 
carry somewhere between 12 and 16 of them, and the cost of the 
conventional munitions such as the ones that would be on the B-2, which 
could penetrate against fixed targets, are about $20,000, and the cost 
of the skeet munitions, which I mentioned earlier, are about one-fourth 
the cost of a load of these expensive standoff cruise missiles, and 
remember that those skeet munitions, these are little pucklike weapons 
with a parachute. They come down over the battlefield, hit the tanks, 
the Bradleys, all the vehicles as they come into the country. Those 
would cost about a fourth versus the load of cruise missiles, but of 
course the cruise missiles do not have any capability against a mobile 
target, and the two most important things were the advancing division 
and actually the movement of Scud missiles. We were unable to detect 
those Scud missiles during the gulf war, and find them and destroy 
them. The B-2, or the Block 30 upgrade, would give us a new capability 
with better intelligence to find those Scud missiles, and if those Scud 
missiles had had chemical, or biological, or nuclear weapons, the 
outcome of the war in the gulf could have been vastly different.
  Now where B-2's are stealthy, survivable, and able to operate 
autonomously, nonstealth-bomber aircraft require significant protection 
including air escorts, fighters, and electronic jammers, and that is 
why I put this chart down here to show you the value of stealth.
  On the far side is a package of airplanes. I think it is about 76 
aircraft that would use nothing but dumb bombs. Then you have a package 
of airplanes using precision weapons, and then you got to the stealthy 
F-117's, and the major difference is that these nonstealthy aircraft 
were unable to go into the most heavily defended areas. They were 
forced to come back out, as General Horner has testified, and then, 
before we had gained total air superiority in the gulf, we used the F-
117's, and eight of them were able to be used to go in and knock out 
these surface-to-air missiles and do it in a very timely way, and what 
happened also was that our pilots in these stealthy airplanes survived. 
They were not shot down even though they were going in against the most 
heavily defended areas.
  And the comparison is, and here they have two B-2's because the Air 
Force never sends just one airplane, it always has two, but one B-2 is 
equivalent to these airplanes and to all of these stealthy aircraft--I 
mean nonstealthy aircraft in terms of their capability to attack these 
targets, and remember the standard package on the far right. All those 
76 planes were turned back. They could not get the job done. So stealth 
worked, we saved money, because we were able to use less-expensive 
weapons. They did not use the standoff weapons, and we were able to 
have all of our pilots survive. That is the value of this revolutionary 
technology.
  Now the saving comes not only in dollars, but in lives, and both, as 
I mentioned, are significant. In dollars we reduce the cost of weapons 
alone in the gulf scenario from approximately $2.24 billion per day for 
the expensive standoff weapons to about $300 million per day by 
utilizing the radar-evading
 capabilities of the stealth, and 1 week's savings during such a 
conflict could pay for nearly 20 additional B-2's. Even more important 
is the lifesaving ability of utilizing a much smaller attacking force 
of aircraft that can operate undetected in hostile airspace. The B-2 
can provide us with conventional deterrence, but if deterrence fails, 
it can help us win wars more quickly and with fewer losses.

  Mr. Speaker, I yield to my distinguished colleague, the chairman of 
the Subcommittee on Procurement of the Committee on National Security, 
and one of the real experts on defense and national security matters in 
the House. I yield to the gentleman from San Diego.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that tribute, and 
let me just say that he has been a real expert in the area of national 
security as one of the leaders in the Committee on Appropriations in 
the Defense Subcommittee, and he made a really important point, Mr. 
Dicks, and that is the point that you can deter wars by having lots of 
air power early in the war, and all of the studies, even the studies in 
which conclusions were drawn adverse to B-2's by the political elements 
in the administration, said that bombers can stop armor, and that means 
that when Saddam Hussein or others who have a desire to take territory 
that does not belong to them fire up their tanks and put them in third 
gear, the only way you can stop that armor quickly is with heavy bomber 
attacks. You cannot sail that carrier task force into that place where 
you can make those short, 200- or 150-mile sorties off the carrier 
deck. You cannot airlift and sealift all your troops over 

