The chairman of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee yesterday challenged the defense industrial base to target Congress with a grassroots campaign to save itself from sequestration.
Durbin brought seven witnesses before the subcommittee, representing industry associations, small businesses and even an Illinois town with a heavy concentration of aerospace contractors. At the conclusion of the hearing, he told them there is exactly one month until the budget conference committee hopes to have a solution to bring to the House and Senate for consideration. .jpg)
“You have three options. You get a bronze medal for sending a letter to those who are engaged, the budget conferees and members of Congress. You get a silver medal by asking your members to send letters as well,” he told his witnesses. “But you’ll get a gold medal if you take the example of this hearing and take it a step further: when you have organized labor joining in this conversation, elected officials, community leaders, saying this is the impact of sequestration on hometown America, Mr. Congressman and Mr. Senator. That is the gold-medal performance, and we have four weeks to do it. I hope you’ll use this hearing as a catalyst and a kick-off for that effort.”
The witnesses spoke to the effects of sequestration on their businesses, on their associations, on their hometowns, and on the national economy. In response to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) question about what the witnesses would do about sequestration if they were in Congress, National Defense Industrial Association president Lawrence Farrell replied that when he was an Air Force general, “we had predictability and certainty in what we were going to get–it might not have been everything we wanted, but it was predictable and so we could make the adjustments. So our recommendation, at least NDIA’s recommendation, is give us two years of relief from sequester, and give us time to make an adjustment to the strategy, and give us a number [for out-year spending goals]. …We know it’s not going to be as good as it’s been in the past, and there are a lot of reasons for that, but we need the predictability.”
Marion Blakey, the president and chief executive officer of the Aerospace Industries Association, told the subcommittee that the defense industry has always helped the United States military “out-innovate” its potential foes, and while that did produce profits for companies, lawmakers should also remember that this industry “is what is protecting the backs of our men and women in uniform right now.”
“I don’t think anyone in our industry maintains that we should just continue spending at a very fast clip without taking into account our country’s fiscal situation: the debt and the deficit have to be addressed,” she said. “We believe they have very significantly, though, been addressed in terms of the defense budget by the $487 billion cut that came on top of a number of other program drawdowns [before sequestration]. At this point we really feel very strongly that the cuts are disproportionate. And what we don’t believe is taken into account is, what is the strategy that will mitigate the risk we all know is out there?”
Blakey said the pivot to the Pacific clearly prioritized some capabilities more than others–ships, air power and stealthy platforms to operate in an anti-access/area-denial environment–and spending ought to reflect that.
“So maybe we do set aside some other capabilities” based on a strategy that prioritizes operations in the Pacific. But, she said, “that conversation, those decisions, cannot be made under sequestration.”