[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 125 (Monday, July 31, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H8022-H8029]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             SPECIAL ORDERS


         seize the opportunity: continue b-2 bomber production

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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, I took this special order today in order to 
again be able to present my very strong and deeply held concerns about 
the future 

[[Page H 8023]]
of the U.S. defense policy and defense posture. I have served on the 
defense committee on appropriations for the last 17 years, and I can 
remember very well, almost vividly, when President Carter and Secretary 
Harold Brown made the decision to start producing a stealthy long-range 
bomber known to the American people as the B-2 bomber.
  We are now at the point in this program where we have committed 
ourselves to purchase 20 of these B-2 bombers. They are being delivered 
to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. They have met, according to 
Secretary Darleen Druyun, all requirements under the block 10 
configuration, and they will be steadily improved between now and the 
year 2000.
  In the defense appropriations bill and in the defense authorization 
bill in the House, there has been authorization and a recommendation to 
the House to appropriate funds to do two additional planes, the long-
lead for two additional planes, and I want to rise today in very strong 
support of that recommendation.
  We have a very difficult problem as we look at our bomber force. 
Today America possesses over 90 B-52's, and over 90 B-1B's. They 
represent the bulk of our American bomber force. Unfortunately, neither 
one of these bombers are able to penetrate air space where we have 
Russian surface-to-air missiles. One of the problems we face today is 
that Russian surface-to-air missiles have proliferated around the 
world. In fact, just a month ago, when Capt. Scott O'Grady was shot 
down, he was shot down by an A-6, a Russian surface-to-air missile in 
Bosnia, and he was flying a nonstealthy airplane.
  One of the lessons that we learned in the Gulf war in the first 10 
days of that war is that the F-117's, the stealthy attack aircraft, 
were used for only a small number of sorties, about 2.5 percent of the 
sorties, but they were able to knock out 40 percent of
 the most difficult targets. The reason for that is when you put smart 
conventional weapons together with stealth, you are able to go in 
against the most heavily defended targets, knock them out, destroy 
those surface-to-air missiles, destroy those radars, and the pilots are 
able to then come out and survive.

  This is a truly revolutionary capability. If you think back to World 
War II, if you think back to Vietnam and Korea, we lost a lot of our 
planes and a lot of our pilots because they were shot down. As I have 
mentioned, with the proliferation of Russian surface-to-air missiles in 
Korea, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, all over the world, China, our planes, if 
they fly in over enemy airspace, are going to get shot down unless they 
are stealthy.
  So the decision that we are about to make on whether we should 
continue to build the B-2 bomber is, in my judgment, one of the most 
important defense decisions that we will make in this decade.
  I happen to believe that the B-2 bomber offers us a revolutionary new 
conventional capability. You have got long range. This plane can fly 
over 5,000 miles, and, with one aerial refueling, it can go one-third 
of the way around the Earth.
  When you combine that with smart conventional munitions, JDAM's or 
GATS/GAM or the sensor-fused weapon, you give this airplane a 
tremendous conventional capability.
  Rand did a study in 1991 that looked at what would have happened if 
we had had the B-2 operation and we had loaded it up with sensor-fused 
weapons against Saddam Hussein's invading division from Iraq into 
Kuwait. In that scenario, three B-2's, each B-2 would have had about 
1400 of these little bomblets, and they would come down with little 
parachutes and hit the moving Iraqi vehicles, this division in column, 
and they were able in this scenario, in this simulation, to knock out 
46 percent of those moving mechanized vehicles, and that includes 
tanks.
  We have never had that kind of a conventional capability against a 
mobile division. That is why I think this is such an important 
decision. Rand, General Jasper Welch, and I even asked Colin Powell, I 
said what would be the ideal number of B-2's? And in each of these 
studies, the recommendation was somewhere between 40 and 60.
  So I believe that the decision on the part of the House thus far to 
go forward with longlead for two additional planes is a very important 
decision.
  The other point is that we have an industrial base out in California 
where we produce the B-2 at Palmdale, and the Northrop Co. receives 
parts from all over the country, but particularly parts from Texas and 
Washington and other States, Ohio, and they put that plane together 
there. That industrial base, in my judgment, is very important, for if 
we shut this line down and we have a bomber force today which is not 
adequate in my judgment to the future challenges, then it is going to 
take us a number of years to get that line reopened.
  In fact, if we wait 5 years, I am told it will cost somewhere between 
$6 and $10 billion just to reopen the line. For that, we will get no 
additional airplanes. So if we keep the line open now and start moving 
toward buying the right number of B-2's, we can save the taxpayers a 
great deal of money.
  Now, I also want to talk about the administration's very, I think, 
flawed study on the bomber force. That study I think was flawed in 
several respects. First of all, it said that we were going to have in 
the future 14 days of actionable warning time in order to move tactical 
aircraft like the F-16's, and F-15's, and F-18's out to wherever the 
problem would be in the world.
  Well, we did not have 14 days of actionable warning time before Pearl 
Harbor, we did not have 14 days of actionable warning time before the 
Korean war.
                              {time}  1530

