Military Appropriations, Earmarks | DMZ Hawai'i/Aloha 'Aina

After Call from Inouye's Office, Central Pacific Bank got U.S. Aid

Post Date June 30, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

While this article is not about military issues, it does provide a glimpse into Senator Inouye’s power, something that drives the military expansion in Hawai’i, including the Project Kai e’e/Navy UARC scandal, the Stryker brigade, and missile defense.

washingtonpost.com

After Call From Senator’s Office, Small Hawaii Bank Got U.S. Aid

By Paul Kiel and Binyamin Appelbaum
ProPublica and Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm’s losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn’t meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye’s office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

Many lawmakers have worked to help home-state banks get federal money since the Treasury announced in October that it would invest up to $250 billion in healthy financial firms. But the Inouye inquiry stands apart because of the senator’s ties to Central Pacific. While at least 33 senators own shares in banks that got federal aid, a review of financial disclosures and records obtained from regulatory agencies shows no other instance of the office of a senator intervening on behalf of a bank in which he owned shares.

Inouye (D-Hawaii) declined a request for an interview but acknowledged in a statement that an aide had called the FDIC to ask about Central Pacific’s application. Inouye said he was not attempting to influence the outcome. The statement did not address Inouye’s personal role in the inquiry, including whether he directed the aide to make the call or knew at the time that it had been made.

Even if Inouye were directly involved, it would not violate the rules the Senate sets for itself, experts said.

Both the FDIC and the Treasury said the decision was not affected by the involvement of Inouye’s office.

Inouye reported ownership of Central Pacific shares worth $350,000 to $700,000, some held by his wife, at the end of 2007. The shares represented at least two-thirds of Inouye’s total reported assets. Inouye has requested a delay in filing his annual financial disclosure for 2008, which was due this spring, and he declined to provide the current value of his investment. Since the end of 2007, the bank’s stock has lost 79 percent of its value.

Central Pacific was founded in 1954 by a group of World War II veterans including Inouye who were emerging leaders in Hawaii’s Japanese American community.

“The time had come to fund a bank that could provide equitable service not only to the Japanese, but to all communities,” Inouye is quoted as saying in an exhibit in the lobby of one of the company’s Honolulu branches. Inouye, who became the bank’s first secretary, said that he initially invested $3,000, the minimum amount possible.

Central Pacific is Hawaii’s fourth-largest bank, holding about 15 percent of the state’s deposits. In recent years, it increasingly used the money to make loans in California, funding several large residential developments. By last year, the bank was facing the consequences of California’s collapsing housing market. In July , Central Pacific reported a quarterly loss of $146 million, matching its total profit in the previous three years.

In October, shortly after the government announced that it would invest billions of dollars in banks to spur new lending, Central Pacific submitted an application under the initiative, called the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP.

The bank faced long odds. More than 1,600 banks submitted applications to the FDIC in the three months after the program was announced, according to a report by the FDIC’s inspector general’s office. The agency forwarded 408 applications to Treasury, which approved only 267, or roughly 16 percent of the total.

Central Pacific’s situation was even bleaker because it was in trouble with the FDIC. Regulators had raised concerns about the bank earlier in the year. The bank would soon sign an agreement with its state regulator and the FDIC requiring it to raise an additional $40 million in capital and to improve its management practices.

After the bank applied for bailout funds, weeks passed. Andrew Rosen, a spokesman for Central Pacific, said that regulators had told the bank that the process would take “some time” because of the glut of applications.

In late November, still waiting for an answer, the bank’s government-affairs officer called Inouye’s office to ask that it check on the status of the application, according to Rosen. (Rosen said in an initial interview that the bank had not contacted Inouye’s office about the application. After Inouye was contacted for this story, Rosen said that he’d been mistaken, that the bank had called Inouye’s office.)

One day after the bank’s request, an Inouye aide called the FDIC’s regional office in San Francisco, which regulates Central Pacific. Inouye said in a statement that the staffer, Van Luong, “simply left a voicemail message seeking to clarify whether Central Pacific Bank’s application for TARP funds had actually been received by the FDIC.” The statement said that the bank was soon notified that the application had been received, “and that closed the matter.”

“This single phone call was the entire extent of my staff’s contact with regard to Central Pacific Bank, to any outside agency,” Inouye said.

Internal FDIC e-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that Luong’s question was referred from San Francisco to FDIC headquarters in Washington. A few days later, Alice Goodman, who heads the FDIC’s office of legislative affairs — and whose office is typically the point of contact for congressional inquiries — called Luong to say that the application “was still under process.”

The internal e-mails show that the application had been forwarded to an inter-agency council headed by the Treasury Department that reviews cases in which a bank did not meet the criteria for a federal investment. Those criteria require banks to demonstrate their viability without the benefit of federal funding.

Shortly after the Inouye staffer’s phone call, the council approved Central Pacific’s application.

So far, more than 600 banks have received federal investments. While some recipients have started to repay aid, the Obama administration announced this spring that it would continue to accept applications from community banks until November. The crush of calls from Capitol Hill on behalf of specific applicants led the Treasury to announce earlier year that it would start releasing a weekly list of congressional inquiries. It has yet to do so.

The question of what role members of Congress have played in influencing the Treasury’s decisions is under review by the special inspector general appointed to oversee the financial rescue program. A spokesman for the special inspector general said a report is expected later this summer.

Such contacts by members and their staff do not violate the rules Congress has established to govern itself. “Congress has never been willing to adopt strong conflict-of-interest rules for its members, but for the most part, has left it up to each member to decide for themselves whether they have a potential conflict of interest,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group.

The most similar known case comes from the House. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) arranged a meeting between regulators and OneUnited of Massachusetts, a bank in which her husband held shares. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who did not own shares in the company, subsequently inserted language into the bailout bill that effectively directed the Treasury to give special consideration to that bank.

The report by the FDIC inspector general found that 26 of the 408 companies whose applications were sent to the Treasury faced enforcement actions as severe as those against Central Pacific. Because the FDIC inspector general did not name these 26 banks, it is unclear how many ultimately won the Treasury’s approval. Nor is it clear whether any other bank used the Treasury money — as Central Pacific did — to address a capital shortfall identified by regulators.

Several financial analysts said they know of no other instances in which Treasury money was used this way. But they said it was impossible to be sure because banks are not required to disclose such regulatory actions, for instance those requiring that firms raise additional capital. Central Pacific had made this disclosure voluntarily.

Andrew Gray, an FDIC spokesman, said the Central Pacific decision was not unique, but he declined to name other banks, citing a policy against commenting on specific institutions.

