C. W. Bill Young: “I have a good friend back home in my district, his name is Bob Schultz. He went ashore with the Marine Corps, the 2d…”

“I have a good friend back home in my district, his name is Bob Schultz. He went ashore with the Marine Corps, the 2d Marine Division, in Tarawa more than 50 years ago. As we have talked about that many, many times, he keeps coming back to the fact that when an American goes ashore on an amphibious landing, what he hopes for is that our troops control the air and not the enemy, so they might have a good chance of surviving the amphibious landing. One of the Marine Corps Commandants, P.X. Kelly, made the same point in testimony before our subcommittee, that the first thing that a Marine wants is for an American force to control the air. The F-22 is going to be an air superiority fighter. The gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey] is correct; the F-15 is an outstanding aircraft. The F-16, the F-15, the F-18 are all good airplanes. However, as the future gets closer and closer, those airplanes get older and older. The technology is not as good today as it will be when the F-22 comes on board. If we take the $1 billion the gentleman from Wisconsin is talking about from this program, we do not cancel the program, we do not stop the F-22, we still going to have the F-22, and the gentleman from Wisconsin concedes that. What we are going to do is add billions of dollars to the cost, because the longer that we drag out the program, the more the program costs.”