It’s been a tough few years for Tampa’s defense industry.
With the war in Iraq ending in 2011 and about two-thirds of the remaining 30,000 U.S. troops set to leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, the Pentagon was on a course to reduce its global footprint and the White House and Congress were planning to chop the war funding that went with it.
Thanks to the multiple whammy of troop reductions, the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration and the reliance on continuing resolutions to fund operations, Tampa area defense contractors, who had seen unprecedented growth since 9/11, experienced a sharp hit to their bottom lines. And reductions in their workforces. A study conducted last year for the Florida Defense Alliance projected 13,000 fewer defense-related jobs in the Tampa area by next year, representing a 9 percent drop from 141,700 jobs in the region in 2011.
But then came the Islamic State group, pouring out of Syria and sweeping across Iraq. The ensuing U.S. military response may see some local defense contractors benefit.
On Aug. 8, at the behest of the White House, U.S. Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, ordered airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq. Then on Sept. 23, Centcom ordered aerial attacks on Islamic State targets in Syria.
The Pentagon estimates it now is spending between $7 million and $10 million a day to rain bombs and missiles on the Sunni insurgent group’s positions in Syria and Iraq and to pay for the 1,600 U.S. troops in Iraq, mostly serving as advisers in joint operations centers in Irbil and Baghdad. That figure includes the $10,400 an hour that the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says it costs to fly KC-135 aerial refueling tankers like the 16 based at MacDill, some of which are taking part in operations against Islamic State.
The cost of the so-far-unnamed operation at its current pace is slated to run more than $3.6 billion for a year — and even more should a larger number of troops be deployed and the pace of airstrikes increase, according to CSBA. With the White House and Pentagon promising a campaign that will last years, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey have raised the issue of how all this will be paid for, leading to a call by some in Congress for an increase in war funding, which was set to drop from about $80 billion this year to just under $60 billion next year.