  We only had about 3 days of actionable warning time before the gulf 
war. And because the picture was clouded, as it always is in these 
situations, with the intelligence community saying, yes, we think 
Saddam Hussein is going to invade, and the leaders in that part of the 
world saying, no, he would never do that, then we took no steps 
whatsoever.
  In fact, had it not been for the 5 months that Saddam Hussein gave 
us, he could have kept coming. He could have gone right into Saudi 
Arabia. And it took us 5 months to get all the equipment out there in 
order to be able to effectively deal with his invasion and to throw him 
out of Kuwait.
  Now, what if we do not have 5 months to build up our forces? What if 
it is in a place in the world where there is not appropriate 
infrastructure, landing fields, and harbors and everything else that 
was necessary and fortunately was available to us in Saudi Arabia so 
that we could move our forces? What if that does not exist?
  Then it is the condition of the bomber force that that force can 
react in a matter of hours. That is going to be crucial for the 
security interests of our country.
  I am convinced that if Saddam Hussein had known that we had 60 B-2's, 
20 in Guam, 20 in Diego Garcia, 20 at Whiteman Air Force Base, he might 
have thought long and hard. If they were married up with a sensor fused 
weapon, the smart conventional submunition that I described earlier, 
that if he had known that, he might have thought long and thought long 
and hard about whether he should invade because he would have known 
that his Republican Guard would have been destroyed before it got into 
Kuwait.
  That is, in my judgment, my colleagues, a revolutionary conventional 
potential capability. So buying enough of this airplane I think makes a 
great deal of sense.
  The other problem is in the weapons, in the administration's study on 
bombers. They say we should rely on standoff capabilities. In other 
words, we should load up the B-52's and the B-1's that cannot penetrate 
with long-range cruise missiles. Well, there are a couple problems with 
that. The first problem is that the long-range cruise missiles cost 
$1.2 million per missile. So, if you have 12 to 14, you can do the 
math, it is going to cost somewhere between $15 and $20 million for a 
load, for one plane load of those missiles.
  The other problem is they can only go to a fixed target. They have no 
utility against a mobile target, a mobile division moving in the field. 
They also will not help us go after the launchers, the mobile launchers 
that the Scud missiles utilized. So they have very major deficiencies.
  What are the costs of the weapons on the B-2 bomber? The JDAM's, the 
2,000-pound bomb, the equivalent of what we 

[[Page H 8024]]
used on F-117 and the F-15 Eagles, they only cost $20,000. The B-2 
would handle 16 of them. So that is $320,000. That is one-fourth the 
cost of one cruise missile. So the difference in weaponry is very, very 
important. And the administration has no plan to buy all these long-
range cruise missiles, and it certainly is not part of their budget.
  The other weapon that I mentioned, the sensor fused weapon, a load of 
those would cost about one-fourth the cost of a load of standoff cruise 
missiles.
  So the difference in cost in weaponry is very, very significant, and 
as I mentioned before, the
 difference in cost, if you shut this line down and have to open it up 
and you will have to spend $6 to $10 billion, and you will not get a 
thing for that except to open the line up, and then it is going to take 
a number of years to start producing the planes again. To me that just 
does not make sense.

