Senate Appropriators Cut R&D To Buy More Weapons

WASHINGTON: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Navy’s surface fleet will win big in the 2021 budget if the Senate Appropriations Committee has its way.

With the 2021 fiscal year already almost six weeks old, the Democrat-controlled House and Republican-led Senate remain billions apart on their appropriations bills, leaving the Pentagon and other federal agencies to muddle along on a stopgap spending measure called a Continuing Resolution. A bitterly contested election and a flood of departures from the Pentagon will hardly help bring a swift and harmonious resolution. Today, when Senate Appropriations chairman Richard Shelby decided to nudge the process along by releasing thousands of pages of legislation —  hundreds on the Defense Department alone – the first response we saw was House seapower subcommittee chairman Joseph Courtney denouncing the bill for not spending enough on submarines (largely built in his home state).

True, the Senate Appropriations Committee only buys about 1.5 Virginia-class attack subs in 2021, while Courtney got the House to fully fund two boats. The Senate would also add $130 million to support the submarine-building industrial base as it tries to keep building attack boats and begin production on the ballistic missile sub, the Columbia class. In fact, the Shipbuilding & Conversion, Navy account does very well in the Senate bill, which adds $1.4 billion to the Pentagon’s request, mostly to fund additional surface warships, bringing the total to $21.3 billion.

More big plus-ups go to airpower, with the senators adding $1.7 billion to Navy and Marine Corps aircraft procurement, $452 million to the Air Force aircraft, and $159 million to Amy aviation. Of that added funding, $1.7 billion goes to a single mega-program, the Lockheed Martin-manufactured F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The House adds a less substantial $1.4 billion to F-35.

So where does all this extra money come from? The Senate appropriators do cut some procurement programs they deem lower-priority, with the biggest dings coming to Navy weapons ($259 million), Army missiles ($300M), and Air Force “other procurement” ($470M).

Overall, the Senate would increase procurement by $2.4 billion. By contrast, it cuts Research, Development, Test, & Evaluation by $2.1 billion. The net effect is more money for buying today’s military hardware and less for developing the weapons of tomorrow.

Air, Space & The Joint Strike Fighter

The Joint Strike Fighter is the biggest winner in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s version of the 2021 spending bill. The SAC adds $1.7 billion for 17 additional F-35 aircraft — 12 F-35As and five F-35C carrier variants – which would bring the total 2021 buy to 96 aircraft.

SAC cites the Air Force’s unfunded priorities list as one justification for the increase12 new F-35A conventional takeoff and landing variants. It also notes that DoD’s 2021 budget request cut back the numbers of Joint Strike Fighters for fiscal year 2021 from the long-term plan approved by Congress last year. SAC’s move pretty much guarantees a bump up in the DoD F-35 buy, given that the House added 12 JSFs in their version of the bill passed in July.

But Senate appropriators did rap DoD for its lack of transparency regarding planned F-35 modernization. Noting that DoD has asked for $5.7 billion through 2025 for modernization of all three variants, the SAC said lawmakers are “deeply concerned with the Department’s approach to budgeting [and] the lack of detail in the budget justification materials.”

Indeed, SAC has raised a number of concerns about DoD budget practices, concerns long shared by the House. In particular, lawmakers fretted about the Pentagon’s use of streamlined acquisition processes that they themselves created, because they allow the Defense Department to provide less detail to Congress. SAC in particular called out the Mid-Tier Acquisition authority (Section 804) and “the services’ growing trend toward procuring de facto operational assets via prototyping acquisitions.” This not only “obfuscates costs and limits transparency and visibility into services’ procurement efforts,” but also raises risks of program mismanagement, the committee charges (and it definitely makes it harder for professional staff members to track every dollar).

So for the 2022 budget request, the SAC bill would mandate that the “Under Secretaries of Defense (Research and Engineering) and (Acquisition and Sustainment), as well as the service acquisition executives for the Army, Navy, and Air Force” provide Congress a complete list of approved and pending acquisition programs using such authorities, a rationale for those decisions and a cost estimate for each.

The SAC also expressed skepticism about a host of specific air and space programs. Some highlights:

ABMS. The Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which is developing the backbone of the all-service Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) network to link all sensors to all shooters on future battlefields, is among the RTD&E programs catching Senate ire. SAC cuts $93.5 million from the Air Force’s $302.3 million request and demands Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper to provide an acquisition strategy certified as fully funded by the service comptroller.

