Joe Cunningham: “I am a Navy guy, but the F-22 is the only airplane in the inventory that is projected that will compete with the SU-30…”

“I am a Navy guy, but the F-22 is the only airplane in the inventory that is projected that will compete with the SU-30 and SU-37. To give my colleagues a comparison, Admiral Stockdale was flying an A-4 Skyhawk. At the time it was not a bad airplane, but they did not have the new PH or the P-408 engines, which is more powerful. And they loaded bombs on that little Skyhawk and it made it real cumbersome flying. I was lucky enough to fly Phantoms and some F-8s and other airplanes like the Thud and so on, but those little A-4 Skyhawks were pretty vulnerable. Admiral Stockdale was shot down in 1965 before they each had surface- to-air missiles in Vietnam, he was shot down by Triple A, and those airplanes were slow and cumbersome. That is why we do not want our men and women flying airplanes that are not the best or driving Humvees that are not armored or other things, because if you look at the history of the past, like Admiral Stockdale and John McCain and Jeremiah Denton and all the others, that they were shot down, and not because they had necessarily inferior equipment, but not the best equipment. That is what we want to make sure of today, that our men and women who are serving overseas, as the chairman of the authorization defense committee, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) has dedicated his life. His son was in the Marine Corps and served I think twice in Iraq.”