[[Page H 7981]]

in a very short period of time. The one thing you know you can do 
without permission from anybody in the world is take your bombers off 
from the United States of America, maybe relay them at the Deigo 
Garcia, or maybe, if you have another friendly airstrip around the 
world, and we have fewer of them now than we had a few years ago, you 
could take those bombers, and you can stop that armor attack, and 
having the ability to do that is a very, very important thing.
  Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, we have never had that kind of capability 
before because the B-52's and the B-1's only drop dumb bombs. They do 
not have the capability to drop smart conventional weapons.
  Now we hope to do that someday in the future on the B-1. I support 
that.
  Also, the gentleman, another important point to think about here is 
if that division is moving, it is going to have air defense 
capabilities. Russian air defenses have proliferated all over the 
world, and so, if you came in with the B-52, or the B-1's, or any other 
nonstealthy airplane, they would be shot down.
  Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman would continue to yield, the gentleman 
has really made the key point for those who appreciate stealth. We 
developed stealth because we lost 2,200 aircraft in Vietnam. We 
discovered that Russian-made SAM missiles were so effective that they 
could be taken to any Third World nation, at that point Vietnam, along 
with a short training course, and in a short period of time surface-to-
air missiles could be effectively operating against the best 
conventional aircraft that we had.
  Now that lesson was driven home to us a few weeks ago in Bosnia when 
our F-16 pilot strayed over an area that had an old Russian SAM missile 
that we overlooked, and that SAM missile went up and got that F-16 at 
over 20,000 feet. We decided to develop stealth because we were losing 
pilots at an enormous rate, our pilots are important to us, our 
aircraft are important to us, and, you know, probably the development 
of radar is considered to be probably the most important military 
invention of this century. Will the ability to evade radar--to be 
invisible to radar is probably the second most important military 
invention of this century, and we are threatening to throw away that 
enormous discovery if we stop the B-2 line.
  Mr. DICKS. And the gentleman is so correct. Think about our history 
in World War II. If the Germans had had a stealthy bomber force, they 
would have potentially defeated England. I mean it was the fact that 
those planes were not stealthy and radar was able to detect them that 
allowed during the Battle of London, you know, for their fighters in 
those days and their air defense system to function. I mean a stealthy 
airplane in those days could have been devastating to the effort in 
World War II.
  And also one other thing about this. We went through this whole thing 
about the vulnerability of battleships, and, what was it, Billy 
Mitchell finally flew over and dropped down a bag of flour on the 
battleship, and all of a sudden the battleship admirals had to admit 
that they were vulnerable to air
 attack. It is the same mind set here. These nonstealthy airplanes are 
vulnerable to being shot down, and that means, as you suggested with 
Captain O'Grady, that we are going to lose those lives, and that is why 
the revolution of stealth is so important. You can go into those 
heavily defended targets, knock out the surface-air-missiles, gain air 
superiority, and then you can use your nonstealthy equipment.

