What are we Getting for Record Defense Spending?

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Next year’s national defense spending — for the Defense Department, the Department of Energy [for nuclear weapons] and other security agencies — may be tens of billions more than the $813 fiscal 2023 billion budget sought by President Biden and perhaps the only important legislation that will draw major bipartisan support in Congress.

Support for authorizing defense spending is so great, that both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees have authorized $47 billion and $37 billion more, respectively, than the President sought — even though his request was more than $30 billion above the $778 billion being spent this year.

We are talking about authorizing record national defense spending thanks to inflation, U.S. support for Ukraine, the threats seen in Congress from Russia and China, and individual lawmakers’ desires to support local military bases and defense contractors.

So far, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate Appropriations Committees have not shown the same enthusiasm for defense spending.

On a party-line, vote last Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the fiscal 2023 national defense appropriations bill which was only $3 billion above President Biden’s budget request.

Another test comes today, when the full House Appropriations Committee meets to approve fiscal 2023 spending for the Energy Department which includes the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which funds the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.

For example, one issue expected to be raised is funding Biden dropped to continue research for a new, nuclear sub-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N), which was initiated during the Trump administration. Both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees revived the SLCM-N by including authorization of $45 million for its research and development in their fiscal 2023 authorization bills. Of that amount, $20 million was for NNSA to continue development of the warhead for the SLCM-N.


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Even though the Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to act, it is all but guaranteed that Congress later this year, will be faced with an election year debate over just how much of a record that fiscal 2023’s national defense spending will set.

The House Armed Services Committee’s action Thursday morning, in far exceeding the Biden nation defense proposal, was done over the objection of its chairman, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who said during debate, “President Biden’s budget request for the Department of Defense includes sufficient funds to meet the defense challenges facing our country… The Department needs tough decisions and rigorous oversight from Congress. More money isn’t necessarily the answer.”

However, Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Elaine Luria (D-Va.), the committee’s Vice Chairman, had already pulled together a 69-page package of hundreds of amendments made up of various members’ requests that added $37 billion to the bill. It was passed during the marathon Wednesday/Thursday session by a 42-to-17 vote.

Luria said, “The President’s current budget proposal fails to meet the threats that China, Iran, and Russia pose. The planned reduction in [Navy] fleet size is not just about loss of capacity, but loss of capability in the timeframe when the threat from China is the greatest.’

Golden said his amendment added $7.4 billion for dealing with inflation impacts, to include $3.5 billion for military construction inflation costs and $2.5 billion to offset the costs of fuel inflation. The amendment also supported $3.5 billion to build five additional Navy ships, including one DDG 51 destroyer [$1.2 billion]. It added another four additional Patriot air defense units to equip the 16th Patriot Battalion [$1 billion], and another $1.3 billion to cover nine additional aircraft for the various services.

Also added was $550 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which brought total authorization in the bill to $1 billion for the program to support the Kyiv government.

The House Armed Services Committee’s actions highlighted some complicated issues.

For example, the Navy, based on Biden’s budget, sought authority to decommission some 24 ships in fiscal 2023, nine of which were to be so-called Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs).

The LCS program, which began in 2004, has been a problem almost from the start. By 2017, a February 2022 Government Accountability (GAO) report said, “the costs to construct the ships have more than doubled from initial expectations and promised levels of capability have been unfulfilled.”  The ships were supposed to be inexpensive, fast, and able to swap missions thanks to “mission modules,” which would enable them to convert from anti-surface to anti-submarine to mine-hunting to irregular warfare usage.

As of fiscal 2019, the Navy had “spent over $28 billion (in constant fiscal year 2019 dollars) to develop and build 32 LCSs,” with three more planned, the GAO report said. It added, “The Navy estimates it will cost over $60 billion to operate and support the 35 LCS it plans to build, including the 17 it has already delivered.” One continuing problem was the need to have contractors handle sophisticated maintenance issues.

No surprise LCS purchases have been cut and those expected high operating costs led the Navy to decide to decommission nine relatively new LCSs in fiscal 2023, while new ones are still in the pipeline.

Armed Services Chairman Smith’s markup of the fiscal 2023 bill included decommissioning all nine LCSs, but the Golden-Luria amendment authorized adding $318 million to save five of the nine. It reflected similar language adopted by the Senate Armed Services panel.

Showing some sophisticated Capitol Hill lobbying was going on, that same amendment, save five LCSs, was approved during Wednesday’s House Appropriations Committee markup, while a Republican attempt failed to protect all nine LCSs. The appropriators, in their report, said the Navy should look at alternative uses for the ships, including transferring them to allied navies.

“These ships have functionality to them,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said during the committee’s markup. “The first round of conversations I had with the Navy were unsatisfactory, and they are coming around to the seriousness of making sure that taxpayer’s dollars are, at a minimum, repurposed in a way that helps with our national security.”

Defense News pointed out, “Before the Navy could transfer the ships, it would have to fix a faulty combining gear on these Freedom-variant LCSs. The service and industry have already designed and approved a fix but face limited shipyard capacity to install the new combining gear system, meaning it could take years before all LCSs have the new system installed.”

During the House Armed Services Wednesday debate on the bill, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said, “We all know what lemon cars are. We have a fleet of lemon LCS ships. We have spent billions of dollars on this fleet when they have no capability to help us deal with [what] our largest threat is, which is that of China and Russia. The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships.”

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