One of the casualties of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73)’s funding limbo and the decision to truncate the Littoral Combat Ship program was the MH-60R helicopter. Once the Navy decided it would have to do without those ships, it slashed all 29 helicopters in fiscal 2016, which would end the program. However, as momentum for CVN-73’s refueling grows, it looks less and less likely that those helicopters are going anywhere — except to a flight deck.
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The MH-60 program is already winding down, with the MH-60S already scheduled for its last procurement of eight helicopters in the fiscal 2015 budget set to be approved by Congress, but in addition to the 29 MH-60Rs to be purchased this year, the Navy had planned to buy 29 more in the fiscal 2016 budget before ending the program. That changed with the Navy’s money-saving bid to sideline 11 cruisers, truncate the LCS program, and their inability to find money to refuel and overhaul CVN-73. In unveiling the 2015 budget earlier this year, the Navy eliminated all of the fiscal 2016 helicopters. That didn’t sit well with Congress, however.
Senate authorizers, in language added to their report, pointed out that the MH-60 is under a multiyear contract with the Army, and the service would force the Army to renegotiate the contract by failing to buy those 29 helicopters, “which will probably delay deliveries and most certainly increase unit costs.”
Both House and Senate appropriators agreed in their own reports, stating that the decision to cut the helos was due to the Navy’s decision to decommission CVN-73 prematurely. But as Congress appears poised to provide the required funding to retain CVN-73, the committees both directed the Navy to restore full funding for those helicopters in next year’s budget.
“Congress doesn’t want to not buy anything,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, noting that lawmakers have pushed back on attempts to cut the U-2 and A-10 programs. “Congress is loathe to give up any force structure or not buy something. There’s a kind of a historical memory there that says once we let this stuff go, we never get it back. [The Defense Department] doesn’t have a great track record for long-term thinking with their money.”
Clark said Congress is trying to avoid making big changes year to year just in response to temporary budget pressures. “There’s been plenty of cases where DOD did something to save money and didn’t come back to try to harvest those savings and do something good with them,” he said.
What Congress essentially is saying is that the Pentagon got the H-60 multiyear contract for cheap, and so why not continue buying the aircraft, even if it means taking the money from somewhere else. “At least we have helicopters at the end of the day,” Clark said.
There is an industrial base aspect to the debate, and certainly lawmakers don’t want to see jobs lost in their state, but Congress as a whole appears to be thinking long-term on the issue, Clark said
At the end of the day, those helicopters will probably be restored because breaking a multiyear contract unless it’s absolutely necessary is not an appetizing scenario for lawmakers, especially at the tail end of the contract. However, keeping the helicopters — and making other similar decisions within the defense budget — brings up another problem: readiness.
When the Pentagon goes elsewhere in the budget for money, it usually dips into the operations and maintenance accounts, which is “just a big pot of money, as opposed to procurement where Congress gets line-item control,” Clark noted.
“Congress puts these budget control caps in place, and then tells DOD they can’t get rid of anything,” he said. “So you have lower budget caps, and the only place to go is to O&M. Readiness goes down, and next time we ask someone to do airstrikes in Syria and chase down pirates in the Gulf of Aden, there will be [fewer assets available].”