  Mr. HUNTER. OK, the gentleman has hit a very important point to every 
American, and that is called bring the crews back, bring your aircrews 
back. If you take that group of 75 aircraft, conventional aircraft, 
that are required to do the same job at the same 16 named points as one 
B-2 can hit, can cover, and two B-2's if you want to do it redundantly, 
that flotilla of conventional aircraft carriers about 147 crewmen.
  Mr. DICKS. That is right.
  Mr. HUNTER. So you have 147 crewmen at risk to hit the same targets 
where, if you use one B-2, you have two crewmen at risk, and, if you 
use two B-2's, you have four crewmen at risk, and the second point the 
gentleman made is really, really important when you went back to World 
War II.
  You know we were developing a nuclear weapon. Well, Adolf Hitler was 
developing a nuclear weapon, and we beat him to the punch, and they 
were very close to having their heavy-water experiments successfully 
converted at the time when we really closed in on the Third Reich. 
Similarly, the Nazis were building jet engines, and they were 
developing jet aircraft. The last aircraft, I believe it was the last 
one, that Chuck Yeager shot down with a propeller-driven aircraft was a 
German Jet. But we had a President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I 
say this as a Republican. He was a Democrat President who every time 
his inventors and his scientists came to him and said, ``Mr. President, 
we have something that will make this country stronger militarily,'' he 
would say, ``Do it, because the lives and safety of our people depend 
on it. Don't ever reject technology. You can't turn the clock back 
because the other guy is not turning the clock back.''
  If we reject this stealth technology that would bring back our pilots 
alive, this will be the first time in this century where we as Congress 
have told our pilots and their families, ``You know we could have 
protected you. We could have kept you safe from that SAM missile, but 
we didn't do it because we thought it was too expensive.''
  Mr. DICKS. It is because we cannot make any decisions about roles and 
missions, and it is not just this administration that has failed to be 
able to sort things out. The Bush administration with Cheney and Powell 
failed, as have Perry and Shalikashvili failed, to address the value of 
this and make room for this in the defense budget. In my judgment it is 
a disgrace to our country that, if we say that we are going to use B-
52's after the year 2000 that are going to be 50 to 60 years old, have 
a huge radar cross-section, and they are going to get shot down. I mean 
I do not know how we explain to these kids that we are going to go put 
them in harm's way when we have got a better way to go, and it is not 
that expensive.
  And the other thing that just bothers me so much in this whole thing 
is that the B-1B's, and I supported them, I did not like them at first, 
I thought the B-2's were better, but the B-1B's cannot penetrate either 
without being shot down because they are not stealthy, so we are going 
to wind up with a bomber force after the year 2000 where we have the B-
52's that cannot penetrate, the B-1B's that cannot penetrate, and we 
are only going to have 20 stealth bombers, and the gentleman knows so 
well all the respected studies have said, Rand has said, Jasper, Welsh, 
and Colin Powell told me at the White House a few months ago that he 
recommended 50 to Cheney, that what we need to have a capable bomber 
force for future challenges is somewhere between 40 and 60 bombers, and 
the gentleman has been in the Congress for many years and has risen to 
a point of major authority. Can you ever remember in modern history 
seven Secretaries of Defense writing a President and saying, ``Please 
don't stop this program?'' I mean, if that is not a repudiation of the 
Defense Department and its inability to sort our priorities, I do not 
know what is.
                              {time}  1615

  Mr. DICKS. Those seven Secretaries of Defense, including Harold 
Brown, whom the current Secretary of Defense worked for, they have said 
that this is such an important issue that we should continue the 
production of this and get enough of it now.
  The other problem with this, if we do not do it now, and come back to 
it in 5 years, it will cost 6 to 10 billion just to reopen the line. We 
will have wasted all the money we have invested in this and then we 
will not get any airplanes. Now we can get them for 15.3 for another 20 
airplanes. To not do it at this juncture is, I think, the most serious 
mistake we will have made in the two decades I have been involved in 
defense policy on Capitol Hill.
  Mr. HUNTER. Would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DICKS. I yield to my distinguished friend.
  Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman has made a great point. Seven former 
Secretaries of Defense wrote this President in a very, very serious 
vein and 

[[Page H 7982]]

said do not stop this program. The President has decided to ignore 
them. Recently, Dick Cheney sent out a second letter that was 
distributed to Members of the House, and I think all of us, you and I 
especially, who are good friends of Dick and remember being with him, 
and it was a joy to serve with him on the House floor, remember his 
wisdom in many, many areas of defense. He is strongly for this bomber.
  One reason he is for it is Dick Cheney was a realist. He was a man 
who did not say a lot. I can remember him making very few speeches on 
the House floor, but one thing he said stuck in my mind. He said, 
``There will be another war, and we cannot control that. We can control 
whether we are prepared for it or not.''
  When the gentleman said, How can we make such a dumb mistake as to 
cut down our bomber force down to such a low level? I will tell the 
gentleman how it came about that we came up with this dumb idea, and 
now that General Lowe is a civilian and not controlled by President 
Clinton, he says it every day, and he wrote a letter to us even while 
he was in the uniform saying you would take enormous risks. We had an 
administration looking at this little bitty bomber force, smaller than 
it has ever been in our modern history and saying, How can we stretch 
this thing between two wars?
  America has to be ready for two wars because if we get engaged in the 
Middle East, we cannot presume that our adversaries in North Korea, for 
example, are not going to jump in the fray knowing that we are occupied 
and tied up in one place. We have to be prepared to handle two wars at 
the same time, and the Clinton administration was faced with this. How 
do you stretch this small bomber force between two wars?
  I understand some staff guy came up and said, I tell you what we will 
do, and it was probably a guy with no military experience, and he said, 
we will just swing the bombers back and forth between the wars.
  Now, you ask General Lowe, what if you swing the bombers out of one 
war theater, let us say Korea to go to the Middle East, because you 
desperately need them in the Middle East, and your adversary, who sees 
them going and leaving decides to mount a heavy armor attack. I asked 
General Lowe what would happen. He said, ``You could take big 
casualties.'' Big casualties mean American men and women, soft bodies, 
coming home in body bags.
  There may be a time in our history when somebody looks back to say, 
who made this crazy idea that you could swing bomber forces back and 
forth between wars
 with no problems, and they will point to some staff guy who stood up 
at a meeting with the way to save money, and who probably had no 
military experience. I know no uniformed people who will say that that 
is a smart idea.

