By Emelie Rutherford
Congress could cut the Pentagon’s defense-spending proposal for the upcoming year, the head of a defense panel in Congress said last Friday in a speech that also outlined areas he wants to focus on more in the budget, including cyber security.
Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) described his views on the Pentagon budget at the Showcase for Commerce in Johnstown, Pa., a defense-industry event long championed by the late Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), whom Dicks succeeded as House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D) chairman in March.
Dicks said his panel’s forthcoming defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2011 may reflect “a substantial reduction from the president’s budget request” of $708.3 billion for the Pentagon base budget and war funding, according to his prepared speech. That’s because the HAC-D’s allocation from the full House Appropriations Committee “could” be smaller than President Barack Obama’s requested amount, he told the large gathering of defense contractors.
“With the austerity that colors the rest of our appropriations work this year, and with a serious commitment to reduce the deficit, I cannot believe defense will be held harmless,” he said. Lawmakers, he said, must constrain spending and will “do they best they can to preserve the “consensus in Congress to provide the best defense of this nation.”
He said his panel could approve a FY ’11 defense appropriations bill “perhaps in July.” Like the HAC-D, the Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee has not yet unveiled its version of the legislation.
Dicks said that while lawmakers don’t always agree with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ proposed budget cuts, he dubbed Gates’ analysis “accurate” regarding “the acquisition of major weapon systems and defense-related material.”
The HAC-D chairman highlighted Gates’ concerns with the cost of the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer, ranging from $3 billion to $6 billion, and projected budget-busting price tag for the planned SSBN(X) ballistic-missile submarine, estimate to run from $8 billion to $11 billion.
“When the costs of these systems go up this quickly, as we know, the number of ships and planes that we are able to buy goes down, which clearly has an impact on our ability to meet the threats and challenges we must be prepared to confront,” Dicks said.
An unabashed supporter of Boeing [BA], a major Washington state employer, Dicks has clashed with Gates on matters including the Air Force’s aerial- refueling tanker competition, which includes Boeing.
As chairman of the powerful HAC-D, Dicks said at the Showcase for Commerce, he agrees “we have to face up to this acquisition problem, or acquisition challenge.”
He highlighted new areas of emphasis for the HAC-D, including intelligence, cyber security, the U.S. industrial base including small businesses, and the National Guard and Reserve.
Cyber security will be “major priority of our committee,” Dicks said.
“When you realize who is at work here, including governments that are developing offensive capabilities in cyberspace…you have to understand that the threat is real,” he said. “It is serious. And it’s here today.”
Dicks, who has been deeply involved in intelligence matters in Congress, emphasized the importance he sees in intelligence collection and analysis.
“I believe the subcommittee will be strongly supportive of our intelligence capabilities, and it is certainly my intention to provide the direction to our intelligence agencies to be as creative as possible to address issues such as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” he said.
The HAC-D will continue to focus on the needs of the National Guard and Reserve, he said, and add funding above the administration’s requested levels for their equipment. He said he fears the National Guard and Reserve’s heavy use in Iraq and Afghanistan has left “nothing left in reserve to allow governors to mobilize for state-level emergencies.”
Dicks also reiterated his critique that the U.S. industrial base has not received sufficient support from the Obama administration, or former president George W. Bush’s White House before it.
“With the number of critical research, satellite, aircraft, and rotorcraft programs that have been canceled or curtailed in the past decade, the Pentagon’s ability to push the technological envelope and leap forward–the way we did with stealth technology, for example–is severely limited,” he said.
With fewer defense firms competing for a smaller number of Pentagon contracts than in the past, he predicted, fewer industry workers will be available and the United States’ ability to respond to new and more technically complex threats will be diminished.
“Our committee is going to seek new and innovative ways of encouraging the (Defense) Department to pay more attention to industrial base concerns,” he said.
That will include prodding the Pentagon to work more with smaller and non-traditional defense companies, he said.
Dicks said he wants the HAC-D to substantially expand the Pentagon’s Small Business Innovation Research Program, and to “direct the Defense Department to seek out and to work with small- and medium-sized companies to fund promising ideas and concepts.”
He has talked in recent months about such enhanced outreach to small defense shops by the Pentagon as a way to help those companies while lawmakers are pressured to curtail the practice of earmarking funding for specific firms in spending bills (Defense Daily, March 11).
“Ideas pioneered by small businesses like many that are displaying here at Showcase (for Commerce) can often push the envelope on traditional science or manufacturing methods and result in huge technological leaps forward,” Dicks said during his morning speech. “But we have not always had an adequate way of bringing these smaller firms and their innovation into the defense pipeline.”
Contractors paid $25 each to hear Dicks at last Friday’s sold-out breakfast. Murtha, who died in February, built up Johnstown from an old steel town to a focal point of the defense industry, using his power as the HAC-D chairman in steering Pentagon budgets and earmarking funds for specific firms.
“It is a great pleasure for me to be here at the 20th Annual Showcase for Commerce and indeed an honor to be here filling the shoes of a man who meant so much to this community and so much to all of us, certainly to me,” Dicks told the gathering.