House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) has eliminated most of the funding for JLENS, a tethered aerostat built for the purpose of detecting cruise missiles and aircraft, in the chairman’s mark of the National Defense Authorization Act, congressional sources told Defense Daily on Friday.
The Army in its fiscal 2017 budget request asked for $45.5 million for JLENS. The chairman’s mark of the NDAA would provide $2.5 million, effectively killing the program. Those funds are to be used by the department to determine how to continue to address the threat to Washington, D.C., and its surrounding region, a HASC staffer said.
Photo: Raytheon
After one system broke loose last October and drifted from Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., to Pennsylvania, JLENS—which stands for Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System—became the poster child of wasteful spending for certain lawmakers who want to see the program canceled altogether. The military took hours to find and deflate the escaped JLENS, and during that time the tether of the system clipped power lines, causing outages and damage. As a result, the Army launched an investigation into the incident, and Congress in the 2016 appropriations bill cut $30 million from the $40.6 million program.
JLENS was developed by Raytheon [RTN] and currently is deployed to Aberdeen Proving Ground to conduct homeland defense of Washington, D.C., and its surrounding area. The company has built two of the unmanned, helium-filled aerostats, each of which is equipped with a long range, 360-degree radar. One aerostat is meant to conduct surveillance, while the other provides fire control data to other systems.
The service projected a $6.7 million request for 2018, when its three-year operational deployment is scheduled to end.
One of the system’s biggest critics, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the Armed Services Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, hailed the decision to cut the program’s funding.
“I commend the Chairman for defunding JLENS as I have urged the committee repeatedly. This isn’t the first time we’ve tried to kill this ‘zombie program’ – let’s hope it stays dead this time,” she said. “I look forward to working with my colleagues to put this money to use protecting our nation, rather than sending it to float away on a path of destruction from Maryland to Pennsylvania.”