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/30/AR2009063004229_pf.html

Defense authorization bill resurrects missile defense field at Fort Greely

Post Date June 28, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

Looks like Senator Begich (D-AK), who defeated the disgraced Stevens, is following in his predecessor’s footsteps, wrangling military pork to his state when the administration is trying to cut back the missile defense program. The article also mentions Sen. Inouye’s influence. Inouye’s support of missile defense led to the wasteful and dangerously provocative deployment of the missile defense system, despite the fact that it doesn’t actually work. Nevermind that small detail, we are told, the improvements will keep Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and other defense contractors feeding at the trough for decades. Indeed, this is the same kind of pork barrel legislation that brought a storm of corruption to the University of Hawai’i and the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua’i.

Bill resurrects missile defense field at Fort Greely

DEFENSE SPENDING: Senate approves bill that would reverse administration’s plans.

By RICHARD MAUER
rmauer@adn.com

Published: June 27th, 2009 02:57 PM
Last Modified: June 27th, 2009 11:29 PM

Plans by the Defense Department to abandon construction of a third field of 14 missile silos at Fort Greely would be reversed under a bill approved last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to U.S. Sen. Mark Begich.

The bill is the first sign that Alaska’s elected officials have been able to alter at least a part of the administration’s efforts to scale back some missile defense programs while boosting others.

Putting the partially built Missile Field 2 in mothballs was one piece of the Obama administration’s efforts to redirect more than $1 billion in missile defense spending from plans left over from the Bush administration.

Fort Greely, near Delta Junction, is home of most of the Ground Based Interceptor missiles that could be launched, with uncertain success, against a ballistic warhead streaking toward the United States from North Korea or Iran.

The 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, the mammoth annual military programs bill, will direct the administration to finish the first half of the new missile field, according to Lindsay Young, Begich’s military legislative assistant. In return for completing seven of the 14 proposed silos in Missile Field 2, the bill would authorize shutting down the existing six silos of the original missile field there, Young said.

Begich, a Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, had been urging the administration to make fully operational all 40 silos originally planned for Fort Greely.

Problems like mold and water leaks are now showing up in Missile Field 1 because of its hasty construction in 2004, Young said. While that field is operational, it will grow increasingly expensive to maintain, she said.

A newer field, designated Missile Field 3 and containing 20 operational silos, is in better shape, she said. Four silos are also located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, of which Begich is a member, completed a closed-door markup of the defense bill Thursday. It won’t be publicly filed until Congress returns from the Fourth of July recess.

But with missile defense a hot subject now — North Korea is threatening another test of its long-range Taepodong 2 missile, perhaps over the July 4 weekend — Begich issued a statement Friday containing information about the bill. He also authorized his aide to talk about its effects in Alaska and particularly on Fort Greely.

“The agreement we reached will ensure that Alaska continues to serve as America’s front lines of defense against rogue nations,” Begich said. “This will allow the (Defense) Department to build a more modernized and sophisticated capability than currently exists there today.”

Young said the $680 billion defense bill doesn’t suggest how much money the Missile Defense Agency would need for the new silos, but Begich will likely propose $82 million when the bill comes before the full Senate. The money can’t be spent until it’s appropriated in a separate bill, but Alaska has some muscle in the Senate Appropriations Committee: Murkowski is a member and its chairman, Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, is a longtime Alaska friend and a missile-defense proponent.

The defense bill also ratifies the administration’s proposal to complete the 44-interceptor fleet even if there won’t be silos for all of them, Young said. The Missile Defense Agency wants a full complement of missiles so it can continue to test the system and to replace older interceptors.

According to Ralph Scott, the spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency in Alaska, 16 missiles are currently in silos at Fort Greely and are ready to be launched. Seven more have been returned to the Lower 48 for maintenance or upgrades. One has been pulled as a backup for future tests. And “several” — presumably two, based on publicly disclosed inventories — have exhibited problems and have been removed for “unscheduled maintenance.”

Four other interceptors are based at Vandenberg.

Young said the defense bill proposes a rigorous missile defense test program. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has long been a critic of the deployment of the Fort Greely system before it was adequately tested. As a result, Levin has said, missiles have had to undergo expensive refurbishing as problems were discovered, and it still hasn’t undergone real-world tests.

Young said Begich joined with Levin and other members of the committee to urge the Missile Defense Agency to run at least two tests a year and to give a full report on its long-range testing and deployment plans.

There have only been three tests of operational missiles, the first in September 2006, the most recent in December 2008. In each one, the interceptor hit its target, a dummy warhead launched from Kodiak. But the attacking missiles lacked the sophistication a real attacker might display, such as assaulting at night or using decoys.

North Korea’s Taepodong 2 missile is theoretically capable of striking Alaska or Hawaii, though its tests have all been flops. Top U.S. defense and intelligence officials say there is little urgency in completing Fort Greely now because North Korea is at least three years away from a successful launch.

But with the possibility of a North Korean test in the direction of Hawaii on July 4, defenses on the island have been beefed up, primarily with detection equipment and interceptors designed to knock down warheads in their last minutes of flight.

The Alaska-based missiles are known as mid-course interceptors because they’re designed to crash into warheads above the atmosphere in the mid-range of their flight. They use three stages of solid-fueled rockets to reach altitude.

If launched from Greely, the spent first stage would likely fall over land in Alaska, though trajectories are designed to keep them away from populated areas, spokesman Scott said. The spent boosters weigh about 3,200 pounds, roughly the weight of a Chevy Impala.

Aside from the improvements at Fort Greely, the defense bill approved by the committee also grants a 3.4 percent pay increase to military service members, up from the 2.9 percent recommended by the administration. It also expands health care to service members and their dependents, according to Begich.

Source: http://www.adn.com/news/military/story/845822.html

"King of Pork"

Post Date May 31, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex, Projects and Campaigns, Social and Economic Impacts, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

May 31, 2009

In Battle to Cut Billions, a Spotlight on One Man

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON – Near the end of a two-hour hearing on a special war-spending bill this month, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, in his slow and rumbling voice, finally said the words that defense lobbyists across Washington had been hoping to hear: there was “good reason to be optimistic.”

Mr. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, was answering a fellow senator’s question about the future of Boeing’s mammoth C-17 cargo plane. But from Mr. Inouye, the taciturn new chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the comment was also the latest reminder that, as the Obama administration lifts its ax over hundreds of billions of dollars in military contracts that the Pentagon says it no longer needs, he is the industry’s last line of defense.

Mr. Inouye is best positioned to fulfill or frustrate the administration’s hopes of reining in runaway procurement costs. That makes him the object of intense courtship from industry executives, senators and even a certain Hawaiian in the White House.

“In the Senate, the buck stops with Chairman Inouye,” said David Morrison, a lobbyist for Boeing and a former aide to Mr. Inouye, the company with the most at stake in the proposed cuts.

Critics, though, say Mr. Inouye – a self-described “king of pork” responsible for nearly a billion dollars in earmarks each year – is also the most potent remaining champion of the parochialism that for decades has made major military projects hard to kill.

“There is no question a lot of this stuff is going to get put back by Congress,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. “And the question is, why? Do we need more C-17s, or are we trying to keep people employed on a weapons system that we already have enough of?” Now, Mr. Coburn said, “We’ll see what the priorities are.”

