By Emelie Rutherford
With the Pentagon expected to call for the end of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s second engine in its pending budget request, a leading congressional supporter of the effort said he continues to push for an objective calculation of monies already spent on it.
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) told reporters yesterday he could not predict if Congress will again agree to fund the backup F-35 engine, built by General Electric [GE] and Rolls-Royce, during the fiscal year 2011 defense budget deliberations set to begin next week.
Yet Levin said he stands by the engine effort, despite Senate votes against it last year. He never succeeded last year in garnering from the military an undisputed calculation of expenditures thus far on the program, which Congress has funded over objections of President Barack Obama and former president George W. Bush’s administrations.
“It’s important that we get some numbers from the military on what has been what we call the sunk costs, how much money has gone into that and what percentage of the development has been completed, what is the projected cost of completion,” Levin said at a Capitol Hill press conference.
“The further you get past the 50-yard line towards the goal of finished development for that engine, it seems to me the more persuasive the argument is for completing the development of that engine,” he said. “We need numbers. We need good numbers. We need numbers that can be agreed to.”
Levin said Congress received two sets of contradictory numbers last year.
Internal Pentagon budget documents indicate the Obama administration will once again seek to end development of the engine program in the FY ’11 Defense Department budget proposal set to be unveiled next Monday.
The second-engine is funded in the FY ’10 defense appropriations and authorization acts. However, before House-Senate negotiators on those final pieces of legislation agreed to include the alternate engine, the Senate voted against it last July during consideration of the authorization measure and last October when it passed the appropriations version.
Levin argued the investment already made in the program, which is pegged to enter into production in FY ’10, is “way past the 50-yard line.”
“It wouldn’t make sense to stop production on an engine which, because it is a competitive engine, it leads to significant savings because it would mean there would be competition as well as a back-up engine,” he said.
Opponents of the F136 alternate engine, which is in addition to the primary F135 engine for the Joint Strike Fighter being built by Pratt & Whitney [UTX], argue it is not needed and wasteful.
The SASC has scheduled a hearing on the Air Force’s budget request, with Secretary Michael Donley and Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, on Feb. 9; funding for the multi- service F-35 is expected to generate ample discussion.
The Obama administration is expected to call for the termination of several addition weapon-system efforts in its FY ’11 budget, such as Boeing‘s [BA] C-17 cargo airplane, and end planning for future programs including the Navy’s CG(X) cruiser and EP(X) intelligence aircraft. FY ’11 will begin Oct. 1.
Levin noted the Obama administration was successful in ending the majority of weapons programs it sought to terminate in FY ’10, during a significant reorganization of the Pentagon’s budget.
Congress, however, did reject some of the proposed changes, and succeeded in continuing the F-35 alternate engine and C-17 production line over Pentagon objections.
The Obama administration also is expected to submit a supplement war-funding request for FY ’10 to Congress next week. Levin said while he expects some “vocal pushback” to the war appropriations bill in Congress, he does not expect a significant number of lawmakers to oppose the troop-funding measure.