By Marina Malenic
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, yesterday making the rounds to defend his proposed Pentagon budget cuts in several media interviews, said he appreciated the impact some weapon program terminations will have on industry and employment.
For example, Gates told The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that employment tied directly to F-22 Raptor fighter jet production–which the secretary on Monday recommend be capped at 187 airplanes (Defense Daily, April 6)–will be reduced from 24,000 jobs this year to about 11,000 in 2011 as a result of gradually shutting down the production line. However, he said, that reduction will somewhat be mitigated as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter line ramps up production. Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds both planes. Some 38,000 people are currently employed in that work, and that number is expected to more than double by 2011.
“So there are puts and takes,” Gates said. “I think we’ve done a good job of taking care of the industrial base in the shipyards and the workers there in the decisions on the shipbuilding.”
Gates recommended no changes to the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, and he supported building three of the DDG-1000 destroyers (Defense Daily, April 6).
“We’re not oblivious to the employment aspects, but to be perfectly honest, there isn’t a single defense program anywhere…that doesn’t have an impact in somebody’s hometown and somebody’s state,” he added. “And so if you’re going to bring any discipline to the Defense Department budget, if you’re going to try and make any selectivity, have any selectivity in terms of what you fund and don’t fund, it will have an impact somewhere.”
Gates reiterated his reasons for major spending shifts in what he described as a “reform budget” intended to provide more support for irregular warfare capabilities. He said his primary goal is to provide a “seat at the table” for the part of the military that spends some 10 percent of the procurement budget on such systems.
“Their work has been funded principally through supplementals over the last six or seven years,” he told the NewsHour. “I want to get that capability into the base budgets so that it will continue and we don’t forget, as we did after Vietnam, how to do what we’re doing right now so successfully in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He said both wars will be funded in 2010 with an “overseas contingency fund”–the Obama administration’s new term for what has been called the “Global War on Terror (GWOT)” supplemental. However, many predictable war costs–such as $2 billion worth of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities–will be included in the department’s base budget request, according to Gates.
And there will still be plenty of funding for conventional capabilities, he added.
“The modernization programs of our traditional strategic and conventional weapons still account for about half of our budget,” Gates said. “Dual-purpose capabilities that work in any war scenario count for about 40 percent.”
Another major shift would come in spending on missile defense systems. Gates said he wants to bolster those programs targeted at rogue states and regional threats.
“We are significantly increasing the missile defense capabilities to deal with the theater and tactical threat, from Iran or Hezbollah or others like that, in a number of different ways–a lot of money being added to the budget,” he said.
He said he wants to “robustly fund research and development” on the Ground-Based Midcourse system of silo-based interceptors in Alaska and California but not add to their number. He said he also proposes continuing research on boost-phase intercept systems.
“I think we have really strongly supported missile defense, and I think that what we have taken out of the budget, frankly, were some experimental capabilities that were really not intended for the rogue-state missile threat, but rather, a much larger threat,” said Gates. “So I’m trying to conform our program to our policy.”