Mr. Inouye is the last of a vanishing breed of powerful old-school appropriators. His predecessor as appropriations chairman, Senator Robert C. Byrd, 91, Democrat of West Virginia, is enfeebled by age. Another former chairman, Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican whom Mr. Inouye called “brother,” lost re-election last year amid ethics charges.

And in the House, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee, is under a cloud because of federal investigations into lobbyists, contractors and other lawmakers with ties to his office.

“Inouye is the last of the old bulls,” said Steve Ellis of the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks Congressional spending. “The others have been gored.”

In an interview, Mr. Inouye said he seeks only the country’s security and its soldiers’ safety as he reviews the budget presented by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “If we agree with the secretary, we go along,” Mr. Inouye said. “And if we don’t, we act accordingly.”

But he also hinted of conflict ahead when he takes up the main defense budget. “You’ll see some interesting activity when the big bill comes up,” he chuckled.

Elected to Congress in 1959, two years before President Obama was born, Mr. Inouye is known as a war hero and civil rights icon. While other Japanese-Americans were in internment camps, he lost his arm leading an Army unit of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

Honoring that legacy is one of many pet causes to which he has doled out federal money, including in one case to a group he helps oversee. In 2000 he inserted into the annual defense bill $20 million for a project dedicated to the sacrifices of soldiers like himself at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where he was longtime chairman of the board of governors.

He capitalized on his official power to help finance the project in other ways as well. He helped draw donations from military contractors with big interests before his committee. Boeing recently pledged $100,000 a year for five years, a museum spokesman said. (Mr. Inouye, 84, whose first wife died three years ago, also married the museum’s then-president, Irene Hirano, 60, last year.)

Mr. Inouye has other close ties to lobbyists. His son, Daniel K. Inouye Jr., once the leader of a punk rock band, is a lobbyist for several entertainment and communications companies that lobby the senator intensely because he sits on the commerce committee. (Mr. Inouye’s son says he lobbies only the House.)

Mr. Inouye has rescued military contractors before, most notably when the Clinton administration tried to cut procurement. When the Pentagon balked at buying early C-17s – the plane it again wants to stop buying – Boeing hired a lobbyist close to Mr. Inouye: Henry Giugni, a former Honolulu police officer who had become Mr. Inouye’s closest aide and then, with his help, the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms.

A month later, Mr. Inouye, then chairman of the military spending panel, wrote to the defense secretary urging the acquisition of more C-17s, and production continued for 15 more years. Now, the pressure from all sides is far more intense. The president has repeatedly called the senator, aides say, to talk about priorities like passing the war-spending bill quickly – meaning without adding any big equipment programs.

“He calls me Dan,’ ” Mr. Inouye said. “I call him Mr. President.’ ”

Scores of defense industry lobbyists, meanwhile, are reminding Mr. Inouye of his past support for threatened programs, including the missile defense system, partly based in Hawaii, or the Army’s “future combat systems,” a pet project of his friend and fellow Japanese-American from Hawaii, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, now the veterans affairs secretary.

As Mr. Inouye prepared for the Senate defense budget and a House-Senate conference on the war-spending bill, some of those lobbyists had a chance to speak to him at a fund-raiser this month for his political action committee at the home of the Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose firm’s clients include Boeing, Lockheed Martin and United Technologies. (All three are among Mr. Inouye’s biggest sources of campaign money.)

Dozens of senators are also beseeching Mr. Inouye to save defense jobs in their states, including 19 who have signed a letter asking him to save Boeing’s C-17.

Many lobbyists took Mr. Inouye’s cryptic “reason to be optimistic” comment as a signal that he intended to include the eight C-17s from the House’s version of the war-spending bill when it goes to conference and may add the other eight sought by Boeing in the main defense bill. Supporters of Lockheed Martin’s F-22, a plane the Pentagon has tried for years to stop buying, took heart from Mr. Inouye’s omission of $147 million requested to shut down the production line, leaving it open while the company seeks new sales either to the United States or its allies, as Taxpayers for Common Sense reported.

Mr. Inouye has kept mum about what he may seek to insert in the 2010 military spending bill. But he acknowledged feeling the pressure. “People, whenever a lot of them see me, say, ‘Congratulations, you have got a great job, chairman of the biggest committee,’ ” he said. “I don’t have the time to explain to them that I spend less time sleeping.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/politics/31inouye.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Hawai'i will still get 20 F-22s despite cuts in program

Post Date April 07, 2009

Comments 1 Comment

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

This is how pork works. The system is considered to be outdated and overpriced, but Hawai’i still gets its piece of the action…

Pentagon cap will not affect Raptors

Hawaii’s Air National Guard will still get its slated 20 F-22s, says a Guard spokesman

By Gregg K. Kakesako

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Apr 07, 2009

Despite a cap on the production of the controversial F-22A Raptor jet fighter in the Pentagon’s proposed $500 billion budget, the Hawaii Air National Guard will still get its 20 radar-evading supersonic jet fighters by November 2011.

“Nothing is going to change,” said Lt. Col. Chuck Anthony, Hawaii National Guard spokesman, yesterday following the release of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ announcement that the Pentagon wants to end the F-22 fighter jet and presidential helicopter programs run by Lockheed Martin Corp.

In his budget recommendation, Gates said he was going ahead with plans to buy four more of the Air Force’s advanced F-22 fighter jets in a supplemental spending bill that will be forwarded to Congress. But he said he would cap the total number of F-22s at 187.

Military analysts have considered the F-22 Raptor an outdated weapon system designed for the Cold War. The planes cost $140 million each.

Anthony said the Hawaii’s Air Guard’s 199th Fighter Squadron will receive its first two single-seat F-22 Raptors in June 2010. By then the first group of Hawaii Air Guard pilots will have completed four months of training on the mainland.

Twenty facilities at Hickam will be renovated or built over the next five years at a cost of $145.4 million to house 20 Raptors and their crews. The Raptors will replace the F-15 Eagles that the Hawaii Air Guard has flown since 1987.

The jets will be flown and maintained by air crews belonging to the Hawaii Air National Guard’s 199th Squadron and the active Air Force’s 531st Squadron. It will be the only F-22 Raptor squadron in the Air Force led by the Air National Guard.

Traditionally, these hybrid units, like the C-17 Globemaster cargo jet squadron at Hickam Air Force Base, are 60 percent active Air Force crews and 40 percent Air National Guard personnel.

However, Hickam’s new Raptor unit will be 75 percent Hawaii Air National Guard and 25 percent Air Force. The unit will be made up of 450 Hawaii Air National Guard pilots and technicians and 100 from the Air Force.

Of the 36 pilots assigned to the Raptor unit, 27 will be Hawaii Air National Guard officers, and nine will be from the Air Force.