  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentleman from California, the 
distinguished chairman of the HUD appropriations subcommittee and a 
very strong supporter of the B-2 and one of the most knowledgeable 
members of the defense appropriations subcommittee.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, let me say that it is truly a 
privilege for me to serve on the subcommittee of appropriations that 
deals with our national defense. There is little question that the 
gentleman from Washington is one of the House's experts in this entire 
field. He and I have had a chance to look at various elements of our 
defense system. That is what we are talking about, we are talking about 
peace in the world, creating a foundation for our own national defense 
and the defense of freedom that really stops the prospect of major 
confrontation in the world.
  There is no question that America is on the edge of having the kind 
of force that will allow us to preserve the world from major conflict. 
One of the elements of that force that could bring us to peace in our 
time is the B-2. It is an incredible vehicle. We all know the role that 
stealth will play in our air future. The B-2 has a tremendous potential 
for America's future in terms of peace.
  Nobody ever said that peace was inexpensive. But if there is a 
responsibility for the national government, if there is a reason for us 
to have a national Congress, the reason is to make sure that we have 
adequate national security.
  Fundamental to that is to have this aircraft available in numbers 
that will allow us to make that difference in the world. And without 
the gentleman's leadership, I think this issue might well have been 
dead by now. That is, we would have gone in a different direction. If 
there is a phase in terms of defense spending this year, where we 
should be willing to make a sacrifice, it is to make sure that the B-2 
is available and in a quantity that makes sense.
  So I want the gentleman to know that I very much appreciate the work 
he has done here and look forward to continuing working with him in 
that regard.
  Mr. DICKS. I think we ought to have a little colloquy here, a little 
dialog on this.
  I appreciate that the gentleman has been on the floor and has been 
very much involved in other matters. He makes some very important 
points. The thing that I have always believed in and the great secret 
of our success in the cold war was that America stood for strength but 
it also stood for deterrence. We had a strong capable military so that 
we could deter the Soviet Union and its allies from ever attacking us 
in NATO.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Absolutely.
  Mr. DICKS. It was our strength and our commitment. The fact is, in 
this dialog here today, that was bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans 
joining together to foster a defense policy for this country that I 
think is so important.
  On this question, what we are really talking about
   is a revolutionary conventional capability. I think once we can 
demonstrate it and show the skeptics, including some in this 
administration and the previous administration, that in fact this 
capability can work and will work effectively, as Rand has said in its 
simulation that it will work by destroying 46 percent of Saddam's 
invading division, I mean, to me that will give us for the first time 
conventional deterrence. We have nuclear weapons, too many nuclear 
weapons. But we know we do not want to ever have to use those nuclear 
weapons.