  Mr. DICKS. The other problem is, those bombers, those B-52's, which 
we will have 66 of, and the 90-plus B-1B's, they cannot go into those 
heavily defended targets because they will get shot down. They have 
extroardinarily limited capability.
  The other problem we have is that today, off of our aircraft 
carriers, we do not have a stealthy airplane. That means that those 
attack aircraft, the F-18's, have only a limited capability to go to 
the deep targets early in a war situation. Now we are reduced to only 
having 50 F-117's, and, literally, only 16 of the 21 B-2's would ever 
be available at any one time. Then we are going to chop off our stealth 
capability. Now, that is the biggest mistake that has been made, and I 
want to just even the score up here, that decision was made during the 
previous administration, and, as Cheney has pointed out, it was a 
political reality that Chairman Aspin at that time kind of put forward.
  It was a political reality. We did the best we could in the 
circumstances. Now, however, with a new Congress, and a Congress that 
is putting more money into defense, we have an opportunity to take some 
of that additional money and invest it in keeping alive this stealth 
technology.
  This is enormous value. We are buying something that will save 
American lives. We are buying something that will get the job done. If 
we had 60 bombers of these B-2's, and put 20 at Diego Garcia, 20 at 
Guam, and 20 at Whiteman Air Force Base, and loaded them up with smart 
conventional submunitions, like the centrifuge weapon where we had this 
division killing capability, I think you would deter North Korea, Iran, 
and Iraq.
  Think about this. If Saddam had known, and if we had demonstrated 
that we had this capability and Saddam had known it, and let us say he 
might have been deterred, first of all, but let us say he was not and 
he came in, and we flew the B-2's in over that moving division, and, 
with those smart submunitions, destroyed that division. Do you know 
what it cost us to go out there and fight that war and move all that 
equipment from Europe and America out there? That cost $10 billion just 
to get the equipment out there, and then we had to spend $60 billion 
with our allies to win the war.
  We have in our own potential the capability of possessing something 
that could have stopped it from happening in the first place so that 
not one single American life would have been lost. None of our kids 
would have come home with these chemical diseases and other problems 
that they have had because we had something that we could have used 
that would have gotten the job done.
  In my whole career in Congress, I have never been more disappointed 
in any decision. It is a shame. It is an absolute shame that this is on 
the verge of happening. I just hope that the gentleman from California, 
and I and our colleagues, when they search out the truth here, will 
listen to the seven former Secretaries of Defense, listen to General 
Horner, who conducted the air war in the gulf, who said if he had had 
the B-2 he would have used it, because in the first couple days of the 
war, the F-117's flew 2.5 percent of the sorties but knocked out 32 
percent of the targets.
  Stealth works and it makes it possible for our
   kids to survive. And we proved it. It is proven.

