By Emelie Rutherford
The Senate was poised yesterday to approve a Pentagon money shift that would amount to one of lawmakers’ first endorsements of President Barack Obama’s new European missile- defense plans.
The chamber was preparing at press time to vote on amendments to the fiscal year 2010 military construction appropriations bill, including one to reprogram $68.5 million in unobligated FY ’09 funds to help build an Aegis Ashore test facility at the Pacific Missile Range in Hawaii. The amendment, offered by Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) at the request of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA), would redirect construction monies never spent on former President George W. Bush’s now-defunct plan to deploy missile interceptors and radars in fixed sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Inouye emphasized last week that MDA Director Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly said “that establishing this test facility is his top priority for the president’s new plan for missile defense in Europe.”
Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced on Sept. 17 they were scrapping the Bush administration missile-defense plan to build an Eastern European “third site.” In its place, the Obama team is pursing a phased overseas setup utilizing Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, which uses Raytheon‘s [RTN] Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptors, before developing a land-based Aegis BMD capability.
The Aegis Ashore facility to be aided by Inouye’s amendment would help test the forthcoming land-based SM-3 interceptor. O’Reilly says in an Oct. 7 letter to Inouye that MDA wants the money reprogrammed in FY ’10, so it can build the facility in time to support the first test flight of the land-based SM-3 interceptor in FY ’12.
The Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii was chosen as the proposed site for the new test facility because of its “strategic location and multi-dimensional testing capabilities,” according to O’Reilly, who adds placing a test launcher at the site could provide continuous coverage for the region.
“Your support to make these FY2009 MILCON funds available for the Aegis Ashore test facility is essential if we are to implement the President’s new Phased Adaptive Approach in time to counter the growing ballistic missile threat,” O’Reilly writes to Inouye.
Inouye’s amendment is co-sponsored by SAC Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies subcommittee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-S.D.). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, at press time had a pending second-degree amendment to Inouye’s measure.
Yet McCain’s amendment “does not negate” Inouye’s, McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said. The Arizona senator’s measure would subject the expenditure of the test facility funding to a subsequent authorization from Congress, she said.
Inouye said last week he offered the missile-defense amendment “with some reservation,” because it circumvents the normal order of business in the Senate, as it was not authorized in the FY ’10 defense authorization act that Obama signed into law last month. Yet Inouye noted the Obama administration announced the new European missile-defense plan, and O’Reilly requested the reprogramming, when the House and Senate armed services committees were finalizing the authorization bill.
The FY ’10 Defense Authorization Act, Inouye noted, allows MDA to spend FY ’09 and FY ’10 research and development monies to buy equipment for the Aegis Ashore test facility and begin developing the new European missile-defense architecture. The reprogrammed military-construction funds, he said, would complement research-and-development funding.