The 62-foot Raptor flies at 1.5 times the speed of sound and can lock onto an enemy fighter 40 miles away and take it out with a missile before the other aircraft’s pilot realizes he has been targeted.

Gates also proposed spending an extra $11 billion to finish enlarging the Army and the Marine Corps and to halt reductions in the Air Force and the Navy. He also announced an extra $2 billion for intelligence and surveillance equipment, including more spending on special-force units and 50 new Predator and Reaper drones, the unmanned vehicles that are currently used in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

—

The New York Times contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.starbulletin.com/news/20090408Pentagon_cap_will_not_affect_Raptors.html

DoD budget recommendations FY 2010

Post Date April 07, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks

This article from the Defense Industry Daily gives a quick rundown of the various budget changes in major military programs for the FY2010 budget from the perspective of military corporations. Note that several programs that impact Hawai’i are affected. These are followed by comments in brown. Near the bottom of the article, the Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) program is listed as one of the “winners” in the proposed DoD budget and mentions the Hawai’i Superferry.

Gates Lays Out Key FY 2010 Budget Recommendations

06-Apr-2009 23:42 EDT

On April 6/09, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates did something unusual: he convened a press conference to announce key budget recommendations in advance. That’s a substantial departure from normal procedure, in which the Office of the President’s submitted budget is the first official public notification of key funding decisions. Gates’ departure was done with full official approval, however, as the Pentagon and White House begin their efforts to convince Congress.

That’s likely to be a difficult task. Congress (the US House of Representatives and Senate) has full budgetary authority within the American system, subject only to the threat of Presidential veto. In the past, this has kept a number of programs alive despite the Pentagon’s best efforts to kill them. Sometimes, that stubbornness has improved America’s defense posture. Sometimes, it has done the opposite. For good or ill, that process has now begun. Again.

Gates’ announcement, made in the presence of Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright, USMC, aims to make significant changes to America’s defense programs. Several would be ended or terminated. Others would be stretched out over a longer period. Still others will gain resources. DID provides the roundup, with links to related articles that offer program background…

Note that these are just recommendations. The Office of the President may disagree, and they must submit the budget request. Congress may also disagree, and they’re the ones who will approve and fund the final FY 2010 budget. Lobbying will now begin in earnest.

Terminated or Ending

VH-71 Presidential Helicopter, terminated immediately. Increment 2 helicopters will cost more than Air Force One, and “Increment One helicopters do not meet requirements and are estimated to have only a five- to 10-year useful life.” New options to be developed for a FY 2011 replacement program.

F-22A Raptor, ended at 187 planes (183, plus 4 funded aircraft under FY 2009 supplemental). Production to end at the end of 2010, absent lifting of Congressional export restrictions, and corresponding orders from Australia, Japan, Israel, et. al. for a less capable export version. [Hawai’i will still get 20 of these aircraft despite the fact that it is considered one of the most wasteful programs.]

C-17 Globemaster III heavy-lift strategic transport, ended at 205 USAF planes. Production to end at the end of 2010, absent further foreign orders. Note that earmarked Congressional appropriations have been the C-17 program’s sole source of support for several years now – and that Congress has little confidence in the Pentagon mobility studies used to justify program termination. [The C-17 was one of the new programs in Hawai’i to support transport of the Stryker brigade, despite the fact that it was shown to be inefficient for that purpose. These cuts come too late; the C-17s are already in Hawai’i.]

2018 Bomber. In effect, terminated. “We will not pursue a development program for a follow-on Air Force bomber until we have a better understanding of the need, the requirement, and the technology.”

TSAT Satellite Program. Terminated, status of unspent but allocated research funds uncertain. The TSAT-SS satellite contract had been delayed to 2010, and the US military’s planned ultra-high bandwidth laser communications backbone is still a developmental program. TSAT-SS will be replaced in the near term by 2 more AEHF satellites. Its $2+ billion companion TMOS ground control system contract is already underway, and has uses beyond TSAT; fate uncertain.

Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) program to engage multiple enemy warheads from one defensive missile. Terminated “because of its significant technical challenges.”

Air Force Combat Search and Rescue X (CSAR-X) helicopter program, terminated immediately. The program had already been stopped dead by contractor challenges, anyway, so the only thing at risk is re-bid preparation. This will be the most keenly-felt blow by the Air Force. “This program has a troubled acquisition history and raises the fundamental question of whether this important mission can only be accomplished by yet another single-service solution…. We will take a fresh look at the requirement behind this program and develop a more sustainable approach.”

Future Combat Systems Ground Vehicle Program. That component makes up over half of the $162 billion meta-program. Recommends canceling that $87 billion component, re-evaluating the requirements, technology, and approach – and then re-launching those buys as standard competitive bids. [This is one of the most expensive and wasteful programs. The Stryker was part of this sci-fi vision of warfare.]

The NLOS-C cannon, which has strong support in Congress and has made significant progress in development, will be the key sticking point. Its fate will be an important bellwether. Gates adds criticisms of both the FCS concept, and its contracting approach:

“I have concluded that there are significant unanswered questions concerning the FCS vehicle design strategy. I am also concerned that, despite some adjustments, the FCS vehicles – where lower weight, higher fuel efficiency, and greater informational awareness are expected to compensate for less armor – do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan…. does not include a role for our recent $25 billion investment in the MRAP vehicles being used to good effect… troubled by the terms of the current contract, particularly its very unattractive fee structure that gives the government little leverage to promote cost efficiency.”

Significantly Shifted

Airborne Laser. The first Boeing 747 will be kept, and the program shifted to an R&D effort. The planned 2nd aircraft is canceled.

GMD ballistic missile interceptors. The planned increase in Alaskan GMD missiles will not happen. Existing missiles will be kept, and R&D will continue to improve the existing handful of missiles “to defend against long-range rogue missile threats – a threat North Korea’s missile launch this past weekend reminds us is real.” [PMRF is one of the sites in the missile defense network.]

DDG-1000 Zumwalt Class “destroyer”. One of 2 possibilities. Option #1 is that the entire program of 3 ships will be built at GD Bath iron Works, under a contract to be negotiated, while DDG-51 production restarts at Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls shipyard in Mississippi. Option #2 is that it is not possible to come to agreement on contracts at Bath and Ingalls, and just 1 prototype DDG-1000 destroyer will be bought.

CG (X) Cruiser. Was supposed to be a DDG-1000 follow-on, then supposed to be a nuclear-powered ship under Congressional legislation. Now, “We will delay the Navy CG-X next generation cruiser program to revisit both the requirements and acquisition strategy.”

LPD 11 and the Mobile Landing Platform. Think of the MLP as a ship whose back half doubles as a pier in the ocean. Flo-Flo (float-on, float off) MLP designs have also been suggested. “We will delay amphibious ship and sea-basing programs such as the 11th Landing Platform Dock (LPD) ship and the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) SHIP to FY11 in order to assess costs and analyze the amount of these capabilities the nation needs.”