  A conventional deterrent, on the other hand, if deterrence fails and 
someone makes a move from North Korea or from Iran or Iraq, then we 
have got the capability to fly this plane a third of the way around the 
world with one aerial refueling and with these smart conventional 
weapons attack these mobile divisions. Frankly, we have never had a 
conventional capability to do that.
  That is why this decision is so important.
  The other point, of course, is that of maintaining the industrial 
base for bombers, and this is a revolutionary technology. We are 
talking about stealth, long range, and a tremendous conventional 
capability against mobile targets, against, as the gentleman and I both 
have been following in the analysis of the gulf war, one of the biggest 
problems we had was finding those Scud launchers. With the block 30 
upgrade on the radar of the B-2, we will have an ability to fuse into 
that cockpit the kind of intelligence that we are now able to gather so 
that we can go after those mobile targets.
  Remember, if those Scuds had been accurate, which they thank God were 
not in the gulf war, and the upgrades in Scuds were going to be 
accurate, or if they had used chemical, biological or, God forbid, 
nuclear weapons, then we would have been in real trouble and our forces 
would be in real trouble. We had really no capability to go and find 
those mobile targets. The B-2 could be used in that respect.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. In those circumstances, without that force 
available, if those Scuds had been accurate, potentially thousands of 
American lives could have been lost.
  The gentleman has articulate very well in our committee the fact that 
just two B-2's can deliver a force halfway around the world with so few 
numbers of personnel involved. It takes a whole armada of aircraft to 
replace that force. That is a great value, not only in terms of 
preserving the peace but it is less expensive than continuing to build 
and maintain that armada, of aircraft.
  Mr. DICKS. It is so true. The gentleman is exactly correct. When you 
have this standard package in our chart, the value of stealth, it was 
like I think 76 airplanes and 145 crewmen that went in, in the most 
heavily defended targets in Iraq, and they got turned back. They could 
not do the job. So they had to come back. We risked all those lives.
  We did the same thing the next day with eight F-117's, which were 
equivalent to one B-2. So one B-2, with two pilots and the 18 on, the 
16 2,000-pound bombs, each one of which is individually targetable, 
could have done the job. They would have gotten the job done that the 
eight F-117's were able to accomplish but the huge package of 
nonstealthy airplanes were not able to accomplish.
  The other thing is, as the gentleman points out, because the weapons 
are less expensive, and because we do not want to lose any lives, I 
mean, stealth makes it possible for our kids to go in against the most 
heavily defended targets, take them out and come out alive. If we said, 
you have to throw the B-52 in there or the B-1B in there, they would be 
shot down by Russian surface-to-air missiles. I do not know how a 
commander would face his troops and say, go do that mission, especially 
if we have ability as a country and turned it down to put those young 
men in stealthy airplanes.
  Think about Captain O'Grady. He is in that F-16, a great airplane, 
but it was not stealthy. It got shot down. In our overview of this, in 
the intelligence committee, I asked the admiral who briefed us, I said, 
would his chances of survival have been greater if he were in the F-
117, another attack aircraft, but stealthy? He said, they would have 
been greater, Congressman. Probably he would have not been shot down.
  One last point, we had to send in two big helicopters full of Marines 
to rescue the downed pilot. We put all those young men's lives at risk. 
They got him out, and it was a great mission, but they never, if it had 
been a 

[[Page H 8025]]
stealthy airplane, they would have never had to go in there and do it. 
So the value of stealth is not only that is saves us money, but most 
importantly, it saves us American lives.
  Think about World War II, when we lost plane after plane after plane 
over Nazi Germany, that were shot down by either fighters or knocked 
down by enemy anticraft. Now in this world we live in, we have this 
incredible Russian surface-to-air missiles that have proliferated in 
the world. So if we are going to send somebody in, we better have them 
in a stealthy airplane in order to win that air war quickly, gain 
superiority so that we can then use the stealthy assets after we have 
got total air superiority.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. If I could make one more point, then we 
might get the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter] involved, who is a 
member of the authorizing committee on national security.
  There is a tendency for people to believe, my colleagues, in this day 
and age of supposed peace in the world, because there is not a major 
confrontation between the Soviet Union or Russia, that no longer is 
there a need for a national defense. Nothing could be further from the 
truth. We are living in a shrinking world with elements of potential 
danger that we have never really thought about in the past.
  America needs to be strong to preserve the peace. One element of our 
strength that is critical is the expansion of Stealth. The B-2 bomber 
as a vehicle is going to make all the difference in terms of how many 
lives we would have to put at risk over the next several decades. It is 
a very, very important item. I want to congratulate my colleague for 
his continued work on behalf of this effort.
  Mr. DICKS. I would like to also to yield to the chairman of the 
Procurement Subcommittee of the House Committee on National Security, 
another Californian, but also someone who has been at the forefront of 
ensuring that America has a strong national defense.
  The chairman was able to put into his mark and defend on the floor 
the authorization for two additional B-2s. Now we are going to have the 
appropriations bill in the next day or two. I hope that the gentleman 
from California [Mr. Lewis] and I are as successful as the gentleman 
from California was. I think it is important for the American people, 
for the press, for our colleagues to understand our intellectual 
rationale for this important defense system, one that I am proud to 
happen to start under a Democratic President but has been supported by 
Republicans and Democrats in the Congress for the last 15 years. I am 
honored to yield to our colleagues and chairman, the gentleman from 
California [Mr. Hunter].
                              {time}  1545

