A lawmaker who helps craft the Pentagon budget called yesterday for boosting national missile defense spending and implanting missile interceptors on the East Coast of the United States.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), whose panel will start crafting the Pentagon policy bill next month, advocated for more missile defenses for protecting the homeland at a Washington conference yesterday, putting him at odds with his Democratic counterpart in the Senate.
Addressing the U.S. Missile Defense Conference sponsored by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, McKeon said “missile defense will play a key role” in the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill the HASC subcommittees will begin marking up next month. HASC Strategic Forces subcommittee Chairman Michael Turner (R-Ohio) has “forged a practical way to bolster our defenses in a tight fiscal climate,” McKeon said.
“In the coming month, with Chairman Turner’s input and guidance, we’ll be doing our best to ensure that the Missile Defense Agency has the resources and capabilities to detect, identify, and eliminate any missile threat to the homeland,” McKeon said.
Turner has said he wants to increase funding for Boeing’s [BA] Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) homeland missile-defense effort–which has had two test failures–and questioned if President Barack Obama’s administration is overly emphasizing its Phased Adaptive Approach program for European missile defense (Defense Daily, March 21).
The Pentagon’s FY ’13 budget request seeks $900 million for the GMD system in Alaska and California, which is roughly $260 million less than in FY ’12, when GMD funding also dropped from the previous year.
McKeon told the missile-defense contractors and government officials yesterday the HASC will “examine two critical areas that should help the health and well-being of your mission.” He called for testing the two-stage ground-based interceptor “as soon as possible” to serve as a “hedge against threats.” He further wants to “ensure…the reliability” of the current GMD system, questioning why testing of it isn’t as frequent as ICBM tests that are conducted three times a year.
“Getting reliable data so that we can calibrate our interceptors with the best information possible is really important,” he said. “That means we properly resource a testing regiment that reflects realistic threats,” he added, citing North Korean and Iranian ICBM aspirations.
McKeon further said “modernizing and prioritizing GMD is just part of the story” and said officials should “look at” putting ground-based interceptors on the East Coast, to complement those on the West Coast.
“We still must assure full coverage of U.S. territory against threats from any direction,” he said.
He argued Iran’s missile ambitions necessitate the need to “bolster the eastern seaboard again GMD.”
McKeon also said he wants to “closely examine” the Pentagon’s proposed funding reduction for Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors used in theater. He noted a successful test in October and the desire to protect forward-stationed troops.
“That means providing the right funding, testing, and numbers are needed to keep our troops safe,” he said.
Moments before McKeon addressed the missile-defense crowd yesterday, Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) delivered a speech that lacked McKeon’s calls for increased funding.
Levin’s committee will mark up a FY ’13 defense authorization bill after the HASC does, and the two lawmakers will have to negotiate a final piece of legislation after the separate bills are passed by their respective chambers.
Levin cited his focus over the years on “developing, testing and deploying operationally effective, cost-effective and affordable missile defenses to protect against actual threats, and to do this by demonstrating that they work through rigorous and realistic testing before we deploy them and through strong acquisition processes and accountability.”
The SASC chairman spoke optimistically about changes to the acquisition system and new quality-control efforts MDA is taking with industry.
Levin, though, stopped short of calling for bolstering the GMD system. He said the current setup with 30 ground-based interceptors “defends the entire U.S. homeland” from threats from potential threats from Iran and North Korea. He noted reliability improvements the Pentagon is planning to the GMD systems, “including reliability improvements to the interceptors, improvements in command and control and sensors, additional test and spare interceptors, and extra capacity to deploy additional interceptors if needed.” He spoke positively about MDA plans to work out problems related to the two GMD test failures before producing more of the Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicles that were used. Levin said the SASC supports “flying before buying,” and said a “delay of a few months in the intercept flight test is worth it because the test will show how the actual system works.”
Levin said “the most pressing missile threat that the world faces, hands down, is the threat of regional ballistic missiles from Iran.” He thus advocated for the nascent sea-and-land-based Phased Adaptive Approach in Europe and the Middle East as well as missile-defense cooperation with Israel. Levin advocated for working with Russia on missile defense, which McKeon said he had misgivings about doing.