Aircraft Carriers. Moves to a 5-year build cycle for CVN-21 carriers, which will drop the total fleet number to 10 after 2040. Assuming that funds are provided for all of the carriers envisioned, despite a looming shockwave of medical and social security entitlements. The schedule change would delay CVN 79, but Gates did not formally announce any delay to CVN 78 Gerald R. Ford.

Army Brigade Combat Teams. The plan to grow the Army to 48 BCTs will stop at 45 – but the number of troops will not change. This will have follow-on consequences for basing and infrastructure. [The cap on brigade combat teams will not come soon enough to save Hawai’i from the Stryker brigade and other expansion.]

Gates’ Winners

Military Defense Acquisition Professionals. This has been a capability weakness since the early 1990s. Existing contractors performing services in this area will be offered a chance to become full-time government employees, with the goal of converting 11,000 of them. By 2015, the plan is to grow the force by 20,000 total, beginning with conversions and 4,100 hires in FY 2010.

Military Infrastructure. Child care, spousal support, lodging, and education on American military bases will see increases of $13 billion over the FY 2009 base budget. This is in addition to almost $6 billion in military infrastructure funded in the recent economic stimulus bill.

Medical Care. Wounded, ill and injured, traumatic brain injury, and psychological health programs will become part of the base budget, with long term funding. Medical research will also receive a boost of $400 million.

Paying for medical benefits while controlling cost growth, is an important long-term cost issue for the DoD, and a challenge for the Pentagon as a whole.

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. American orders to increase to 30 in FY 2010 ($11.2 billion), with 513 to be bought over the 5-year defense plan. Gates reiterates the goal of 2,443 total. That assumes overall costs will hold steady, something the US GAO audit office doubts. The added American buys may improve allied confidence in the program, and may add leverage for a multinational joint buy at a lower, averaged initial production price. Meanwhile, F-35A/B/C flight testing will continue until 2014.

Special Forces. “To grow our special operations capabilities, we will increase personnel by more than 2,800 or five percent and will buy more special forces-optimized lift, mobility, and refueling aircraft.”

Those aircraft expenditures could be substantial. Lockheed Martin’s C-130J Hercules, which the Pentagon tried to cancel several years ago over cost issues, is the likely winner – but not a certain one. Alenia’s smaller Joint Cargo Aircraft winner, the C-27J, has been discussed as a mobility and gunship aircraft. Less obviously military options like business or regional jets are also under consideration for the mobility mix.

Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). In addition to the Predator and propeller plane winners, R&D will rise for ISR enhancements, and for experimental platforms aimed at today’s problems. SecDef Gates has been focusing on this area for some time.

Light ISR Propeller Planes. The unheralded stars of Task Force ODIN, with capabilities that Gates has said will be needed all over the world for the forseeable future. The King Air 350-ISR turboprops will probably be the biggest winners.

Predator and Reaper UAVs, which includes the Army’s MQ-1C SkyWarrior variant. Gates intends to sustain 50 active “orbits” by FY 2011, a 62% increase in capability over the current level.

THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missiles. Another $700 million to field THAAD and SM-3 missiles, providing late mid-course defense option against ballistic missiles and long-range air defense. [This will probably mean that Army missile defense tests at PMRF will continue unscathed.]

Standard Missile 3. In addition to sharing additional immediate funding with THAAD, the Navy will spend $200 million to fund ballistic missile defense capabilities for 6 additional AEGIS destroyers or cruisers. The SM-3 is the corresponding missile for that role, so more BMD-capable ships offers a sustained boost to the missile’s production prospects. [Similarly, Navy AEGIS missile defense tests will likely continue at present levels at PMRF.]

Helicopter Crews. Gates will add $500 million to raise the number of helicopters fielded, in light of needs in Afghanistan. “Today, the primary limitation on helicopter capacity is not airframes but shortages of maintenance crews and pilots. So our focus will be on recruiting and training more Army helicopter crews.”

Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). Despite issues with the program, and concern about the ship’s combat capabilities, Gates recommends the full 3-ship buy for 2010, and reiterates the goal of eventually buying 55 of these $500 million specialty support ships.

JHSV-like fast catamaran charters. Another 2 ships will be chartered from 2009-2011, until JHSV ships begin arriving. Austal was the JHSV winner, its Westpac Express is chartered for the Marines, and recently had its similar Hawaiian Superferry catamaran sidelined while Hawaii completes environmental reviews for the service. They would compete with Incat, which has had 4 of its wave-piercing catamarans chartered by various American services. Their Swift wave-piercing catamaran is currently chartered by the Navy as HSV-2. [The military insiders seemed to make the connection with the Hawaii Superferry. Why not the politicians, the media and the public?]

DDG-51 Destroyers. Production will restart at Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls shipyard in Mississippi, subject to a negotiated contract. Rep. Gene Taylor [D-MS, Seapower subcommittee chair] will be pleased.

AEHF communications satellites. Adds satellites 5 & 6.

Hackers. The Chinese will certainly keep them busy trying to secure American systems, and perhaps P2P security awareness will improve: “To improve cyberspace capabilities, we will increase the number of cyber experts this department can train from 80 students per year to 250 per year by FY11.”

Additional Readings

Beyond the DID in-depth coverage referenced above…

* Pentagon DefenseLINK (April 6/09) – Budget Press Briefing: As Prepared for Delivery by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Arlington, VA, Monday, April 06, 2009

* DID – US Military Tries, Again, to Improve Its Acquisition. Includes a number of quotes from SecDef Gates re: future directions.

Source: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Gates-Lays-Out-Key-FY-2010-Budget-Recommendations-05367/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=did&utm_medium=textlink

Turnabout: Pentagon looks to cut Future Combat Systems, Missile Defense budgets

Post Date April 04, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks

Gates Planning Major Changes In Programs, Defense Budget

Proposal Said to Move Focus To Counterinsurgency Efforts

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A01

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration’s bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate U.S. conflicts in coming decades.

Gates’s aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.

Among the programs expected to be heavily cut is the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a network of vehicles linked by high-tech communications that has been plagued by technical troubles and delays; with a price tag exceeding $150 billion, it is now one of the most costly military efforts.

Gates also is considering cutting a new $20 billion communications satellite program and reducing the number of aircraft carriers from 11 to 10, and he plans to eliminate elements of the decades-old missile defense effort that are over budget or considered ineffective, according to industry and administration sources.

They cautioned that not all the details have been decided.

“He is strategically reshaping the budget,” said Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, who declined to provide details. The secretary is “subjecting every program to harsh scrutiny, especially those which have been over budget and/or behind schedule. . . . The end result, we hope, is a budget that more accurately reflects the strategic priorities of the president.”

Gates has signaled for months that the Pentagon’s resources are misallocated, but his embrace of the budget increase proposed by President Obama represents an abrupt turnaround. Late in the Bush administration, he blessed a military-service-driven budget proposal for 2010 packed with $60 billion in spending beyond what the Pentagon had earlier recommended. Much of the added funds would have accelerated the production of existing ships, airplanes, Army vehicles and missile defenses.

