Sea and air power were major winners in the fiscal year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act conference report released on Tuesday.
In their versions of the NDAA, both the House and Senate proposed funding increases that would boost the number of fighters, increase the pace of shipbuilding and number of vessels procured. For the most part the Senate’s larger increases were adopted in the reconciled bill, resulting in a $1 billion hike for Navy shipbuilding and the procurement of additional fighter aircraft.
The bill authorizes the purchase of 12 additional F/A-18E/F Super Hornets for the Navy and six more F-35B Joint Strike Fighters for the Marine Corps.
In shipbuilding, the bill adds $279 million to accelerate production of the first LX(R) amphibious assault vessel. To speed up other programs, it increases funding for the Afloat Forward Staging Base program by $97 million, boosts LHA-8 procurement by $199 million and adds $34 million to the Landing Craft Utility replacement vessel program.
It also provides an extra $60 million for DDG-51 upgrades as well as contracting authority to buy an additional Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
In the area of unmanned aerial systems, the bill contains an extra $65 million for the MQ-4C Triton program for an additional air vehicle.
The conference report includes several provisions that will not likely be popular with the services. It includes funding for the A-10 Warthog, which the Air Force wants to retire, and prohibits the service from mothballing those aircraft.
Both the House and Senate armed service committees want the Navy to field a Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system that can operate in contested environments—something that the current UCLASS requirements do not allow for. To push the service toward developing a more sophisticated UCLASS, the conference report authorizes an increase of $350 million for development and risk reduction of two Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration (UCAS-D) aircraft.
That decision represents a compromise between HASC–which opted to simply fund the president’s UCLASS request–and SASC, which wanted to authorize $725 million for the formation of a new competitive prototyping effort and the existing UCAS–D aircraft, the X-47B.
The bill decreases the cost cap of the Ford-class aircraft carriers from $11.498 billion to $11.398 on the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) and all following ships in the class. Another new regulation stipulates that Congress must be notified of engineering change on the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) resulting in a cost of more than $5 million.
The report also mandates that CVN-78 go through full shock trials, but grants the Defense Secretary waiver authority to delay the tests until the ship’s first major maintenance availability after deployment.
For the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, the bill limits funds for LCS-25 and LCS-26 until the Navy provides information about the acquisition strategy of LCS-25 through LCS-32. It limits research and development, design, construction, procurement or advance procurement of materials funding for frigate version of LCS to 50 percent unless the service provides a capabilities-based assessment of the new vessel.
It also cuts $34.5 million from the remote minehunting system, one of the systems in the LCS’s mine countermeasures mission module.
The NDAA contains $515 billion in base budget spending for national defense and $89.2 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations.