[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 125 (Monday, July 31, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H8029-H8031]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  DO NOT BE DETERRED: CONTINUE THE B-2

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington 
[Mr. Dicks].
  Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, it is that important fact, and the fact that 
we have not been able to figure out a way to counter it. This is a game 
that goes on and on. There is a struggle back and forth.
  Again, I want to thank my colleagues for coming over here and joining 
me in an impromptu discussion of the B-2. We are going to be moving on 
to this issue as we get to the defense appropriations bill. As I have 
said, I think this is the most important defense issue that most of us 
will decide while we are in the House of Representatives.
  Mr. Speaker, I am glad that I have good bipartisan support from my 
colleagues are we try to oppose those who I think in a very 
shortsighted way are trying to cut off this program and saying that 
they are going to save money.
  I will tell my colleagues this: We are going to save lives and money 
if we build the B-2. We are going to save money if we do it at the time 
the line is open. We are going to preserve the 

[[Page H 8030]]
industrial base. The B-2 weapons that are sometimes 40 percent less 
expensive than the weapon on the B-52's or the B-1's.
  But most importantly as the F-117 showed us, we can send pilots into 
the most difficult areas with surface-to-air missiles that are active 
and survive and that is what this is really all about: Saving lives of 
American young people who we send in harm's way.
  To me, as the gentleman said a few minutes ago, how we could in good 
conscience not want to be able to use that in the early days of any war 
in the future, because we know we will save lives and we know that we 
can win the war more rapidly? Stealth can go in and out, in and out, in 
and out, destroy all those targets and help us win the air war more 
rapidly, which is crucial to almost any scenario that I can think of in 
the future.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California 
[Mr. McKeon].
  Mr. McKEON. A couple of weeks ago, Charles Krauthammer had an 
editorial, I think I got it out of the Washington Times. I do not know 
what other papers it was in. George Will wrote one in ``The Last Word'' 
in the magazine.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to insert these in the Record, if I may. If 
I could just make a comment on Mr. Krauthammer's. He entitled his 
article, ``The B-2 and the `Cheap Hawks' '' and he gave 3 reasons why 
the B-2 is so important.
  First, American is coming home. In 1960, we had 90 bases abroad. We 
are down now to 17. We cannot station short-hop airplanes around the 
world. We have to have range.
  Second, America will not endure casualties. We do not want to put, as 
you were saying, our people in harm's way if it can be avoided.
  Third, the next war will be a surprise, such as every other war we 
have entered into, and we need to be ready. And the B-2 meets all three 
of these requirements. It has long range; it can reach anywhere around 
the world. If we have it in the three bases that we look at, we can 
reach any key spot in the world in 10 to 12 hours.
  Fourth, Casualties. It has two personnel on board. Does not need a 
lot of support and backup because of the stealthiness and the amount of 
weapons that it can carry.
  Fifth, If we have an adequate number, we will be prepared and we will 
have a deterrent.
  Mr. Speaker, I include the following articles for the Record:

                      The B-2 and The Cheap Hawks

                        (By Charles Krauthammer)