The proposal became known among some analysts as Gordon England’s “fairy dust,” after the deputy defense secretary who helped put it together. The name suggested the magical touch that would be needed to win a proposed 14 percent budget increase amid a global recession.

Even though the Office of Management and Budget last April ordered all Cabinet agencies to avoid presenting plans that might box in the next administration, Gates got permission to present the proposal to Obama’s transition team.

The new president agreed instead to a 4 percent increase in defense spending, which put Gates, whom Obama decided to keep on as defense secretary, in the position of having to reorient military priorities within a smaller spending limit than he had initially supported.

The turnabout has not been easy, according to a senior official involved in the process, because the military services “became vested stakeholders” in last year’s ambitious proposal. Gates has become so consumed by the internal discussions that, after briefing Obama Monday on his thinking, he skipped the celebration of NATO’s 60th anniversary in Europe this weekend.

Several experts said the Pentagon budget plan last year was an effort to force the hand of a new administration and stands as a textbook example of military service pressures that have driven the growth in recent years of the defense budget, which has more than doubled since 2001. The 2009 total of $513 billion — not including special Iraq and Afghanistan war costs — exceeds the combined military budgets of the next 25 highest-spending nations.

The timing and size of the much higher proposal that Gates initially presented to the transition team “are provocative,” said David J. Berteau, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

A current Pentagon official who is disenchanted with past allocations of resources said, “It shines a light on the internals of the department: a culture that lives to grow its resources and make that the whole measure of merit.”

That official and several others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the budget.

The effort to win political support for a much higher spending target began in March 2008 with the first of several appeals to outgoing President George W. Bush by the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen. In meetings with Bush then and in July, he argued that military spending, as a rule, should be at least 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Mullen’s position grew out of his conviction that the United States spent the right amount on defense in the decades before 1994, when President Bill Clinton let that proportion drop. Mullen sees the 4 percent target as “not an absolute number, but a good minimum starting point,” said his spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby.

A group headed by Deputy Secretary England and Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved details of the service-driven budget plan. Nearly half was meant to pay for what the military calls “persistent presence” overseas, including at least 10 combat brigades with large recurring costs. “Our forces are likely to be deployed around the world for the foreseeable future,” said a Pentagon official who supported this approach.

In addition to urging a budget of $584 billion for next year, the group also charted hundreds of billions of dollars of additional spending over five years. The “fairy dust” notion reflected the fact that even as they pushed the plan, many officials realized that its chances of approval were slim.

While Gates did not lead the effort, he insisted that the results be ready by Election Day — much earlier than was done for previous new administrations — and then explicitly obtained White House permission to brief Obama’s transition team on the results. Morrell said Gates was not attempting “to squeeze or pressure the new administration”; rather, the information was presented as “a conversational piece.”

The team rejected the size of the proposed increase and the recommendation to set aside billions now for permanent stationing of many combat brigades overseas. Gordon Adams, a national security expert who was on Obama’s transition team, said the message from the Pentagon was not subtle. “I saw this very much as an effort to jam the system,” he said. “It didn’t matter who ended up in the White House. If they decided to go below that number, it would be like they were cutting defense.”

Obama addressed the Pentagon budget March 24, saying: “We’ve already identified potentially $40 billion in savings just by some of the procurement reforms. . . . And we are going to continue to find savings in a way that allows us to put the resources where they’re needed, but to make sure that we’re not simply fattening defense contractors.”

Since his reappointment, Gates — who has demonstrated an uncanny ability to work with different presidents — has explained that he supports more belt-tightening because the economy is now much worse. “Everybody must recognize, and frankly all the service chiefs do, the economic climate we find ourselves in,” Morrell said in February. “These guys don’t live, you know, in a cave somewhere or in a vacuum.”

Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/AR2009040304080_pf.html

What does an F-22 cost?

Post Date March 28, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Accidents, Military Appropriations, Earmarks

http://original.antiwar.com/wheeler/2009/03/27/what-does-an-f-22-cost/

What Does an F-22 Cost?

Posted By Winslow T. Wheeler On March 27, 2009 @ 8:00 pm In Uncategorized | Comments Disabled

On Wednesday, March 25, an F-22 crashed near Edwards Air Force Base, CA. Very sadly, the pilot was killed. The news articles surrounding this event contained some strange assertions about the cost of the F-22. The tragic event was apparently used to disseminate some booster-baloney.

Possibly based on the price asserted in the Air Force’s “fact” sheet on the F-22 that was linked to a Pentagon “news” story on the crash, the cost per aircraft was typically described in many media articles as about $140 million.

What utter hogwash.

The latest “Selected Acquisition Report” from the Defense Department is the most definitive data available on the costs for the F-22. The SAR shows a “Current Estimate” for the F-22 program in “Then-Year” dollars of $64.540 billion, which includes both R&D and procurement. That $64.5 billion has bought a grand total of 184 aircraft.

Do the arithmetic: $64.540/184 = $350.1. Total program unit price for one F-22, what approximates the “sticker price,” is $350 million per copy.

So, where does the bogus $143 million per copy come from? Most will recognize that as the “flyaway” cost: the amount we pay today, just for the current production costs of an F-22. (Note, however, the “flyaway” cost does not include the gas, pilot, et cetera needed to fly the aircraft away.)

Advocates of buying more F-22s assert they can be had for this “bargain basement” $143 price in their lobbying – now rather intense – to buy more F-22s above and beyond the 184 currently contracted for. That is, they argue, the “cost to go” for buying new models, which do not require a calculation to amortize the early R&D and other initially high production costs across the fleet. It’s what we’re paying now for F-22s in annual appropriations bills. Right?

Hopefully, it will neither surprise nor offend you to say that assertion is pure bovine scatology.

Congressional appropriations bills and their accompanying reports are not user-friendly documents, but having wadded through them for the past 30 years, I know their hiding holes. The F-22 program has many. Let’s check through the 2009 congressional appropriations for the F-22. Most – but not all – of the required information is contained in HR 2638.

In the “Joint Explanatory Statement” accompanying the bill, the House and Senate appropriators specified that $2.907 billion was to be appropriated for 20 F-22s in 2009. The math comes to just about what the Air Force said, $145 million per copy. So, what’s the problem?

There’s more; plenty more. Flipping down to the section on “modification of aircraft” we find another $327 million for the F-22 program.

Switching over to the Research and Development section, we find another $607 million for the F-22 under the title “Operational System Development.”

Some will further know it is typical for DOD to provide “advance procurement” money in previous appropriations bills to support the subsequent year’s purchase of major equipment. In the case of the 2009 buy of 20 F-22’s, the previous 2008 appropriations bill provided “advance procurement” for “long lead” items needed to be purchased in advance to enable the 2009 buy. The amount provided was $427 million.

