House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Democrats were not united on Monday behind a potential push to block the Pentagon from continuing a troubled tri-nation missile defense program.
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), ranking member of the HASC Strategic Forces subcommittee, said he hasn’t “come to a firm conclusion” on whether to support a potential amendment on the Medium Extended Air and Missile Defense System (MEADS). Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), a member of the missile-defense focused subpanel, said last month that one could arise when the HASC marks up the fiscal year 2014 defense authorization bill on Wednesday.
Multiple lawmakers have called on the United States to stop work on the developmental MEADS program, which has suffered cost and schedule setbacks. Though the United States does not plan to actually deploy MEADS, it has continued work on a MEADS “Proof of Concept” effort, in part to avoid substantial contract termination fees and to appease the German and Italian partners.
The missile-defense system is developed by MEADS International, which includes Lockheed Martin [LMT] in the United States and MBDA in Italy and MBDA’s LFK in Germany.
Sanchez said May 22, during the Strategic Forces subcommittee’s markup, that she and other HASC members would likely offer an amendment during the full HASC’s bill-writing session challenging the Pentagon’s continued MEADS funding. She said the HASC “should really begin to think about where we are leading with this program, or is it time to really say ‘It’s enough.’” At the time subcommittee Chairman Michael Rogers (R-Ala.) said supported funding MEADS so the United States could own and mine technology from the effort.
“It’s a messy issue,” Cooper, Rogers’ Democratic counterpart, told Defense Daily Monday. “I’m not exactly sure where the Europeans really are on it. I’ve heard conflicting stories…..There are degrees of support.”
Cooper said on Monday it was “too early to say” if an amendment like one Sanchez mentioned will arise during the day-long HASC markup on Wednesday. Sanchez, he noted, almost didn’t raise the possibility of the amendment during the subcommittee markup, but had a last-minute change of mind.
Cooper spoke shortly after HASC Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) released the “chairman’s mark,” the version of the defense authorization bill the committee will spend Wednesday amending.
“A lot of folks are coming together and trying to figure a lot of issues out,” Cooper said. That included whether members’ proposed amendments would be included in non-controversial “en bloc” packages that could pass easily, or whether they would be left as standalone amendments that would likely be debated in more depth.
Missile defense amendments have taken up a sizable chunk of the HASC markups in recent years, and congressional aides said that will be the case again tomorrow.
“We will have a lot of issues in our subcommittee, but Mike Rogers is trying to narrow things as much as he can,” Cooper said.