The Pentagon budget bill the Senate passed over the weekend cuts funding for systems including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, adds monies to maintain M-1 Abrams tank production, and critiques Army weapons development.
The fiscal year 2012 defense appropriations bill, which is part of larger government-funding legislation, contains an array of weapon-system cuts that match those in the policy-setting Pentagon authorization Congress signed off on last Thursday (Defense Daily, Dec. 16).
Military-watchers have waited for Congress to pass the defense authorization and appropriations bills since FY ’12 began Oct. 1. As of mid-day Saturday the two pieces of legislation had passed Congress–after the Senate passed the massive, budget-dictating appropriations measure that morning, via a 67-32 vote.
Much of the funding changes for weapon systems are the same in that omnibus appropriations bill–the details of which were released last Friday morning–as in the defense authorization legislation the Senate sent the White House last Thursday. The appropriations measure notably maintains the previously troubled Army-Marine Corps Joint Light Tactical Vehicle effort, as has been reported.
The appropriations bill, like the defense-policy measure, calls for cutting $151 million requested by the Pentagon for an Air Force variant of Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, dropping the total aircraft buy in FY ’12 from 32 to 31. The spending bill further cuts F-35 advance-procurement, by $94.5 million for an Air Force variant and $109 million for a Navy version. The appropriations measure then adds $100 million in funding to address concerns with F-35 concurrency, which is a setup that allows the Pentagon to buy early versions of the F-35 at the same time they are being developed.
“The conferees encourage the Joint Strike Fighter Team to review processes and oversight of concurrency changes and establish a process that will reduce the time it takes to discover a problem, develop a solution, and implement this solution to reduce future concurrency change costs,” the House and Senate appropriations conference committee says in its report on the defense bill. “The conferees recognize that, for a variety of reasons, the Joint Strike Fighter program is burdened with what could be the highest level of concurrency ever seen in an acquisition program.”
The conferees direct the defense secretary to provide a semi-annual report to the congressional defense committees that shows the actual concurrency costs for the F-35 effort. The report should be made available to the Pentagon’s director of cost assessment and program evaluation “for the purposes of cost estimating and to develop lessons learned from allowing programmatic concurrency, so this cost can be considered when decisions are made regarding allowing such a high degree of concurrency in future programs,” the appropriations conference report says.
(The policy-setting defense authorization bill, meanwhile, says contracts for forthcoming lots of F-35s, staring with lot 6, must be fixed-price and require the contractor pay all cost overruns.)
The final appropriations legislation also adds $255 million to the Army’s request for the M-1 Abrams tank to fund an additional 42 vehicles and prevent a break in the production line. The authorization legislation approves the same funding, which is says is for 49 tanks.
“The conferees direct the Secretary of the Army to provide a report not later than 60 days after enactment of this Act on the plan for the use of the additional funds, including the plan to sustain tank production,” the appropriations conference report states.
The document also delves into Army acquisition. It says conferees agree with Army steps to improve its processes by implementing the Decker-Wagner Army Acquisition Review findings, as well as taking steps to enhance civilian oversight of Army modernization portfolios. Yet they say current efforts “will not ensure that the Army will achieve its modernization objectives”
The Army recently gave House and Senate appropriators information on its 10 top-priority programs, and six of the “had undergone significant acquisition strategy modifications causing schedule and programmatic perturbations,” the report says. The Army identified more than $1 billion from its original FY ’12 budget request as excess to its funding requirements for the year. The service also notified Congress about more than $309 million in excess funds from its budget request because of program terminations and requested transfers of over $282 million among 10 different programs, the appropriators write.
“This magnitude of change in funding across a multitude of programs, identified after submitting the budget only 10 months prior, indicates a pervasive instability in Army programs,” their report says.
They criticized a “history of programmatic instability indicates a lack of focus and discipline in the requirements generation process that must be corrected before the Army will see any improvement in its ability to successfully modernize.”
Their report says the Army secretary “is encouraged to” thoroughly examine the service’s requirements-generation process.