       We hear endless blather about how new and complicated the 
     post-Cold War world is. Hence the endless confusion about 
     what weapons to build, forces to deploy, contingency to 
     anticipate. But there are three simple, glaringly obvious 
     facts about this new era:
       (1) America is coming home. The day of the overseas base is 
     over. In 1960, the United States had 90 major Air Force bases 
     overseas. Today, we have 17. Decolonization is one reason. 
     Newly emerging countries like the Philippines do not want the 
     kind of Big Brother domination that comes with facilities 
     like Clark Air Base and Subic Bay. The other reason has to do 
     with us: With the Soviets gone, we do not want the huge 
     expense of maintaining a far-flung, global military 
     establishment.
       (2) American cannot endure casualties. It is inconceivable 
     that the United States, or any other Western country, could 
     ever again fight a war of attrition like Korea or Vietnam. 
     One reason is the CNN effect. TV brings home the reality of 
     battle with a graphic immediacy unprecedented in human 
     history. The other reason, as strategist Edward Luttwak has 
     pointed out, is demographic: Advanced industrial countries 
     have very small families, and small families are less willing 
     than the large families of the past to risk their only 
     children in combat.
       (3) America's next war will be a surprise. Nothing new 
     here. Our last one was too. Who expected Saddam to invade 
     Kuwait? And even after he did, who really expected the United 
     States to send a half-million man expeditionary force to roll 
     him back? Then again, who predicted Pearl Harbor, the 
     invasion of South Korea, the Falklands War?
       What kind of weapon, then, is needed by a country that is 
     losing its foreign bases, is allergic to casualties and will 
     have little time to mobilize for tomorrow's unexpected 
     provocation?
       Answer: A weapon that can be deployed at very long 
     distances from secure American bases, is invulnerable to 
     enemy counterattack and is deployable instantly. You would 
     want, in other words, the B-2 stealth bomber.
       We have it. Yet, amazingly, Congress may be on the verge of 
     killing it. After more than $20 billion in development costs-
     costs irrecoverable whether we build another B-2 or not--the 
     B-2 is facing a series of crucial votes in Congress that 
     could dismantle its assembly lines once and for all.
       The B-2 is not a partisan project. Its development was 
     begun under Jimmy Carter. And, as an urgent letter to 
     President Clinton makes clear, it is today supported by seven 
     secretaries of defense representing every administration 
     going back to 1969.
       They support it because it is the perfect weapon for the 
     post-Cold War world. It has a range of about 7,000 miles. It 
     can be launched instantly--no need to beg foreign dictators 
     for base rights; no need for weeks of advance warning, 
     mobilization and forward deployment of troops. And because it 
     is invisible to enemy detection, its two pilots are virtually 
     invulnerable.
       This is especially important in view of the B-2's very high 
     cost, perhaps three-quarters to a billion dollars a copy. The 
     cost is, of course, what has turned swing Republican votes--
     the so-called ``cheap hawks''--against the B-2.
       But the dollar cost of a weapon is too narrow a calculation 
     of its utility. The more important calculation is cost in 
     American lives. The reasons are not sentimental but 
     practical. Weapons cheap in dollars but costly in lives are, 
     in the current and coming environment, literally useless: We 
     will not use them. A country that so values the life of every 
     Capt. O'Grady is a country that cannot keep blindly relying 
     on non-stealthy aircraft over enemy territory.
       Stealth planes are not just invulnerable themselves. 
     Because they do not need escort, they spare the lives of the 
     pilots of the fighters and radar suppression planes that 
     ordinarily accompany bombers. Moreover, if the B-2 is killed, 
     we are stuck with our fleet of B-52s of 1950s origin. 
     According to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, 
     the Clinton administration assumes the United States will 
     rely on B-52s until the year 2030--when they will be 65 years 
     old!
       In the Persian Gulf War, the stealthy F-117 fighter flew 
     only 2 percent of the missions but hit 40 percent of the 
     targets. It was, in effect, about 30 times as productive as 
     non-stealthy planes. The F-117, however, has a short range 
     and thus must be deployed from forward bases. The B-2 can 
     take off from home. Moreover, the B-2 carries about eight 
     times the payload of the F-117. Which means that one B-2 can 
     strike, without escort and with impunity, as many targets as 
     vast fleets of conventional aircraft. Factor in these costs, 
     and the B-2 becomes cost-effective even in dollar terms.
       The final truth of the post-Cold War world is that someday 
     someone is going to attack some safe haven we fell compelled 
     to defend, or invade a country whose security is important to 
     us, or build an underground nuclear bomb factory that 
     threatens to kill millions of Americans. We are going to want 
     a way to attack instantly, massively and invisibly. We have 
     the weapon to do it, a weapon that no one else has and that 
     no one can stop. Except a ``cheap hawk,'' shortsighted 
     Republican Congress.
                                                                    ____

                     [From Newsweek, July 24, 1995]

The Last Word--Precision Guesswork About the B-2--Do Americans Now Find 
              Their `Moral Economy' Too Taxing to Defend?

                          (By George F. Will)

       We should study war some more. We should because doing so 
     is contrary to the spirit of the age and our national 
     temperament. If peace is to be preserved, that must be done 
     by a few nations of a sort that is disinclined to believe 
     that peace requires preserving. These nations believe that 
     although war once was prevalent, history has ascended to a 
     pacific plateau. The nations that believe this, such as the 
     United States, are, says historian Donald Kagan of Yale, 
     formed by ethics that are commercial, individualistic, 
     libertarian and hedonistic. Kagan concludes his book ``On the 
     Origins of War'' with a warning: ``The United States and its 
     allies, the states with the greatest interest in peace and 
     the greatest power to preserve it, appear to be faltering in 
     their willingness to pay the price in money and the risk of 
     lives. Nothing could be more natural in a liberal republic, 
     yet nothing could be more threatening to the peace they have 
     recently achieved.'' Hence the high stakes of the debate 
     about the B-2 bomber.
       The issue is whether to purchase more than the 20 long-
     range stealth bombers already in service or being completed. 
     The argument against steady low-level production to bring the 
     B-2 force to 40 is that the B-2 is too expensive, 
     particularly because the mission for which it was designed--
     penetrating Soviet air defenses to attack mobile or hardened 
     targets--is no longer relevant.
       The case for continuing the B-2 program is more complex, 
     but more compelling. It rests on three facts. The B-2 is not 
     as expensive as critics contend. The B-2 economizes other 
     material assets, and economizes lives, too. And given the age 
     of the B-52s (the youngest is 33 years old) and the time and 
     cost required to design another bomber (at least 15 years and 
     scores of billions from design to deployment), the B-2 force 
     is going to be the only U.S. bomber force for many decades. 
     Who wants to wager that in, say, the year 2030 the nation 
     will not need a bomber better than a 70-year-old B-52?
       Critics bandy the figure $1.5 billion for each B-2. 
     Actually, given the research and development already paid 
     for, the life cycle cost of additional B-2s, including 20 
     years of 