  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. DICKS. Some Members of this very institution. Our colleagues have 
been POW's.
  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. DICKS. That is right.
  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. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, the other point is the gentleman made a very 
major point here. We have spent all this money to get us where we are, 
and what are we talking about, by the Air Force's own numbers, $15.3 
billion, to build 20 more of these airplanes. That is a much lower 
price than we purchased the first 20. It is about a half to a third of 
the cost. The gentleman and I have been around quite a while, and at 
some point, they will say, ``Oh my gosh, we made a terrible mistake, we 
should have built this.'' Then we will have to reopen the line.
  The Air Force tells me it is $6 billion to $10 billion to get the 
line up if we wait 5 years. For that, we get nothing. It seems to me 
while the line is open out in California, we should continue at a low 
rate to purchase these bombers. It will keep the industrial base alive, 
keep it there in place, and it will allow us to have the most modern 
technology for our young men and women to fly and use if we have 
another major problem.
  The world is not any safer. I think the world was safer during the 
cold war, if you want to know the truth. Now you have all kinds of 
problems around the world. It is a combination of saving money in the 
weapons that are used, the JDAM's weapon for $20,000 apiece versus the 
standoff cruise missile for $1.2 million apiece. They cannot have any 
capability against mobile targets.
  That is the other problem, Mr. Speaker, with saying we will take the 
B-52's and the B-1's, and load them with standoff cruise missiles. 
Those standoff cruise missiles only go to a fixed point and they cannot 
be effective against the mobile issues. We have not only the division 
coming in either in South Korea or in Iraq or Iran, but you have this 
problem with the scud launchers. That was a major problem in the gulf 
war. We could not find those scud launchers. Again, with better 
intelligence and with stealth, we can put the B-2 or the F-117's in 
against those mobile targets.
  This is, in my judgment, a revolutionary capability. To not get 
enough of it while the line is open just defies common sense. When I 
look at the entire budget, and some people say look at our aircraft 
carriers, and I am as strong a supporter as the gentleman is of our 
aircraft carriers, unfortunately a decision was made to stop building 
the stealthy long-range attack aircraft coming off our aircraft 
carriers. The aircraft today coming off those carriers are not stealthy 
and have limited range, so we cannot rely on them either.
  The B-1's cannot penetrate, the B-52's cannot penetrate, the planes 
coming off the carriers cannot penetrate. The only thing we have are 
the F-117's and the B-2's, In my mind, why would I not go out and 
reshuffle my defense dollars and buy the most incredible capability, 
the capability for the next 30 years, that can deal with the radars? To 
me, this does not make any sense. I am hard pressed to come up with a 
rationale, especially when the B-2 has this potential against mobile 
targets. That is what bothers me the most.
  None of these other weapons, Mr. Speaker, have the capability to go 
against these mobile targets before we have complete air cover and air 
cap because of the surface-to-air missiles that go along with the 
division.
  I yield to the gentleman.
  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. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, they have proliferated all over the world. 
This is not something that is just in a few countries. We have them in 
North Korea, Iran, Iraq, China. We have them in Bosnia, where Captain 
O'Grady was shot down.
  Another thing here, for some of the crowd of American people saying, 
``Are these two Congressmen just up here by themselves?'' I feel very 
proud of the fact that without any request from me or anybody else who 
is a B-2 supporter, seven former Secretaries of Defense wrote the 
President of the United States, and this is unprecedented in the 17 
years I have been on the Subcommittee on National Security of the 
Committee on Appropriations, and said, ``Mr. President, please keep 
this line open. This is the kind of weapon system that we are going to 
need in the future. Twenty of them simply is not enough.''
  One of those colleagues, Mr. Speaker, former Congressman Dick Cheney 
was the one who made the decision with Les Aspin, our former colleague, 
former Secretary of Defense, now deceased, to limit this to 20. There 
was absolutely no military rationale for that decision. It was strictly 
a decision made on what Congress would go along with. At that time 
there was some question about the plane, but now we have six of these 
at Whiteman Air Force Base, according to the pilots there. One just 
flew all the way to Europe, did a mock bombing run over the 
Netherlands, went to Paris, engines running, changed crews and flew 
back to Whiteman Air Force Base.
  Mr. Speaker, this thing is going to work. It has a 95-percent mission 
reliability, and it is at the block 10 configuration. Over the next 4 
years it will
 be upgraded to block 30, which will give us this revolutionary 
capability.