  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.
  Mr. DICKS. The gentleman is so correct.
  I want to talk to my colleague a little bit about the money involved 
in this. Before my good friend got here I mentioned the fact that there 
is a great difference in the cost of the weapons. The administration 
says we will use standoff weapons, cruise missiles. Those standoff 
cruise missiles cost $1.2 million per missile. The cost of the bombs on 
the B-2--they are JDAMS, as the weapon of choice--cost $20,000. So 20 
times 16 is, what, $320,000. That is one-fourth the cost of one 
missile.
  There is an enormous difference because they can fly in over the 
targets and drop those 16 bombs. Now, the cost of the centrifuge 
weapon--and I will explain this, too. This is a new revolutionary 
conventional submunition. A B-2 would carry 36 of these bombs. Each 
bomb has 40 bomblets. So you are talking about 1,400 little bomblets 
from each plane. They are like a skeet and on the top of it you have a 
little parachute and you come in over the moving division. This thing 
will cover like 2,100 yards by 9 miles deep, and a moving division, you 
fly in and
 drop these things down. It hits the tanks and the vehicles and 
according to the Rand study it will knock out 46 percent of the 
mechanized vehicles.

  So it is a much less expensive weapon than what we will have to use. 
The ones coming off the B-52 and the B-1's can only go to a fixed 
target. They have no capability against a mobile division moving in the 
field. The B-2 gives you the ability to attack the mobile division 
coming in and also to go into the heavily defended areas with 16 2,000-
pound bombs.
  Remember the gulf war the first day. It was the F-15 Eagle or the F-
117 that dropped one of those 2,000-pound bombs right down the elevator 
shaft of the opposing air commander's building. This is a revolution 
that is going on out here.
  I know what my friend and colleague and I are worried about is that 
here America will turn its back on the technology that gives it the 
advantage for the future and we are not going to buy enough of it when 
the line is open out in California to have a credible bomber force for 
the future. We can save money during this. We can use the B-2's and use 
much less expensive weapons than the standoff cruise missiles that are 
much more expensive and not nearly as effective. I would yield to my 
colleague if he wants to comment on that.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for making that point, because you 
have made the precise point about one of the biggest threats that we 
have, and that is in the post-cold-war world discovering one day that 
somebody like a Saddam Hussein has fired up his armor forces, his 
tanks, and is moving across an international line. It is very, very 
difficult to stop him quickly.
  Now, Saddam Hussein, as Colin Powell said, was a character right out 
of central casting. He let us build up other forces to the point where 
we overwhelmed him. But the thing that you want to do----
  Mr. DICKS. Which had to be one of the dumbest military moves in the 
history of warfare.
  Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely. We built up this massive force, but what you 
want to do to really save casualties and to deter that enemy from 
really crossing that international line is to get air power in and stop 
the armor, destroy the tanks.
  This munitions and submunitions that my friend Mr. Dicks has 
described is the way our technicians and our scientists have figured 
out to stop heavy armor advances without having to throw a lot of 
American boys, a lot of soft bodies and infantry divisions out there in 
harm's way.
                              {time}  1630

  American air power is a way to save lives. This is a real 
breakthrough in American air power.
  If the gentleman will continue to yield, I think of one other 
example. When we hit Mr. Qadhafi in Libya after he had assassinated 
Americans, and we had proof of that, and we struck him in Tripoli, we 
decided we were going to do that partly with naval projection, and we 
moved a lot of naval ships into the Gulf of Sidra, right outside the 
Gulf of Sidra.
  Mr. DICKS. Two carrier battle groups.
  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. DICKS. On that point, what it says to me is that we are in a very 
different world in the post-cold-war era. We face terrorists, we face 
people like
 Qadhafi. We have situations like North Korea, Iran, Iraq where there 
is peril out there that has already been demonstrated. We have also 
seen that sometimes, even with our nuclear deterrent, because people do 
not think we will use it, that someone like Saddam invades.

