Armed Services Committee Member Duncan Hunter

Here is a brief summary of Duncan Hunter's accomplishments as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

In April 2004, while the congressman was in the middle of a committee hearing in Washington, he received a satellite phone call from his son in the midst of the siege of Fallujah, not so subtly asking his father why his unit was being ordered to stop attacking when it had the insurgents on the run.  “I ended up with this young Marine officer cussing me out on a cell phone,” Hunter recalls with a laugh.   Within minutes, the congressman was on the phone with top Pentagon brass, relaying his son’s message and demanding answers.  Hunter’s family has deep military roots. His father served in World War II, and he was an Army Ranger in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star.  Away from the committee, the past year has been a tumultuous one for the congressman, as his presidential bid has failed to surge, leaving him an asterisk in the polls.   Hunter is particularly stung by criticism from Democrats that he did not conduct tough enough oversight of the Iraq war while he was committee chairman, citing efforts to bolster protections against improvised explosive devices and to provide “jammers” to scramble the triggers insurgents were using to set off roadside bombs. “We produced 10,000 portable jammers and moved them out to the battlefield — from a concept to the field — in just 70 days,” he said.  In fact, Hunter’s zeal to come up with protective body armor to defend against improvised explosive devices earned him the derisive nickname “SpongeBob HunterPants” after a military staffer fabricated a picture of Hunter wearing the bulky contraption, drawing comparisons to the famous children’s television character, according to an account in The Washington Post.  When he was in charge, Hunter said, “this committee moved up the production of armored Humvees by seven months” after he took his case directly to the steel mills that manufactured the plating.