By Emelie Rutherford
A leading defense appropriator in Congress predicted yesterday that Pentagon spending will drop in the coming years, and that consideration of the next supplemental war-funding bill will “set the stage” for how President-elect Barack Obama handles defense matters.
The Bush administration is expected to send a second and final war supplemental for fiscal year 2009 to Congress as soon as this month. House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D) Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) told reporters after a speech yesterday that spending request, expected to be worth $82 billion, will be changed, “no question about that.”
Murtha spoke favorably about funding Boeing [BA]-build C-17 airlifters, lamenting that while the Pentagon needs replacement C-17s it has not requested funding for them and left it to Congress to insert the aircraft’s spending into supplemental spending bills.
He said lawmakers will have to examine Army and Marine Corps plans for a new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) effort when considering an expected funding request for the new vehicle competition in the supplemental (Defense Daily, Dec. 7).
And Murtha, asked if he would support buying four of Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] F-22 fighter jets in the supplemental–a request expected to be in the spending plan–said “it depends on how bad we need them and when we need them.”
Murtha bemoaned the Pentagon’s recent budgeting practices during and after his speech at the Center for American Progress think tank in Washington.
If the four F-22s are needed to keep the production line going, he asked reporters, then why didn’t the Pentagon build that stability into the base defense budget itself? Similarly, he questioned why there isn’t a clear strategy for Afghanistan that he can look to when considering adding funding for varied aircfraft, or clearer plans for how many C-17s, F-22s, C-130s (Lockheed Martin cargo haulers) and F-35s (Lockheed Martin jets) the Pentagon needs.
“The secretary (of defense) and I have talked about this over and over again,” Murtha said. “Tell me how many you need because now’s the time to buy them. Don’t cut it down then start (the production) up later on, because that’s so expensive.”
Murtha repeated his call for ending the practice of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through supplementals instead of the base defense budget, yet said the supplemental for the remainder of FY ’09 is needed under the current setup.
“This supplemental will I think set the stage in the way Obama is going to handle defense,” he said. “So we’re going to work very closely with the Armed Services Committee and with the Obama administration trying to come up with a supplemental that makes sense.”
Murtha said in his speech that during his three decades in Congress he’s never seen a more difficult situation than the one the Obama administration faces, with two wars it is inheriting and a “military stretched to the edge of its capabilities.” On top of that, Murtha noted the recession, federal deficit and debt, and unavoidable and costly domestic spending.
“If we use history as a guide, defense spending will come under increased pressure over the coming years,” Murtha said. “What I’m saying (is) there’s going to be less defense spending.”
He added “our job will be to manage the current and future threats under a constrained defense budget,” which he said is “not easy” to get right.
The HAC-D chairman said there will be “savings across the board.” Those can be sought by working to find “a way to fix the acquisition process so that we do it the right way the first time,” he said, pointing to rising costs for programs such as the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer. Murtha also called for buying “the quantity (of weapon systems) that gives us stability in industry so that they can get the price down.” Defense savings also can be found by cutting enlistment bonuses and slowing personnel increases, he said.
Murtha called for maintaining a “strong military” with a “flexible and dynamic force that can be task-organized to deal with conventional war as well as irregular or asymmetric warfare.” He said Obama faces a great challenge in developing an “achievable strategy” for Afghanistan, and lamented “serious challenges with readiness and personnel” the military faces.
“The fiscal year 2009 (personnel) costs are a staggering: $153 billion, and growing,” Murtha said. “We have to find the right balance between personnel and procurement. You can’t expect to increase personnel and increase procurement, both of them at the same time, in a defense budget that is under pressure.”
Because the United States does not have the industrial capacity it had in the past, he said, it is very important to figure out and stick with the numbers of systems needed in defense programs.
Murtha said these challenges cannot be addressed before the development of a comprehensive national-security strategy addressing short-term and long-term threats to the country.