By Emelie Rutherford
The supplemental war-funding bill the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) plans to mark up today will not include C-17 cargo aircraft yet may fund Stryker ambulances not requested by the Obama administration, the panel’s chairman said.
SAC Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who also chairs the defense subcommittee, told reporters Tuesday night he does not support adding the Boeing [BA]-built C-17 cargo aircraft to the bill. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to end the C-17 production line at the 205 aircraft ordered. Yet the version of the supplemental headed to the House floor today calls for adding $2.2 billion to the administration’s supplemental request for eight C-17s.
C-17 funding “is not going to be on it,” Inouye said about the SAC’s supplemental. The C-17 funding will be hashed out by a House-Senate conference committee, he predicted.
Inouye has called for passing a clean supplemental without too many add-ons.
Regarding the C-17s, he said: “Once you start putting stuff like that on, how are you going to stop others from doing it?”
Strykers are different because they more directly relate to war operations, he said.
Inouye did not outright endorse adding the ambulance version of General Dynamics‘ [GD] Strykers to the supplemental. Yet he did say he was concerned about maintaining the Stryker production line.
“We’ll try to work out something, maybe with the ambulance,” the SAC chairman said Tuesday night.
Earlier on Tuesday Inouye questioned Army Secretary Pete Geren on the service’s Stryker plans, with the senator saying the Army should buy more of the vehicles than planned “to maintain the industrial base of the Stryker.”
Inouye also asked about the Stryker ambulances. Geren said the Army’s requirement for those vehicles has been addressed, but the service will study the requirement further because House appropriators have called for buying more of them.
The House Appropriations Committee approved a supplemental last week that adds to the administration’s supplemental $338.4 million for 225 Stryker medical-evaluation vehicles and 35 Stryker engineering-squad vehicles, which the administration did not request. The White House did, however, seek six Stryker mobile-gun-system vehicles in its proposed supplemental.
Inouye’s decision to leave C-17 funding out of the supplemental has alarmed some of his Senate colleagues, including C-17 supporter Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), and 17 other senators had sent Inouye a letter on Tuesday asking him to fund 15 C-17s in the supplemental.
“We cannot ignore the fact that the C-17 is the last remaining strategic airlift production line in the nation, and shutting down this line prematurely may prove costly for the American taxpayer,” states the letter, which also was sent to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), the ranking member of the SAC and its defense subcommittee.
Inouye has said he supporters adding C-17 funding to the base FY ’10 defense budget.
The supplemental is intended to cover war-related operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through the end of fiscal year 2009 on Sept. 30 (Defense Daily, April 13). President Obama on April 9 requested $75.5 billion in war funding within a supplemental bill totaling $83.4 billion, which later grew to include flu-related funding.