  But the revolution here in technology, with precision-guided 
munitions and these smart submunitions and a bomber with long range and 
stealth, means that we now have a conventional capability that if 
deterrence fails we can destroy that man's divisions, and he has got to 
take that into account because he knows we could use that capability 
unlike nuclear weapons where the American people do not want to use 
them unless the survival of the country is at stake. I think it is this 
compact kind of weapon that we need for the future.
  As the gentleman and I both know, we have gone through a major 
reduction in defense spending. People forget that in 1985, if we took 
today's dollars, we were spending about $350 billion on defense. We 
have cut it down to $250 billion. The gentleman is an expert on 
procurement. We have reduced the procurement budget from $135 billion 
down to $40 billion. Yes, the Republican Congress is putting a little 
bit of money back into defense, and that helps.
  Mr. HUNTER. God bless them.
  Mr. DICKS. And I support that aspect of it, especially because we 
need a little bit more money in there for procurement. But we have 
already reduced defense spending by 37 percent. We need to have a 
technological advantage in order to be able to prevail in the future 
with a much smaller force. What the B-2 allows us to do is keep America 
secure for the future, because even though we have got a smaller Army, 
a smaller Navy, a smaller Air Force, we still would have a highly 
credible force.
  Another point is, we are going to have fewer air bases abroad. That 
is why having a bomber that can go one-third of the way around the 
world with one aerial refueling is really a revolutionary capability.
  I had a hearing the other day with Brent Scowcroft. I said, ``Tell me 
about the 3 days before the war started.''
  He said, ``Norm, people always say we are going to have actionable 
warning time. Well, there was not any actionable warning time because 
the intelligence
 community was telling us that 

[[Page H 7984]]


Saddam was preparing to invade, but all the leaders in the gulf were 
saying he would not do it, so we did not do anything. We did not take 
any steps.''
  For this administration, for the Cominsky study to say that there is 
going to be 14 days of actionable warning time so we can move 800 
tactical aircraft to the gulf in order to stop the guy from coming in 
is laughable. It is a joke.
  When in the history of this country have we had 14 days of actionable 
warning time? We certainly did not have it at Pearl Harbor, we 
certainly did not have it in the Korean war, and we certainly did not 
have it in the war in the gulf.
  What this country needs is the ability within a matter of hours to 
interdict an invading division, whether it is in Korea or in the gulf 
or anywhere else, and stop it with long-range bombers that are stealthy 
and survivable, that will get the job done. This is a revolutionary 
potential.
  To stop it prematurely, to not get enough, there is not one study 
that says 20 of these bombers is enough. Every study that has been done 
says you need somewhere between 40 and 60 so you can get the sortie 
rates up, so you can use the whole potential of them. Then you can have 
a smaller bomber force, get rid of some of the older planes to take 
care of life cycle costs, and there are many ways we can finance it.
  The gentleman from California is an old pro up here. You have been on 
the Hill as long as I have. I went back to our staff on the defense 
appropriations subcommittee and I said, ``How much do we cut out of 
that budget every year in low-priority items?''
  For the last 2 years, even when the budgets are down, with a $250 
billion budget being sent up here, the professional staff of the 
Committee on Appropriations with the chairman and the ranking member 
have cut out $3.5 billion a year, in just things you do not need to do, 
that are not important, low priority, and can be put to the side. All 
we are asking in order to keep this thing going, to keep this line 
open, is about $2 billion a year in Air Force procurement.
  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. DICKS. It is a joke that we have reduced
   procurement from $145 billion down to $40 billion and we still have 
as many people over there as we have had in the past. I commend the 
gentleman for his initiative to try and reduce the number of those 
people, because that saving can also help us pay for the B-2.

  But remember something: I think, and can the gentleman think, I do 
not think there is one thing in this budget in procurement that I can 
think of that has more defense potential capability for this country 
than the B-2. So how can anyone say, ``We cannot afford it''? But we 
are going to buy a bunch of other things that are not real important, 
that are not stealthy, that cannot get the job done, but we are going 
to buy them because we have already made up our budgetary mind to say, 
``We have this much for the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force and we 
can't make any hard decisions on roles and missions and we can't face 
the reality.'' It reminds me of those old admirals in the Navy who were 
defending the battleships. They just did not get it. This is the 
future. Stealth technology is the future. We are about to end this line 
in California and it will go down as the greatest mistake in the 
history of this country from a military perspective. It ranks with not 
being prepared for World War II.
  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. DICKS. ``We'll do it with stand-off capabilities.''
  The gentleman has asked me and I wanted to put up this chart. This is 
a chart that shows the letter that was written by seven former 
Secretaries of Defense, including Harold Brown, who is the father of 
stealth technology, and let me read it to my colleague.
  Mr. HUNTER. Do not forget Dick Cheney, the guy who won Desert Storm.
  Mr. DICKS. Right. Let me read this letter. I think the American 
people need to know what the President received on January 4. I want to 
tell the names here: Mel Laird, Jim Schlesinger, Donald Rumsfeld, 
Harold Brown, Caspar Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, and Dick Cheney.

