Three years ago, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that he was recommending Congress approve the termination or truncation of 33 programs.
With total contract values in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the programs collectively touched just about every state, sending lawmakers on both sides of the aisle into a frenzy over the possibility of losing jobs in their districts.
“[I]t was basically a blitzkrieg on the Hill because everybody’s ox was getting gored,” Gates said on March 14 after accepting the Elliot L. Richardson Prize for Excellence in Public Service from the National Acacemy of Public Administration as he reflected on his 2010 budget proposal. “And that prevented [lawmakers] from forming alliances, and ultimately we were successful.”
It’s unclear whether Gates’ strategy for killing or shrinking programs will apply to the Pentagon’s 2013 budget proposal, which the Defense Department sent to Congress in February.
The Air Force, for example, has faced stiff opposition in Congress for decisions to cancel two programs, the C-27J cargo plane and the Block 30 variant of the Global Hawk UAV.
At congressional hearings over the past two months, Republicans and Democrats have argued against both decisions. Moreover, they’ve called into question the Air Force’s analysis and rationales used to justify those decisions.
This could cause what Air Force and other Pentagon leadership have called a “strategy driven” budget proposal to unravel.
Critics of the plan to cancel the Alenia Aermacchi C-27J have questioned the Air Force’s life-cycle spending estimates, or how much it will cost to purchase and operate one aircraft over a 25-year period.
That argument has been raised not only by the Air National Guard, which is slated to lose at least 21 planes, but also by lawmakers and congressional staffers.
Numerous Air Force documents state the aircraft’s life-cycle cost is somewhere between $111 million and $308 million per aircraft, a broad margin that has created skepticism in both chambers of Congress.
“There’s a big gap there that I don’t think they adequately explained at all here today,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after a March 20 hearing with Air Force leaders.
As for the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, the Pentagon changed its requirements for high-altitude reconnaissance, which favored the venerable U-2 spy plane over the UAV. The Air Force also says problems with the Global Hawk sensor drove its decision to cancel the Block 30 version.
The Air Force still plans to buy other versions of the Global Hawk, but plans to retire 18 Block 30s.
The decision puzzled many because last summer top DoD acquisition officials expressed their support for the program to Congress.
“It’s completely inconsistent with what [these officials] said just a few months earlier, that there was no substitute for the Global Hawk,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “I think on some of these decisions, at least the way they’ve communicated them publicly, is creating a credibility problem.”