You can see the next two years of congressional defense debates, in miniature, from the office of Rep. Buck McKeon, the California Republican who'll soon chair the House Armed Services Committee. What others on the Hill or in the Pentagon might take out of the defense budget, McKeon will try to restore. Especially when it comes to the Pentagon's favorite family of fighter jets.
The Senate is taking up a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill to close out the congressional session. It includes about $667 billion for defense -- less than the Pentagon requested, but not out of line with the last few years' defense bills. Among its more eye-catching provisions: the bill would fund a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, something that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has urged President Obama to veto as as a cost-saving measure. But it also punts on purchasing seven of the planes, as they've been beset with delays and rising costs.
Enter McKeon. During a sprawling session with reporters in his Rayburn Building office, McKeon called cutting the plane orders "shortsighted" just because there've been "some setbacks." Asked if he would consider scrapping the Marines' variant of the plane -- as the White House deficit commission recently urged -- he replied, "What plane are the Marines gonna have?" He reiterated his support of the second engine ("Over the long range, I think we save money" with it, McKeon said) and grinned when asked if he was concerned about a possible veto.
Consider that an appetizer. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense's breakdown of the omnibus bill, the Senate's taken $272 million out of missile defense; McKeon wants missile defense "fully funded," although he said he didn't have a specific dollar figure in mind. When it came to the Army's troubled plans to buy a new combat vehicle, McKeon said he wanted to hold hearings before reaching any conclusions -- same thing with the Marines' swimming tank -- and expressed concern that the military might be too geared toward buying the "ultimate" in technology, rather than the practical. Taxpayer dollars are "sacrosanct," he said -- but he's looking for savings on the margins.
And don't get him started on repealing the ban on open gay military service. While McKeon said he doesn't have a personal position, he highlighted Marine General James Amos' comments that repealing the ban could get Marines killed, and said he wanted to hear from "battalion [and] company" level officers in Iraq and Afghanistan about what they think about repeal.
It couldn't be a better predictor of McKeon's upcoming tenure atop the committee. Any effort to cut big-ticket defense programs will be met with a very skeptical eye. Sometimes that's going to please the Pentagon brass, as with the F-35. Other times it's going to irritate them, as with the second F-35 engine or 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' And still other times there will be areas of consensus, as with Gates' desires to reinvest money from wasteful Pentagon overhead back into ships, tanks and guns. (McKeon gave that a big thumbs-up again today.) But above all, when the next House Armed Services Committee chairman said last month that cutting defense was a "red line" for him, he really, really wasn't playing.
Photo: Rep. Buck McKeon’s Flickr page
See Also:
- Cut the Defense Budget? Over My Cold, Dead Gavel
- Want To Cut Defense? Maybe Give The Military a Breather, Then ...
- Deficit Plan Scraps Pentagon Jets, Tanks, Trucks
- Deficit-Hawk Panel Says It's Keeping Its Defense Cuts
- Pentagon's Favorite Jet Delayed as Costs Rise Yet Again
- Lockheed Cross-Breeding Raptors, Joint Strike Fighters