  Mr. Speaker, to have seven former Secretaries of Defense write the 
President and say this would be a terrible mistake, is, I think, one of 
the most unprecedented things I have seen. In light of all that, I am 
amazed, frankly, and with the importance of power projection in this 
very dangerous world, and with the potential conventional utility of 
this system, why we are killing this at this point. I think it is the 
greatest mistake that I can think of since I have been in the Congress 
and involved in defense matters. This is a terrible, awful decision. We 
in the Congress, under the Constitution, as the gentleman well knows, 
serving as a senior member of the Committee on National Security, 
ultimately have the responsibility for raising navies and armies and, 
by inference, air forces. It is the constitutional responsibility of 
the Congress of the United States, and I am proud of the fact that we 
have stood up on this issue and are trying to correct a very serious 
mistake in judgment.
  The gentleman from California has been willing to stand shoulder to 
shoulder to discuss this issue, to lay out our rationale with the 
American people, and I just am very pleased that he has been willing to 
continue to engage in this colloquy to explain to the American people 
why we feel so strongly about this and why we think those seven 
Secretaries of Defense were correct.

[[Page H 8027]]


                              {time}  1600

  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentleman from California.
  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. DICKS. The gentleman makes a very important point. I do not know 
if he was here on the floor, but I suggested that if we had had, say, 
60 B-2's, 20 at Diego Garcia as the gentleman suggests, Guam and at 
Whiteman, Saddam might not have made the attack. If he did, we could 
have obliterated that division, we could have stopped the war.
  Do you know what it cost us to move all the forces out to the gulf to 
fight the war, just in transportation? Ten billion dollars. The cost of 
the
 war to us and our allies was $60 billion, for a total of $70 billion. 
With an adequate bomber force that is stealthy, that has long range and 
can use smart conventional weapons against mobile targets like Saddam's 
republican guard, if we could just prevent one war out there in the 
future sometime somewhere, whether it is North Korea, Iran, Iraq, or 
wherever, that would save and pay for this more than once. There is 
nothing else that can do it.

