The Reactivation Of The SR-71

Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I am very pleased that the conference committee on the DOD authorization bill has chosen to accept my proposal to reactivate a small, three-plane contingency group of SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft. The SR-71 will be able to provide a timely, flexible, unique reconnaissance capability, at the call of our CINC's worldwide, which is not now available. I am also supportive of a range of development vehicles, unmanned aerial aircraft, or `UAV's,' which eventually can partly make up for the gaps in our intelligence which will be filled by the SR-71. But those vehicles are years away from fielding, and in the meantime this contingency group can provide invaluable special radar and optical intelligence that would not otherwise be available by any other means now in America's inventory, including our satellites and other aircraft such as the U-2. I say it is unique because it can defeat deception, as satellites cannot, and it can go anywhere, virtually invulnerable, as our other aircraft cannot.

I believe that the previous administration made a mistake in prematurely retiring this system, in the hope that systems then under development would replace it. But those systems have not come along, and the proposal that I have made would be a frugal, stripped down, modest, contingency group, not a full-fledged 12-plane squadron as was the heart of the previous program. So we have the capability reactivated without high cost, a reinvestment in a proven capability that is well worth the money--particularly in comparison to the cost of the billions that we intend to invest in new systems that may, I emphasize may, be able to take up this intelligence task 5 to 10 years or so down the road.

I understand that there are forces in the Air Force and the Pentagon opposed to this modest reactivation proposal. I suspect that their opposition is based on the fear that we may discover that the very expensive new systems they want to build might be jeopardized by this action. That is not the intent of the proposed new contingency group, but I am all for saving money on redundant and wasteful defense technologies, and if it is redundancy that we are buying, then we need to take a good second look at the billions planned for spending on new technologies. If the buzzword in the Pentagon is to spend money on new toys rather than using effectively and frugally the ones we have already paid for, then the American people would expect us to take a hard, close second look at the new spending plans.

Mr. President, I say it was a mistake for the Bush administration to scrap the SR-71 prematurely and open up a gap in our reconnaissance capabilities. What were their reasons for scrapping this important capability?

The primary reason given in 1989 and 1990 for terminating the SR-71 program was cost. The operating costs for the 12-plane fleet were averaging $250 million each year, for a system that was not then being creatively or effectively employed. This reasoning seems faulty, however, in light of the enormous sums being spent on a new headquarters building for the National Reconnaissance Office [NRO], the agency that builds and operates the intelligence community's satellite systems. To terminate an operational system that to this day has not been surpassed in capability on the basis that it is too expensive to operate, while spending over $300 million just to house the NRO, not on actual intelligence collection systems, is like building the Taj Mahal of Garages when you just sold the car that was to be parked inside. This wasteful, extravagant, and secretive spending is more than three times the amount needed to keep a contingency capability of SR-71 alive to support military commanders in the field.

Creating the 3-plane contingency force at a cost of $100 million, and maintaining it for some $50 million per year, which includes 1 month of operations with 10 mission flights, is far less expensive than developing and fielding new aircraft or satellite systems. After carefully studying the costs of this small program, and after including cost-reducing measures such as basing the contingency force with the NASA-operated research SR-71's in order to share common equipment, I am confident that this contingency group can be reactivated for $100 million. Indeed, in the DOD appropriations bill, the costs for reactivating the program have been capped at that amount.

A second reason given for the termination of the SR-71 program was that the system was no longer needed, since it was not being used well and newer systems were coming. We now know that the new systems have either been canceled or are still some years off. I concede that the SR-71 was not being effectively employed in the 1980's. But now that the static cold war era is over, the blossoming of smaller regional and ethnic conflicts around the globe has created many new requirements for conflict monitoring and humanitarian crisis planning. These requirements could be efficiently supported by limited numbers of SR-71 aircraft flying a small number of well-planned missions. One of the lessons learned from the Persian Gulf War was that the SR-71 was needed to create maps and to monitor activity over large areas. Civilian satellite systems were pressed into service to support humanitarian air drops of food in Bosnia in 1993, but the greater resolution and finer detail achievable by the SR-71 cameras might have made greater precision in air drops achievable. Similar creative use of the SR-71 could support humanitarian efforts in Rwanda and Zaire without drawing national collection systems away from other areas of interest.

Finally, opponents of the SR-71 suggest that America's political authorities lack the will to use the SR-71 to overfly hostile territory. It is true that in 1991, a political decision was made not to overfly Iraq, despite the potential intelligence that might have been gathered for the United States and her allies. I do not believe that one decision, taken by one administration, should forever tie the hands of future administrations. It is far better for our national leaders to have the instrument at hand, to use if necessary, than to deny them the opportunity to use it by assuming that they will never have the political will to over fly a nation if our intelligence needs, and our combat forces at risk, demand it. I applaud the decision made by the conference committee to provide this contingency force, and to keep this tool in our intelligence arsenal.