The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 may fund intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets above and beyond what the Defense Department asked for, with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) saying he would prioritize the needs of overseas commanders over the Pentagon’s request.
Speaking to reporters Thursday morning, McKeon acknowledged the tough situation DoD found itself in–budget toplines are down compared to the past decade, and Overseas Contingency Operations funding is phasing out even as some overseas costs are likely to rise in the short-term as troops and their supplies move out of Afghanistan this year.
That being said, there are several items that DoD cut from its budget that the chairman wants to see back in.
“I’m concerned about the aircraft carrier refueling, I’m concerned about the A-10s, I’m concerned about the U-2s,” he told reporters.
Though the Air Force plans to retire its aging U-2 force in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk Block 30 because the newer platform’s maintenance and operation costs have dipped below that of the 1950s-era plane, McKeon implied he may not let them do so.
“I think ISR and intelligence is very, very important–if you don’t know what somebody else is doing, you don’t even know what your risks are,” McKeon said. He mentioned U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti several times during his media roundtable, noting that his daughter’s family had been stationed in South Korea for eight years and he was familiar with the dangers on the peninsula. “ISR is very, very important to him. I’m probably more concerned about Korea than anywhere because the way it’s laid out…you’ve got 27 million people there [in Seoul], all within range of North Korea’s artillery. And if you start shooting off that artillery, you’re talking huge numbers of casualties, Koreans and Americans. It would be catastrophic. And so he really needs the ISR, that gives him the ability to look deep into Korea–and the U-2, he said, was very important to him.”
Asked whether he was advocating keeping the U-2s instead of Global Hawks, McKeon said “[Scaparrotti] needs both. They have different capabilities. U-2 can go into areas where Global Hawk or unmanned systems can’t go right now. And so his opinion was, he needs all he can get. JSTARS, the satellites; human [intelligence] there is very difficult, so it has to be pretty much what we can gather in other ways.”
McKeon also mentioned the nuclear triad and readiness accounts as those he would protect in the NDAA, which the committee staff is writing now in preparation for subcommittee markups beginning April 30 and the full committee markup on May 7.
McKeon noted the challenges in finding room for all his priorities in the budget request. Between the administration’s five-year spending plan that goes above the sequestration spending caps, the assumed savings in personnel accounts that Congress will likely reject, and the changes McKeon and others would like to see based on the Unfunded Priorities Lists provided by the service chiefs and combatant commanders, “the subcommittees are going to have a real chore trying to figure all this stuff out. When they get their bills done and when we get the final markup, it’s going to be really tough,” he said.
“We have cut wherever we could the last couple years: we’ve taken all the efficiencies we could find, we’re in the process of cutting back manpower, [Rep.] Mac Thornberry is really working on ways to improve the buying and save money that way,” McKeon said. “But after a while, it becomes pretty much a zero-sum game: hard to keep cutting things, you don’t get as good a return.”