Senate skepticism about ABMS is not a surprise. As Breaking D readers know, Roper has had a hard time selling lawmakers and their watchdog, the GAO, on a novel acquisition strategy that upgrades ABMS and associated technologies on rapid-fire four-month cycles. House appropriators rapped the program’s acquisition strategy for a lack of “discipline” and chopped $50 million from the 2022 request.

Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD). SAC recommends $974 million for the NGAD effort to build a sixth-generation fighter jet along with a family of uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs) to enable teaming operations. This represents a $70 million cut to the service’s $1 billion-plus request, and reflects ongoing congressional wariness about the vagueness of the current acquisition strategy for the top-secret effort — despite the Air Force’s surprise announcement in September that a plane had been built and flight testing started.

National Security Space Launch (NSSL). Senate appropriators would cut $95 million from the Space Force’s $1 billion-plus procurement request, despite “applauding” the Phase 2 contract awards in August to United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. SAC expressed some concerns about “recent moves by some agencies to procure launches outside of the space launch enterprise through direct commercial contracts or delivery on orbit contracts.” Thus, the committee wants all DoD and Intelligence Community launches for “NSSL class” missions to use that contract vehicle, unless the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence certify there are compelling reasons not to.

Missile Defense Agency. The SAC includes $10.23 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, $1.1 billion more than the administration’s request. Bump ups include an additional $319.6 million for an eighth THAAD battery; $250 million for Ground-Based Midcourse Defense reliability/SLEP; and $200 million for risk reduction on Ground-Based Midcourse Defense. In addition, SAC fully funds the Next Generation Interceptor; a SM-3 Block IB multi-year procurement contract; and the Long Range Discrimination Radar.

Missile Warning. SAC, like its House counterparts, also raises concern about DoD’s plans for SDA to develop missile tracking satellites instead of the Missile Defense Agency. SAC wants the 2022 budget request to include a comprehensive acquisition strategy for the “hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor (HBTSS),” and to fully fund the effort. SAC adds $140 million to MDA’s budget for HBTSS and approves SDA’s request for a transfer of $20 million to its budget for the effort. DoD’s request had no MDA funds slated for the program, only the $20 million for SDA.

Army: Hypersonics & Missile Defense Up, Digital Training Down  

The Army historically has the most manpower but the smallest acquisition budget, and this year is no exception. The Senate Appropriations bill would give the Army $34.5 billion in combined procurement and RDTE: That’s less than half the Navy Department total (which includes the Marine Corps) and a little more than a third of the Air Force (which includes the Space Force).

But that Army figure is actually $284 million than the Pentagon requested, with the Senate adding funding for helicopters, tracked vehicles, weapons and ammunition.

The highest-profile plus-up here, touted in the Senate’s highlights of the bill, is $60 million for the Common Hypersonic Glide Body – which, although an Army program, will provide hypersonic warheads for Navy missiles as well. (The Navy will build the booster rocket for both services). The Senate also added $47 million to build up the highly specialized infrastructure required to test hypersonic weapons, which benefits all the services.

Combing through the funding tables, a few other changes jumped out.

The Senate appropriators made big additions to Army air & missile defense:

• They added $92 million to “advanced technology” (R&D Budget Activity 3), most of it for work on high-energy lasers;
• $106 million to “systems integration” (the next step of R&D, Budget Activity 4);
• and $23 million to improve cybersecurity and supply chain resilience for air & missile defense systems.
• On the other hand, they cut $54 million from various aspects of the LTAMDS radar program
• and cut $74 million from IFPC, a battlefield air and missile defense system that’s attracted considerable congressional skepticism.

The senators also cut $204 million from the Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) program to replace the Reagan-era M2 Bradley. That’s no surprise because the Army decided to reboot the program and develop the new vehicle on a slower and more realistic schedule, so it doesn’t need as much money as soon.

Finally, we note that the bill would cut virtual-reality training systems – what the Army called the Synthetic Training Environment – by $48 million; this Synthetic Training Environment is another high-tech effort that Congress has been leery of. By contrast, the augmented-reality IVAS targeting goggles got through the Senate uncut, while the House would dock them by $235 million.