Here’s the arithmetic: $2.907 + $.327 + $.607 + $.427 = $4.268 billion for 20 aircraft. That’s $213 million each.

Please do not think these data represent an exceptional year. If you check any of the last few annual buys of F-22s, you will find the same pattern: in addition to the annual “procurement” amount, there is additional “modification,” “operational system development,” and advance procurement.

F-22s are costing these days a little over $200 million each. Period.

Well, actually, there’s more. Last November, Acquisition Czar John Young told the press that the first 100 F-22’s built need an additional $8 billion in R&D and procurement costs to bring them all up to their originally mandated requirements. Ergo, the total program unit cost is not $350 million each, it’s $394 million, assuming Young is correct. The annual purchase, “cost to go” (“flyaway”), price will also go up, but just how much is not calculable right now.

For those sticklers who also want to know how much it will cost to maintain and operate the F-22, you can forget all those promises that it would be cheaper than the aging F-15 it is supposed to replace. Data released by the Pentagon shows that for 2008 each aging F-15 C in the inventory cost, on average, $607,072.92 to maintain and operate. Pricey, but to be expected for such an old airplane.

The F-22’s care and feeding is a little more. In 2008, each cost $3,190,454.72 to maintain and operate: that’s more than five time the cost to run a decrepit F-15.

OK, so the F-22 is really pricey and the Air Force and its boosters are full of baloney on the cost, but it’s a great airplane, a real war winner, right?

Oh, please. Consider the source. More on that later.

Obama White House "wants to collect six to eight 'scalps'"?

Post Date March 14, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks

This article from the right wing Lexington Institute expresses worry that the new administration is looking to cut 6-8 major military programs, including reducing the number of aircraft carriers to 10. It also contains a little snippet that should buoy the anti-bases movement:

There’s only one problem with all this. It reduces the United States’ capacity to project power from the sea at the same time that access to foreign bases is becoming doubtful.

http://www.upi.com/Security_Industry/2009/03/11/Obama_hunts_US_Navys_supercarrier_force/UPI-36041236781176/

Security Industry

Obama hunts U.S. Navy’s supercarrier force

By LOREN B. THOMPSON

Published: March 11, 2009 at 10:19 AM

ARLINGTON, Va., March 11 (UPI) — The word within the U.S. Department of Defense is that the White House wants to collect six to eight “scalps” — major program kills — in this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review.

Some of the cuts already are being considered as Defense Secretary Robert Gates rewrites the 2010 budget. You can expect to hear a lot of rumors about which programs are being targeted between now and when the Pentagon releases details of its budget request in April. But while most of the military services are scrambling to protect programs, at least one is getting ready to offer up a signature weapons system. The U.S.. Navy will propose removal of one aircraft carrier and air wing from its posture, dropping the number of carriers to the lowest number since 1942.

Of course, today’s aircraft carriers make World War II carriers look like toys. With nuclear propulsion, supersonic fighters and more than four acres of deck space, they are the biggest warships in history. But at any given time some are being repaired, some are being replenished, some are in training and some are in transit; if the fleet is cut to 10, then maybe half a dozen will be available for quick action on any given day.

The U.S. Congress didn’t think that was enough, so it mandated in law that at least 11 carriers must be maintained in the force. But with big bills coming from the Obama administration and other items like healthcare costs pressuring Navy budgets, the service has repeatedly sought relief from that requirement. This year’s quadrennial review is the likely venue for another such bid.

The issue is coming to a head now because the pace of new carrier commissionings is not keeping up with the rate of retirements. Kitty Hawk, the last carrier in the fleet powered by fossil fuels, was removed from the force last summer after nearly 50 years of service. The Navy plans to decommission the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise in November 2012, leaving the fleet with only the 10 flattops of the Nimitz class for three years, until the next-generation Ford class of carriers debuts in September 2015.

Going to 10 isn’t supposed to happen under present law, but since the service hasn’t made budgetary provisions for maintaining the Enterprise and its crew until the Ford class arrives, it looks like 10 carriers will be the total number in the fleet.

In the current budget environment, once the Navy gets used to having 10 carriers, that’s probably where it will stay. Navy insiders think the service will decide to forgo the nuclear refueling of the USS Lincoln, which is scheduled for 2012. And when the decision to stay at 10 is formalized, the service also can move to eliminate one of its carrier wings.

That step would cut the Navy’s projected shortfall in strike aircraft by half. So billions of dollars are saved by skipping the refueling, cutting the purchase of aircraft, and eliminating the need to sustain 6,000 personnel associated with ship operations and air-wing support.

There’s only one problem with all this. It reduces the United States’ capacity to project power from the sea at the same time that access to foreign bases is becoming doubtful. And why is such a move necessary? Because the Obama administration has decided to stick with Bush-era plans to grow the size of ground forces by 92,000 personnel, and the Navy must pay part of the bill for that.

Yet the administration is getting ready to depart Iraq, which was the main reason for increasing the size of ground forces in the first place. There are precious few other places where the war-fighting scenarios for the next QDR suggest a big ground force will be needed. Most of the scenarios envision reliance on air power for the big fights of the future — the kind of air power delivered by carriers. So cutting carriers to build a bigger ground force doesn’t make much sense.

(Loren B. Thompson is chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank that supports democracy and the free market.)

Hawai'i delegation proud of earmarks

Post Date March 09, 2009

Comments Comments Closed

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

March 8, 2009

Hawai’i delegation proud of earmarks

By John Yaukey
Advertiser Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – While other senators spent last week arguing over the evils or merits of special project funding they stuffed into a $410 billion spending bill, Hawai’i’s lawmakers have happily boasted about their take, which looks to be considerable.

U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was expected to be among the top beneficiaries of the so-called omnibus spending bill.

And he is.

But an analysis of earmarks by Taxpayers for Common Sense found that second-term U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat, led the 435-member House of Representatives with $138.6 million in pet projects – or earmarks – in large part because they were co-sponsored with Inouye.

In fourth place was Democratic U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, with $111.4 million.

Hirono wa

Business as usual: Democrats drive up military budget with earmarks

Post Date March 09, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military Appropriations, Earmarks, Military-industrial-academic complex

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/07/AR2009030702216.html?hpid=topnews

Pentagon’s Unwanted Projects in Earmarks

Democrats Press Backyard Spending

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, March 8, 2009; A01

When President Obama promised Wednesday to attack defense spending that he considers wasteful and inefficient, he opened a fight with key lawmakers from his own party.

It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors — a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts — most were Democrats.

And last July, when the Navy’s top brass decided to end production of their newest class of destroyers — in response to 15 classified intelligence reports highlighting their vulnerability to a range of foreign missiles — seven Democratic senators quickly joined four Republicans to demand a reversal. They threatened to cut all funding for surface combat ships in 2009.

Within a month, Gates and the Navy reversed course and endorsed production of a third DDG-1000 destroyer, at a cost of $2.7 billion.