[[Page H 8031]]
     spare parts, is about 1.1 billion 1995 dollars. Buying 20 more B-2s 
     would consume only 1 percent of the defense budget and 5 
     percent of the combat aircraft budget for a few years. And 
     doing so would prevent the irreparable dispersal of the 
     industrial base that has produced the most sophisticated 
     weapon ever, a weapon suited to the changed world.
       In 1960 there were 81 major U.S. air bases overseas. Today 
     there are 15. The B-2's long range responds to the dwindling 
     of forward-based U.S. forces. Its high payload and 
     stealthiness (the difficulty of detecting its approach) 
     enable it to do extraordinary damage to an adversary's 
     warmaking capacity, at minimum risk to just two crew members 
     per aircraft. This gives a president a powerful instrument of 
     credible deterrence for an era in which Americans are 
     increasingly reluctant to risk casualties. The importance of 
     a
      military technology tailored to this political fact is 
     argued by Edward Luttwak in his essay ``Toward Post-Heroic 
     Warfare'' in Foreign Affairs.
       Luttwak, of the Center for Strategic and International 
     Studies, says the end of the Cold War has brought a ``new 
     season of war,'' in which wars are ``easily started and then 
     fought without perceptible restraint.'' A war such as the 
     Iraqi invasion of Kuwait can menace the material interests of 
     the United States. And a war such as that in the former 
     Yugoslavia can, Luttwak argues, injure the nation's ``moral 
     economy'' if the nation ``remains the attentive yet passive 
     witness of aggression replete with atrocities on the largest 
     scale.''
       Perhaps Americans find their ``moral economy'' too taxing 
     to maintain in today's turbulent world. The debacle of 
     American policy regarding Bosnia strongly suggests that is 
     so. If so, America faces a future in which only one thing is 
     certain: it will never again be what it has been, the 
     principal force for good in the world. But if America wants 
     to be intolerant both of evil and and of casualties, it needs 
     to arm itself appropriately, as with the B-2.
       It is the only aircraft that can on short notice go 
     anywhere on the planet with a single refueling, penetrate the 
     most sophisticated air defenses and deliver high payloads of 
     conventional weapons with devastating precision. Five B-2s 
     can deliver as many weapons as the entire force of F-117s 
     (America's only other stealth aircraft) deployed in Desert 
     Storm. Four U.S.-based B-2s with eight crew members could 
     have achieved by same results as were achieved by the more 
     than 100 aircraft sent against Libya in 1986. Military 
     personnel are not only precious as a matter of morality, they 
     are expensive. True, many targets can be attacked with 
     ``stand-off weapons,'' such as cruise missiles, but such 
     weapons are 20 to 40 times more expensive than direct attack 
     precision weapons. Calculating the real costs of weapons is 
     more complicated than reading restaurant bills.
       And as Luttwak argues, cost-effectiveness criteria for 
     weapons often do not factor in the value of casualty 
     avoidence, which is a function of casualty exposure and is 
     often the decisive rertraint on political leadership when it 
     is considering whether to project U.S. power. ``When judged 
     very expensive, stealth planes are implicitly compared to 
     non-stealth aircraft of equivalent range and payload, not 
     always including the escorts that the latter also require, 
     which increase greatly the number of fliers at risk. Missing 
     from such calculations is any measure of the overall foreign 
     policy value of acquiring a means of casualty-free warfare by 
     unescorted bomber.''
       Will the nation need a substantial B-2 force? That depends 
     on developments in the world, and on what America wants to be 
     in the world. On a wall at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 
     Pasadena there reportedly use to be a sign: We do precision 
     guesswork. So do the people who must anticipate crises 
     relevant to America's material interests and moral economy, 
     and the means of meeting them. Twenty more B-2s would be a 
     responsible guess.

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

                              {time}  1630

  Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, I will just say one final thing. One of the 
other articles General Skantze wrote, one of the big problems has been, 
ever since the Air Force reorganized and got rid of the Strategic Air 
Command, there really has not been an advocate for bombers inside the 
Air Force. They will advocate for the F-22 and the C-17, but nobody 
stands up for bombers, and I think that is one of the things where the 
Congress may have to step in. We may have to reconsider that decision 
and recreate a Strategic Air Command within the Air Force so we have 
some real attention by the service on this subject. I think we ought to 
consider that.


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