       Dear Mr. President: We are writing you to express our 
     concern about the impending termination of the B-2 bomber 
     production line. After spending over $20 billion to develop 
     this revolutionary aircraft, current plans call for closing 
     out the program with a purchase of only twenty bombers. We 
     believe this plan does not adequately consider the challenges 
     to U.S. security that may arise in the next century, and the 
     central role that the B-2 may play in meeting those 
     challenges.
       At present the nation's long-range bomber force consists 
     primarily of two aircraft: the B-52 and the B-1. The 95 B-
     52's are all over thirty years old, and their ability to 
     penetrate modern air defenses is very doubtful. The 96 B-1's 
     were procured as an interim bomber until B-2's were 
     available.
       Even after all twenty B-2's are delivered, the inventory of 
     long-range bombers will total barely 200 aircraft. This is 
     not enough to meet future requirements, particularly in view 
     of the attrition that would occur in a conflict and the 
     eventual need to retire the B-52's. As the number of forward-
     deployed aircraft carriers declines and the U.S. gradually 
     withdraws from its overseas bases, it will become 
     increasingly difficult to use tactical aircraft in bombing 
     missions. It therefore is essential that steps be taken now 
     to preserve an adequate long-range bomber force.
       The B-2 was originally conceived to be the nation's next 
     generation bomber, and it remains the most cost-effective 
     means of rapidly projecting force over great distances. Its 
     range will enable it to reach any point on earth within hours 
     after launch while being deployed at only three secure bases 
     around the world. Its payload and array of munitions will 
     permit it to destroy numerous time-sensitive targets in a 
     single sortie. And perhaps most importantly, its low-
     observable characteristics will allow it to reach intended 
     targets without fear of interception.
       The logic of continuing low-rate production of the B-2 thus 
     is both fiscal and operational. It is already apparent that 
     the end of the Cold War was neither the end of history nor 
     the end of danger. We hope it also will not be the end of the 
     B-2. We urge you to consider the purchase of more such 
     aircraft while the option still exists.

  Mr. HUNTER. Could the gentleman recite the names of the people once 
again who signed that letter?
  Mr. DICKS. I will be glad to do it. Melvin Laird, former member of 
the Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations; Jim 
Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy, head of 
the CIA; Donald Rumsfeld; Harold Brown; Caspar Weinberger; Frank 
Carlucci, and our good friend and former colleague Dick Cheney who was 
involved in the
 decision with Les Aspin to go to 20. He has now written us a letter 
saying he only did it because the political realities of the time were 
such. But he signed this letter that we need to keep this low-rate 
production.

  There is a major industrial base problem. I come from the State of 
Washington. The great Boeing Co. is in my State.
  I went to them and I said, ``Tell me, if the Congress kills this, and 
we have to do it again, how long do you think it would take us to build 
a B-3?''
  They said, ``It would take 15 years, from start to finish.''
  I said, ``How would it differ from the B-2?''
  They said, ``It wouldn't differ from the B-2. We would have basically 
built 

[[Page H 7985]]

the same airplane. We build a plane that has long-range, enormous 
carrying capability and is stealthy and would look a lot like the B-
2.''
  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.
                              {time}  1645

  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. DICKS. General Skantze, who was one of our best procurement 
people in the history of the Air Force wrote me a letter, a very strong 
statement saying:

