Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, let us start with stealth because, that is an important part of the B-2 story. In Vietnam, we lost 2,300 aircraft. In fact, in the last phases of the war, when we threw B-52's against surface-to-air missile systems from Russia, then the Soviet Union, we lost 10 percent of our B-52 force that was used in that theater in 11 days. And America turned to her scientists and said, we may be on the verge of having our Air Force become obsolete if you do not figure out a way to beat those Soviet-made radar systems and surface-to-air missile systems. And our scientists, the great scientists that we have in this country, responded. They came up with something developed by Democrat and Republican administrations, announced first by President Jimmy Carter, with what was known as stealth. Stealth is the ability to avoid enemy radar. That means very simply that a guy like the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Sam Johnson, who is sitting right here, who was a POW for a number of years in Hanoi, could fly an aircraft through a SAM missile battery without it acquiring him, without it seeing him and shooting him down. It gave survivability to American pilots. So we started developing stealth. And that is what the B-2 is.”