“Too many contractors have been allowed to get away with delay after delay in developing unproven weapon systems,” Obama said, attributing $295 billion in cost overruns to “influence peddling” and “a lack of oversight” that produces weapons meant “to make a defense contractor rich” instead of securing the nation.

He did not mention that since 2006, Democratic lawmakers have presided over a 10 percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget — it now amounts to 46 percent of the government’s total discretionary spending — and have also voted repeatedly to keep funding weapons systems that have had hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns.

Although Obama complimented one Democratic and one Republican senator who last month proposed revisions, senior Pentagon officials predict that gaining support on Capitol Hill for ending procurement abuses will be an uphill battle.

“There is equal blame to go around,” a senior defense official said Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities. “It’s bipartisan. It’s all about political expediency.”

He added that Gates, who has lately been urging both the Pentagon and Congress to set aside parochial interests in setting budget priorities, is “not naive” — he expects only to improve the process, not to perfect it. Gates is “willing to use the capital he has built up” if necessary, the official said.

But a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) defended the Democrats’ record on defense spending. “This kind of spending can play an important role in our ongoing effort to improve critical national defense programs,” Jim Manley said.

Independent experts say the obstacles to radical change in defense procurement are all familiar: Close ties between contractors and the military services help ensure that waste and inefficiency are unpunished. Lawmakers seeking home-state jobs and a steady flow of campaign contributions have every incentive to keep funding programs that Pentagon officials say they do not need, particularly in an economic downturn.

“A lot of these weapon systems that are big-ticket items now have no purpose,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “The Taliban doesn’t have an air force. China and Russia are at least a generation behind us. So at a time when we’re talking about developing unmanned aerial vehicles and want to increase our special forces, we ought to be making a clean sweep of these systems that were built during the Cold War.”

The problem, he added, is that the defense industry, now dominated by a handful of large firms with offices or subcontractors in key congressional districts, plays the political game extremely well.

Tens of thousands of jobs directly related to the F-22, for example, are spread among 44 states, a point emphasized in a letter of support for the program signed by 194 House members on Jan. 21. The fighter was conceived in the mid-1980s, and even though Gates said last year its production should end at a fleet of 183, a bipartisan group of lawmakers appropriated $523 million as a down payment on parts to build 20 more in 2010.

“The F-22 decision is an important national security decision with ramifications for the next 30 years,” said Jeff Adams, a spokesman for Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, its manufacturer, noting that the Air Force still says it needs more planes.

Each aircraft now costs about $145 million, and senior defense officials note that the plane has not been used in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. Although the F-22 is built as an air-superiority fighter, the U.S. military has not faced a serious dogfight threat since the Vietnam War, one of the officials said. The signatories to the Jan. 16 Senate letter supporting the additional planes included Vice President Biden, then still a Democratic senator from Delaware, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

“The thing about weapons and bases is they are backyard issues for members of Congress,” said Gordon Adams, a professor at American University who formerly served as associate director for national security and international affairs for the Office of Management and Budget. “It’s not like foreign aid. It’s about contracts in my district, contributors to my election campaign, things that directly affect my prospects of staying in office and my ability to say to my constituents, ‘I got one for you!’ That’s the heart of a weapons decision.”

Since Democrats took control of the defense appropriations process in 2006, the defense industry has shifted gears: During the 2008 election cycle, more than half of the industry’s estimated campaign donations of $25.4 million went to Democrats, marking the first time in 14 years the party had come out on top, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that monitors campaign spending.

The impact of the shift was pronounced in the two committees that control military spending in the House, where Democrats collected 63 and 66 percent, respectively, of all defense industry funds given to committee members in that cycle. The champion was defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who collected $743,275 of the industry’s money; second place was held by Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), who collected $268,799, according to the center’s tally.

Murtha added more than $100 million in earmarks to the fiscal 2008 defense bill, nearly a fifth of the total inserted by all Democrats, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Every earmark reflects a project that the Pentagon did not seek in its budget request, and some of Murtha’s earmarks benefited clients of a lobbying firm called PMA Group, now under FBI investigation for possible violations of federal election law. PMA is run by a former Murtha aide, and some of its clients were donors to Murtha campaigns.

“We receive thousands of requests for funding each year, all of which are fully vetted and approved by the committee and the House,” said Murtha spokesman Matthew Mazonkey. “In the end, we recommend funding only those programs that have the most value and merit to the Defense Department.” Some, he added, have produced innovations that brought eventual cost savings.

Murtha also joined other Democrats — including Boxer — in adding billions of dollars to the war budget for 15 Boeing C-17 cargo planes that the Pentagon did not request. “We have said we have enough” of the C-17s, the senior defense official said. “But members keep adding them to every spending bill, every opportunity they can find.” Taxpayers for Common Sense calls the persistent funding “a gift to Boeing.” Boeing spokesman Douglas J. Kennett says that the program’s cancellation would cost “over 30,000 jobs with over 600 aerospace suppliers.”

Reid is no match for Murtha, but he still managed to sponsor or co-sponsor $68 million in unrequested defense earmarks in the 2008 bill, financing the development of a “truck-deployed explosive containment vehicle,” an “integrated imagery network” for the Nevada National Guard, an Army flatbed trailer, Nevada anti-drug operations, an Air Force diesel air quality project, and a propellant agent for “slurry gel” used by the Army.

Three of Reid’s Democratic colleagues — Kennedy, Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and Evan Bayh (Ind.) — also helped add almost a billion dollars to the Pentagon budget over the past two years for continued production of an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, though the Pentagon said in 2007 that the engine is unnecessary. The plane is already $55 billion over its budgeted cost, according to the Government Accountability Office. The engine is being developed and built by General Electric and Rolls Royce in Massachusetts, Vermont, Indiana and other states; its production team says the engine will offer more flexibility for the fighter pilots if it is installed.

Kennedy also joined Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.), James Webb (Va.), Herb Kohl (Wis.) and other Democrats in demanding funding for the third, unwanted DDG-1000 Navy destroyer. “The world has changed markedly since we began the march to DDG-1000 in the early 1990s,” Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, said in January, explaining why he sought to cancel the ship in favor of building more of a smaller, cheaper and older alternative vessel.

Intelligence reports have warned that the ship will be unable to fend off missile threats, including an advanced missile being developed by China and simple ones already possessed by Hezbollah. As a result, the Navy agreed to end production of the hard-to-hide 14,000-ton vessels, capping the program at two ships instead of seven.

A Kennedy aide said of the senators’ joint letter to the Pentagon that “we’d like to think that it played a big role in changing their mind.” He confirmed that Raytheon, which makes the destroyer’s electronic components in Massachusetts, had contacted Kennedy’s office about keeping the ship in production. But, he added, “we don’t do Raytheon’s bidding.”

A Navy spokesman said Friday that the service still considers the DDG-1000 “a ship you don’t need.”