       There are no bomber engineering design teams left at 
     Rockwell or Boeing. Nor can you assemble them overnight, nor 
     do they come up with a sophisticated design in less than 2 or 
     3 years at best. Building Boeing 747's is no more like 
     building B-2's than building Cadillacs is like building 
     M1A2's.
       Ask the Boeing people who build the After Center Section 
     and the Outboard (Wing) Sections of the B-2. The Aft Center 
     Section of the B-2 begins manufacturing and parts 
     fabrication; assembly of bulkheads, skins, panels, and beams. 
     Then it goes into sub assembly of spars, carry through 
     assembly, keel beams, upper panels and ribs. Most of this 
     work involves careful layups of special composite materials. 
     The final assembly goes through clean, seal, paint, 
     installation, test, and preparation for shipment.
       Most of this is very sophisticated composite work and 
     assembly with tolerance of thousandths of an inch. The 
     process takes 37.5 months. When this assembly comes together 
     with the Outboard Section, the Intermediate Sections, and the 
     Forward Center Section at the B-2 final assembly at Palmdale, 
     California, the buildup goes through an excruciatingly 
     accurate mating process to ensure the careful laser-measured 
     joining preserves the aircraft outer mold line, which is 
     fundamental to the very low radar signature.
       The resulting total flow time from the B-2 from lead time 
     to rollout is currently 6 years.

  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. DICKS. I want to say one final thing. This is a bipartisan effort 
and the support for the B-2 has always been bipartisan. I just hope 
that the people who are watching C-SPAN all over this country will let 
their Members know and then tell them what they think about this.
  This is not just some pork barrel project. This is the future 
security of our country. I enjoy working with the gentleman from 
California [Mr. Hunter], because I know he too cares about the future 
of our country; he too has seen too many body bags come home and know 
we have a way to prevent that, to save American lives, and to have a 
less expensive program. Because we can have fewer people in the 
military if we have this technological superiority and we can save 
money for the taxpayers; we can save American lives in future 
conflicts, and we can, I hope, some day have a conventional deterrent 
in the B-2 that will prevent a future war. Then everyone will recognize 
why we fought so hard to try and save this capability.
  Mr. Speaker, I submit the following:

                                                  January 4, 1995.
     The President,
     The White House, Washington, DC.
       Dear Mr. President: We are writing you to express our 
     concerns about the impending termination of the B-2 bomber 
     production line. After spending over $20 billion to develop 
     this revolutionary aircraft, current plans call for closing 
     out the program with a purchase of only twenty bombers. We 
     believe this plan does not adequately consider the challenges 
     to U.S. security that arise in the next century, and the 
     central role that the B-2 may play in meeting those 
     challenges.
       At present the nation's long-range bomber force consists 
     primarily of two aircraft: the B-52 and the B-1. The 95 B-
     52's are all over thirty years old, and their ability to 
     penetrate modern air defenses is very doubtful. The 96 B-1's 
     were procured as an interim bomber until B-2's were 
     available.
       Even after all twenty B-2's are delivered, the inventory of 
     long-range bombers will total barely 200 aircraft. This is 
     not enough to meet future requirements, particularly in view 
     of the attrition that would occur in a conflict and the 
     eventual need to retire the B-52's. As the number of forward-
     deployed aircraft carriers declines and the U.S. gradually 
     withdraws from its overseas bases, it will become 
     increasingly difficult to use tactical aircraft in bombing 
     missions. It therefore is essential that steps be taken now 
     to preserve an adequate long-range bomber force.
       The B-2 was originally conceived to be the nation's next 
     generation bomber, and it remains the most cost-effective 
     means of rapidly projecting force over great distances. Its 
     range will enable it to reach any point on earth within hours 
     after launch while being deployed at only three secure bases 
     around the world. Its payload and array of munitions will 
     permit it to destroy numerous time-sensitive targets in a 
     single sortie. And perhaps most importantly, its low-
     observable characteristics will allow it to reach intended 
     targets without fear of interception.
       The logic of continuing low-rate production of the B-2 thus 
     is both fiscal and operational. It is already apparent that 
     the end of the Cold War was neither the end of history nor 
     the end of danger. We hope it also will not be the end of the 
     B-2. We urge you to consider the purchase of more such 
     aircraft while the option still exists.

     Melvin Laird.
     James Schlesinger.
     Donald Rumsfeld.
     Harold Brown.
     Caspar Weinberger.
     Frank Carlucci.
     Dick Cheney.
     

                          ____________________