By Emelie Rutherford
Pentagon leaders yesterday defended their budget to House lawmakers, who questioned the analysis behind the defense proposal and its limitations on efforts including the C-27J Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA), the F-22 fighter jet, strike fighter inventories, and missile defense.
Republicans delivered the harshest criticism of the Pentagon’s overall approach to the fiscal year 2010 budget proposal during yesterday’s House Armed Service Committee (HASC) hearing with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen.
HASC Ranking Member John McHugh (R-N.Y.) questioned Gates’ “wholesale reductions to military requirements” and lamented that “long-standing assumptions about the capabilities needed to hedge against the risks we face were holistically changed.”
“The delayed release of the budget request, the infamous prohibition on providing briefs to Congress ahead of that release, and the absence of a future years defense program has left an undeniable vacuum of analysis and justification,” McHugh said, adding some people have concluded “this proposal is a series of decisions whose only unifying theme is that the aggregate fits within the top line.”
Gates unveiled last month a series of programmatic changes within the $533.8 billion fiscal year 2010 defense budget proposal, which the Obama administration officially submitted last week to Congress.
Gates said the “problems that affect our strategy for our acquisition process” don’t result from a lack of analysis.
“My bumper sticker would be the problem with the Department of Defense is not a lack of analysis, but a lack of will to make tough decisions and tough calls, and I think we’ve done that this time.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including HASC Air Land Ranking Member Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), questioned Gates’ decision to cut the JCA effort from 78 to 38 planes and transfer the Army-Air Force program to the Air Force for oversight. L-3 Communications [LLL] is the prime contractor.
Gates said the JCA has half the payload of the C-130 and costs two-thirds as much.
“The reality is, here at home, we have over 200 C-130s that are available and uncommitted, so the notion that…limiting the C-27 program somehow reduces the ability of the Air National Guard and the Army to respond to a national disaster…or some other kind of disaster here at home is not sustainable,” the defense secretary said.
The current Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) will look at the balance among heavy-lift helicopters, C-27s, and C-130s, Gates said. Buying 38 JCAs will carry the Pentagon over the next three fiscal years, he said.
He added “the Air Force culture and approach to how they support the Army in this arena has to change,” and the uniform leaders of the Air Force and Army are discussing how the air service can be “more responsive to Army needs.”
Lawmakers also voiced concern about projected strike fighter shortfalls before the Joint Strike Fighter comes online.
Gates said the QDR will look at the fighter shortfall in two ways: by making a “capabilities-and-force-structure-based estimate” and by comparing U.S. fighter capabilities to adversaries’.
Mullen said the “strength of the commitment to air sovereignty levels and the need to meet that requirement is one we all recognize for the future.”
HASC Vice Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) noted “concern” about stopping the F-22 stealth fighter production line at 187 aircraft, after four more are ordered.
Gates reiterated his common retort that the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-22 has never flown a combat mission in Iraq or Afghanistan, and by buying 187 F- 22s the Pentagon would complete the program of record set in the Bush administration.
Many HASC Republicans grilled Gates on his proposed $1.2 billion cut to the Missile Defense Agency–reductions focused on longer-term technologies–and related proposals including to end expansion of the ground-based interceptors in Alaska and make the Airborne Laser program a research-and-development effort.
“I think this budget pays a lot of attention to missile defense. It’s just trying to focus the dollars on real yield and on research programs that have some prospect of yielding an operationally sound platform and one that actually can come to fruition in a lifetime,” Gates said.