The move was swift and sudden: the Pentagon suddenly decided it was done with the Tomahawk missile last year and slashed the buy in half, zeroing it out in the Future Years Defense Plan. And the response from Congress was unmistakable: not on our watch.
Congress quite decisively restored all Tomahawk buys in its fiscal 2015 defense authorization and spending bills. But the Pentagon isn’t done yet, and in the fiscal 2016 budget submission, leadership is trying to pull the same move. Does the military have a chance of getting their way this time around? Probably not, but it frames a wider debate between Congress and the Obama Administration on the future of military spending.
The Defense Department’s position is that the current Tomahawk inventory meets current warfighting requirements: they have enough to stock all of the ships with enough Tomahawks to fight a big war and then some. “It’s basically as many as they would anticipate of being able to use in a warfight,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis.
However, the inventory doesn’t meet the strict warfighting requirement of having enough missiles to fight a longer-term conflict, say against China, and here’s where the debate comes in.
The Navy’s preference is to upgrade its current stock of missiles and start working on the replacement to the Tomahawk down the road. The service wants to work on next-gen missiles like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM). The Tomahawk is a fairly small production operation, so it doesn’t take much to keep the line open anyway, and the Navy is betting on no major conflict in the near term, said Clark.
Congress doesn’t appear quite willing to make that bet, and it’s not just because some lawmakers want to keep money flowing into their districts. There’s a philosophical difference between Congress and the Pentagon, as the former has some concerns with how the latter emphasizes capability over capacity — something that manifests itself in the A-10 and U-2 debates that are raging on the Hill right now. The Navy wants to get out of “the old thing and put money against the new thing,” Clark notes, whereas Congress appears more comfortable with phasing out the old thing gradually while developing the new thing. “Tomahawks are just another example of that phenomenon,” Clark added.
As a result, Congress is likely to once again be completely against this move when the markups start taking place later this year, and we’re likely to see a repeat of last year.
But there is some room for compromise: the Navy can use OCO (overseas contingency operations) funding for Tomahawks, which could allow Congress to buy Tomahawks outside the baseline budget while the Navy carves out money for its next-gen missile projects. Whether they can come to that sort of compromise, however, remains to be seen.