By Jen DiMascio
The chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee told senior Army leaders he predicts election-year politics will make passing a defense spending bill for fiscal year 2009 very difficult, if not impossible.
Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) also alluded to a request that he has made in the past about accelerating near-term pieces of the Future Combat System (FCS).
“I don’t know if we’re going to get a bill,” Murtha said, adding that a continuing resolution would hamper efforts to “do anything that’s visionary.”
Still, Murtha said the defense portion of the FY ’08 supplemental is ready and may begin to move through the House during April.
The bill to fund the war this year needs to pass by Memorial Day, or the Army will begin to face problems, Lt. Gen. David Melcher, the service’s budget chief, told reporters.
Despite any hurdles posed by the election, Murtha said the subcommittee plans to mark up FY ’09 legislation in May.
“We’re looking at trying to get this thing moving as quickly as we can before the money runs out,” Murtha said. “So I think it’s imperative that you keep looking, that you study what we can offset some of these things with, and I would hope that you would come forward to the committee before we pass our base bill.”
What congressional staff calls Murtha’s “FCS drill” has been prompted in part by the urge to act while defense budgets are still flush (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
“As this war winds down, and we elect a new president, there’s going to be less money for the military,” because Congress will turn to address domestic problems like the nation’s infrastructure,” Murtha said during the hearing.
Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, the Army’s military deputy to the civilian acquisition chief, said the service is considering what FCS systems can be brought forward into the current force and said he discussed that with members of the HAC-D during a closed session yesterday.
The issue is how the service will fund that change; Thompson indicated plans to upgrade heavy ground vehicles may foot the bill.
“It’s a balance. You can’t just stop your investment in today and say I’m not going to do anything, because you’re going to have a lot of those systems out there for a long period of time. So it’s what’s the right level of investment to keep that force viable to be operational and what’s the right mix of what you’re going to do in the future,” Thompson said.
“You have to do reset for the vehicles, because that brings them back to the operational condition they need to be in for the soldiers to use them,” he told Defense Daily. “I don’t know how much recap and upgrade I need to do with the current systems, and that’s the real fundamental issue. It’s how much do I invest in upgrading current systems before I go to the future.”
Sources on the Hill and in industry said that points to one option the Army is considering as part of its future investment plan–pulling hundreds of millions of research dollars targeted at upgrading heavy vehicles and Stryker vehicles and pouring that money into accelerating pieces of FCS.
The stakes for moving funding around are high, according to a congressional aide. Pulling upgrade dollars from current vehicles could hamper efforts to add power needed to run force protection systems in the future. And rushing development of specific FCS vehicles could turn out platforms that are less capable than existing ones.