  That is why it blows my mind when people talk about priorities. Well, 
other things are more important. I say, I cannot think of one except 
the young men and women serving in our military today. They are more 
important, obviously. They are first in my mind. But in terms of other 
weapons systems, other things that we are doing, that have the 
capability to give us conventional deterrence and if deterrence fails, 
a way to knock out the enemy quickly and save American lives while we 
are doing it and not even risk them because of stealth, I cannot 
imagine how this Congress in its wisdom can stop this system when every 
export has said that 20 of these is simply not enough, that you need 
somewhere between 40 and 60.
  Colin Powell, as good a military mind as I know, he has recommended 
to Chaney 50. Sometimes you have got to make hard decisions. You have 
been on the Hill for a long time as I have. I asked the staff of the 
Committee on Appropriations, I said, ``This is going to cost us about 
$2 billion a year for about 7 or 8 years in order to get the additional 
20 planes.''
  I said, ``How much did we cut out of the defense budget, about $250 
billion, how much did we cut out just in a cut here, a cut there, 
through the thousands of line items that are in that budget?'' The 
answer is in both this year and last year, $3.5 billion in just low-
priority items.
  Right there is more than enough money to finance the B-2. I know the 
gentleman has been urging reform in the procurement areas where we have 
thousands and thousands of extra buyers or shoppers or whatever you 
call them. There is another way to save some money that we could use to 
finance the acquisition of these weapons systems. You are the 
procurement subcommittee chairman. You know as I do that procurement in 
the peak of the Reagan buildup was $135 billion a year in today's 
dollars. Now that is down to about $40 billion to $45 billion, or it 
has been reduced about 70 percent.
  We have got to continue to do some things that make sense. Here is a 
system that gives us a revolutionary conventional war-fighting 
capability, and I believe the potential for conventional deterrence. 
Not to get this and spend the money on a bunch of lower priority things 
that have no comparable worth or value to the American people and to 
our military, to me is just unbelievable.
  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. DICKS. I agree with the gentleman. There are ways to save money 
in a $250 billion budget if you want to set priorities. When you look 
at all the things we are procuring, there is going to be a list of what 
is important, what is crucial, and what is kind of nice to have. I have 
got to tell you, when you have got something that has the potential 
capabilities that the B-2 has, you have got to make room for it. It 
does not make any sense to protect a lot of purchases of other things 
that cannot project power around the world like the B-2 can in our 
future.
  I just hope that we can continue to make this battle on the floor 
with our colleagues here in the House. I happen to think that this is 
one of those watershed moments, one of those times when either the 
Congress is going to have truly profiles in courage, standing up to 
this administration and saying, ``Wait a minute, this is a mistake.'' 
The same Congress, by the way, that supported the F-117, the stealth 
attack aircraft. In the first 10 days of the Gulf war, I think I have 
the numbers right, the stealth fighter flew 2.5 percent of the sorties 
but knocked out 32 percent of the hardest targets, because it was 
stealthy. What did that mean? That allowed us to win the air war more 
quickly and cap Iraq so they could not even get a plane up. That saved 
a lot of American lives. If we did not have that stealthy airplane to 
lead the attack and to knock out those surface-to-air missiles, knock 
out those radars, we would have lost a lot more of our pilots and they 
would have been there and Saddam would have had them to play politics 
with as the gentleman has suggested. But because we had stealth, we 
were able to win that war more rapidly. Then we could bring to bear the 
B-52's with their dumb bombs, not very accurate but they pounced away 
on the Republican Guards and allowed us to win the war quite easily. 
But stealth, the F-117, was at the forefront. Here you have got the B-2 
which can carry 8 times what the F-117 can carry and it can carry it 6 
times as far and with one refueling go a third of the way around the 
earth and be able to have it not only against fixed targets as we 
proved with the F-117 but by putting that sensor-fused weapon on there, 
those 1,400 little bomblets over that Iraqi division, 3 of them knocked 
out 46 percent of the mechanized vehicles as that division moves in the 
field, that is a revolutionary capability, and there is nothing in the 
Pentagon's budget that can do anything like that.
  How can you say we are not going to fund this when it has that kind 
of capability and we are going to fund a lot of other things that have 
no comparable worth or value and just do it because, ``Well, we just 
can't make any hard decisions. We can't make tradeoffs. We can't do 
roles and missions. We can't do the job we were sent over there to 
do.'' That is what it says to me.
  It is never easy to have to make tradeoffs. But in this case, I think 
the potential is so great that without those tradeoffs, we are really 
doing a disservice to the American people. I hope that Congress stays 
with this, makes the point, so that we can show the American people why 
we feel so passionately about this subject.
  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.

