The Army has held staff-level conversations about potentially expanding the list of munitions it would look to buy using new multi-year procurement authority, according to the service’s secretary.
During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth cited the new multi-year procurement authority as “very helpful” and reaffirmed the Army’s intent to award such contracts for GMLRS rockets and PAC-3 MSE interceptors this fiscal year.
Photo: Lockheed Martin
“I think we’ve been in conversations at the staff level about a couple more places where that might be applicable. If I’m not mistaken, I think we have to demonstrate a certain amount of cost savings. There’s a threshold that one has to meet to be able to get multi-year procurement authority. So I think that’s where some of the conversation has been with some of the professional staff,” Wormuth told the panel.
After Congress granted new authority in the fiscal year 2023 defense policy bill to seek multi-year procurement opportunities for select munitions, the final FY ‘24 defense appropriations bill funded six of DoD’s seven requests to include the Army’s Lockheed Martin [LMT]-built GMLRS and PAC-3 MSEs and Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile, Lockheed Martin’s LRASM and JASSM-ER missiles and RTX’s [RTX] AMRAAM missiles (Defense Daily, March 21).
The final FY ‘24 defense spending bill did not cover DoD’s request to use multi-year authority for RTX’s SM-6 missiles.
The FY ‘24 National Defense Authorization Act further expanded the list of weapons eligible for such contracts to include: Tomahawk cruise missiles, the Army’s new Precision Strike Missiles, Mark 48 Torpedoes, Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles, Rolling Airframe Missiles, and Small Diameter Bombs (Defense Daily, Dec. 14 2023).
The Pentagon, however, did not include any new requests for multi-year munitions procurements in its FY ‘25 budget submission (Defense Daily, March 14).
“There’s no new [multi-year requests] in here. We’re hoping to get started on the ones we asked for a year ago. But we didn’t add new ones to the list. Seven [munitions] is a lot to start [with] in one year. So I guess it’s just as well that we didn’t start with any new ones because then we’d be on the hook to do quite a lot in however many months it’s going to be into FY ‘25 before we get the FY ‘25 funding,” a senior defense official told reporters ahead of the FY ‘25 budget rollout, which occurred prior to congressional appropriators funding six of the DoD’s seven requests.
The senior defense official noted the multi-year munitions procurement requests funded in the FY ‘24 defense appropriations bill, once awarded, would continue to run through FY ‘25.
The Army has previously detailed its projected cost savings with the multi-year procurement authority as it eyes awarding a potential four-year, nearly $2.6 billion deal for 18,000 GMLRS rockets and a three-year, $2.58 billion award for up to 1,000 PAC-3 MSE interceptors (Defense Daily, April 13 2023).
“Essentially, [multi-year procurement contracts] send a very strong demand signal to industry that there’s a consistent need for that investment. And they are more willing to invest in their own facilitization when they have an, essentially, guaranteed buy over multiple years,” Wormuth said during last week’s SASC hearing.