By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps has identified for Congress $351 million in desired spending items left out of the official fiscal year 2011 Pentagon budget request, which total twice the amount of so-called unfunded requirements it outlined last year.
A KC-130J aircraft is the highest-value item listed on the Marine Corps’ FY ’11 unfunded-programs list, which was released to the press yesterday. The service wants $79 million in advanced-procurement funds for one of these aerial-refueling tankers. This KC-130J aircraft request is part of a total $168 million in warfighter equipment that the service wants yet did not survive the inner-Pentagon budget scrub.
Another prominent item on the service’s newly unveiled unfunded-programs list is $34 million for CH-53E helicopter reliability improvements.
Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway sent House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Ranking Member Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calf.) a Feb. 17 letter and list describing the $351 million in unfunded items. By contrast, the service last year identified just $188.3 million in unfunded programs for FY ’10.
It has become an annual budget practice for the ranking member of the HASC to ask the services to detail such unfunded programs for Congress. To the chagrin of some lawmakers, Defense Secretary Robert Gates last year reviewed the letters before they were sent to Capitol Hill.
“None of the items on this Unfunded Programs List is of a higher priority than any of the items already included in the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2011 Budget submission,” Conway wrote to McKeon about the FY ’11 list.
The service’s list is broken down into four areas:
- $34 million for the CH-53 improvements;
- $168 million in warfighter equipment (advance procurement for three aircraft: $79 million for the KC-130J, $33 million for three UC-12Ws, and $56 million for two UC-35ERs);
- $131 million for readiness (for four items: $55 million for 24 M88A2 Improved Recovery Vehicles; $38 million for 221 Mine Roller Systems; $33 million for seven Assault Breacher Vehicles; and $5 million for Family of Field Medical Equipment); and
- $18 million for modernization (a child-development center).
While the Marine Corps compiled a modest $188.3 million unfunded-requirements tally last year, for FY ’10, in previous years its lists were much larger, totaling $3.01 billion in FY ’09 and $3.1 billion in FY ’08.