                              {time}  1615

  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. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's participation in 
this colloquy, and I also want to yield to my distinguished friend from 
California [Mr. McKeon], who has been another leader and another worthy 
proponent of the B-2.
  Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, I just turned on the TV in my office and saw 
two of my friends talking about the B-2, one of my favorite subjects.
  Mr. DICKS. We had a little break in the action, and so we jumped in 
and took our shot.
  Mr. McKEON. I really appreciate what you are doing. The B-2 is built 
in my district, and a lot of people say that is probably the reason 
that I am a strong supporter. That is one of the reasons.
  Because it is in my district, I have had the opportunity of going 
down to the factory, going down on the floor, seeing the assembly lines 
and seeing what is being done. A lot of people do not understand that 
that plane is built differently than any other plane. It is built from 
the outside in. It has a wingspan of 170 feet, and from one end of that 
wingspan to the other end, it cannot be off one-thousandth of an inch.
  We cannot afford to lose this technology. The people that have been 
trained, the tools that have been put together, all of that is already 
now starting to unwind. Originally, the assembly line was built for 20 
planes; we are down to 6 planes. They have already closed up part of 
the assembly line.
  We are losing the people that have been trained, that have put in the 
time and effort, have the skill to learn how to do this. We are losing 
that.
  I think it is very important that we keep our economic base there, 
our industrial base to build the B-2, but the second and probably even 
more important reason to me is defense.
  When you talk about Desert Storm, you could probably talk about other 
wars that we do not even know about that have never happened because we 
project power. But we are losing that projection. We are starting to 
talk now about moving the B-52, which is almost as old as I am, that is 
pretty old; and the B-1B's into London to use in Bosnia. I do not know 
how
 long we can expect our young people, our career people to get in those 
planes and fly them. B-1 is still relatively young, about 15 years old; 
the B-52's are 30, 40, 50 years old.

  Mr. HUNTER. Compared to the B-52, the B-1 is a baby.
  Mr. McKEON. That is right. But even then, when all the B-52's are 
gone, we are down to 95 B-1's. The study that was given to us, that we 
should be able to fight in two places at one time, we need 174 long-
range bombers, we would be down to 95, and then you add the 20 B-2's 
that we have now.
  Mr. DICKS. But we do not have them yet. We have six of them now.
  Mr. McKEON. I am looking out 20 years. I think our responsibility 
should be to really look out 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.
  I know one of my good friends on the other side of this issue has 
said there will be another bomber at some point. I think that is a 
total fallacy. It takes $10 billion to $15 billion now to get a 

[[Page H 8029]]
fighter up, ready to be built. Who around here is going to vote $25 
billion, $30 billion or $40 billion just to get another bomber 
developed? Why spend that kind of money when we have the great B-2?
  Mr. DICKS. If the gentleman would yield, I told my friends in the 
Boeing Co. in the State of Washington that one of my colleagues has 
suggested a B-3; and they said, ``Congressman, what we would do is, we 
would build a long-range, subsonic aircraft and it would look a heck of 
a lot like the B-2. It would be stealthy and we would have the ability 
to put precision-guided munitions on them.''
  We have got the line open and the costs are down where this thing is 
affordable in terms of the defense budget, and now, not to do enough of 
it just does not make sense. I always say to my Democratic friends, 
many of whom are not happy about some of the budget cuts that are being 
made, if we cut out the B-2, this money is not going to go to HUD or 
education or the environment; this money is going to go to something 
that is less important in the defense arena.
  As I said, I look at the entire defense budget, and except for the 
men and women serving in the service, I cannot think of one weapons 
system that has anywhere near potential that this weapons system does.
  The gentleman has made another important point that General Skantze, 
who was our former acquisitions person at the Air Force, has made as 
well, and that is that this plane is the most difficult plane to put 
together. So we finally figured it out.
  Mr. Chairman, I think we should stay with it, and I appreciate my 
colleagues joining me here on the floor in an impromptu session to talk 
about one of the most important defense decisions this country will 
make during our time in Congress.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  

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