http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4318241
Authorization Bill Kills Big U.S. Defense Programs
By william matthews
Published: 9 Oct 2009 14:13
Weapon programs "are like vampires," Sen. John McCain said. "You can kill one occasionally, but not very often."
This year, however, Congress seems to have driven stakes through the hearts of at least a half dozen weapon programs - although not the C-17, which McCain, R-Ariz., strove mightily to execute.
The big cargo plane would be killed by the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill that U.S. House and Senate conferees agreed on Oct. 7 and the House passed Oct. 8. But C-17s may well be resurrected by the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act.
The list of other defense programs that lawmakers voted to snuff in the new authorization bill is striking:
■ F-22 stealth fighter. Terminated.
■ Future Combat Systems. Slashed.
■ Multiple Kill Vehicle. Dead.
■ Kinetic Energy Interceptor. Eliminated.
■ Airborne Laser. Truncated.
■ Combat search and rescue helicopter. Killed.
■ Presidential helicopter. Terminated.
"Those are just part of the list of the things that we did to respond to the request of the secretary of defense to cancel programs which no longer can be justified," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The authorization bill matches the $680.2 billion that President Barack Obama requested for defense. Of that, $550.2 billion is the basic defense budget and $130 billion is an Overseas Contingency Operations fund used to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bill represents a big win for Obama.
"Congress largely rolled over for the White House," said Mackenzie Eaglen of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Congress typically changes about 5 percent" of the defense spending bills that presidents send them each year. "This year it's a lot less. This gives the White House a green light for next year to make even more significant cuts."
She predicts more cancellations of "legacy programs," with missile defense a prime target.
"You could see it coming," said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Some of the terminated weapons were programs that Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, also tried to kill, he said. But Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates go further.
Portfolio Rebalancing
"It is a rebalancing of the portfolio," Harrison said. Obama and Gates are refocusing the defense budget to concentrate on irregular warfare and countering high-end threats. The cuts are to weapons designed for midlevel threats, he said.
The Army's Future Combat Systems and the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter, for example, were intended for battling militaries "that look like ours and fight like ours. But everyone has learned that they can't fight us that way and win," he said.
So threats are gravitating toward the low end - irregular warfare - or the high end - space systems, cyberspace and long-range missiles, Harrison said.
Thus lawmakers added $1.2 billion to the $5.5 billion Obama wanted to buy Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles for use in Afghanistan. And they boosted spending on National Guard equipment by $600 million to $6.9 billion.
They budgeted more than $2 billion to develop defenses against improvised bombs and allocated $1.57 billion for defenses against chemical and biological weapons.
To address theater missile threats such as that from Iran, Congress added $723 million to buy extra Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Standard missiles, and $200 million to convert six more Aegis ships to conduct missile defense operations.
But the changes in missile defense priorities represent something more.
Lawmakers "finally realize that the Reagan vision for missile defense doesn't make sense at this time," said Christopher Hellman, a budget analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "There are other systems out there that are designed to meet the existing threat, and there is a reasonable expectation that they might work."
THAAD and the Standard missile "seem to be fairly reliable in testing - way better" than the larger missile interceptors dug into underground silos in California and Alaska, he said. THAAD is a mobile land-based missile. The Standard missile is ship-based.
"It is very clear in this bill that there is little tolerance for funding technology that is not ready for prime time," said Tom Captain, head of the aerospace and defense division of consulting firm Deloitte.
The cuts are the beginning of a trend in procurement and research and development sprnding, predicts Loren Thompson, defense analyst for the Lexington Institute.
"Weapons spending is caught in a three-way squeeze," he said. "The U.S. government is spending more than $4 billion a day that it doesn't have, personnel costs are squeezing everything else, and Gates says he doesn't even want a lot of the weapons" that the services hold dear.
Thompson foresees a 30 percent cut in weapons buying power by 2013.
Obama played hardball to get some of the cuts he wanted in 2010. He vowed to veto any bill that authorized buying more F-22s, and the program was canceled.
He was less adamant on the alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). A White House statement threatened only that senior advisers would recommend a presidential veto if the engine was funded and funding "would seriously disrupt the F-35 program."
Long a favorite of lawmakers, the alternative engine remains in the authorization bill. There is $430 million to continue development and $130 million to begin procurement.
Levin said the House, not the Senate, insisted on buying the second engine.
"We stood as long as we could for the Senate position, which was no second engine," Levin said. "But at the end of the day, this was a top House issue." Rather than delay the bill, the Senate went along with the House "as a matter of give-and-take to get to a conference report."
Levin said he hopes to dodge the threatened veto by not using money from the JSF program to pay for the engine. The House proposed reducing the number of planes bought in 2010 to pay for the engine. A compromise takes money "from multiple sources outside the Joint Strike Fighter program," Levin said, so funding the engine shouldn't "seriously disrupt" the program.
The White House argued that the second engine is "unnecessary" and would impede the JSF's progress.
Tough but Necessary
The engine notwithstanding, Congress made tough but necessary choices when it decided to cancel major weapons, Captain said.
"We can't afford all that we as a nation want for defense," Captain said. The cuts are the product of "a very professional and informed debate between the House and the Senate and the president's staff about [what] we can't afford."
The authorization bill affirms Gates' "desire to fund weapons development for the current and next wars, not the Cold War," Captain said. "That's important," considering "the irregular nature and asymmetric threats" the United States has faced since the Vietnam War.
But lawmakers were also conscious of the need to protect endangered parts of the defense industrial base, including aerospace jobs, he said.
That may be harder to do in the future.
The authorization bill would increase the size of the Army by 30,000 and the military's annual pay raise from 2.9 percent to 3.4 percent. Add to that rising health care costs, medical expenses for wounded troops and various allowances and other benefits.
"All of that is taking an increasingly larger chunk from the defense budget," which is likely to receive only nominal increases for the foreseeable future, Captain said.
As a result, procurement and research and development will be allotted smaller and smaller percentages of the budget, he said.
Procurement in the 2010 Authorization Bill receives $105 billion; research and development gets $79.3 billion.
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