Congress is making the final changes to a defense spending package, and it's a doozy: The $626 billion bill includes money for several big-ticket weapons programs that the Obama administration sought to cancel.
Among other things, the bill includes around $465 million to develop an alternative engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and $2.5 billion for 10 more C-17 Globemaster III cargo planes. It even throws a lifeline to the VH-71 presidential helicopter, a troubled program canceled by the administration because of cost overruns.
But to hear defense executives and their friends tell it, it's all doom and gloom for the defense industry.
Earlier this month, former Pentagon acquisition chief Jacques Gansler claimed that whispering has started inside the Beltway about "a global war on contractors." According to Gansler, recent moves by the executive branch to scale back unnecessary weapon programs, impose stringent new ethics rules and pursue new cost-cutting measures "go in the wrong direction."
Speaking yesterday at a Reuters aerospace and defense summit, David Hess, the president of Pratt & Whitney, picked up and expanded on the theme. He complained that moves by the Obama administration to "vilify" the business jet industry and defense firms would cost the United States much-needed jobs. ("The defense industry and Department of Defense contractors kind of get a bad rap," he lamented. "We're too often portrayed as greedy profiteering, and we're not.") Ahead of the same conference, Northrop Grumman CEO Ron Sugar whined that the Pentagon's move to fixed-price contracts for weapons development -- a key cost-control measure -- might "create a lose-lose situation."
My unsolicited advice to the gold-plated weaponeers defense industry: Quit whining. If anyone has learned anything from the finance sector bailout, the public has little patience for self-pity from behemoth corporations, particularly ones that profit heavily from wartime spending. You think you are getting a "bad rap?" Wait 'til Matt Taibbi turns both barrels on your industry.
[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]
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