Defense cuts test lawmakers’ resolve on deficits

DONNA CASSATA

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s call to shrink the mil­i­tary, shut bases and can­cel weapons to meet the demand for bud­get cuts tests the resolve of law­mak­ers who came to Wash­ing­ton deter­mined to slash the deficit.

A new national secu­rity strat­egy reflect­ing an end to decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan offers the oppor­tu­nity to reduce defense spend­ing and gov­ern­ment deficits by hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars over the next 10 years — but at a cost of thou­sands of jobs in law­mak­ers’ states and districts.

Democ­rats as well as Repub­li­cans are resist­ing, look­ing to pro­tect home turf from Cal­i­for­nia, where the Global Hawk unmanned air­craft is built, to Wis­con­sin, home to speedy Lit­toral com­bat ships, to mil­i­tary instal­la­tions all across the country.

“It’s funny that we want to save money every­where except when it can bother us,” Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham, R-S.C., said in an inter­view. Gra­ham is a mem­ber of the Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee and one of the few law­mak­ers who favors another round of domes­tic base closings.

Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta recently out­lined a $525 bil­lion bud­get for next year that’s $6 bil­lion less than the cur­rent level. The pro­posal is the first step in the deficit-cutting plan that Obama and con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans agreed to last sum­mer that calls for a reduc­tion in pro­jected defense spend­ing of $487 bil­lion over 10 years.

“Make no mis­take, the sav­ings that we are propos­ing will impact on all 50 states and many dis­tricts, con­gres­sional dis­tricts, across Amer­ica,” Panetta said at a news con­fer­ence spelling out the new strat­egy. “This will be a test, a test of whether reduc­ing the deficit is about talk or about action.”

Obama sub­mits his com­plete bud­get pro­posal to Con­gress on Feb. 13, but Panetta’s pre­view included enough details to stir alarm on Capi­tol Hill.

The bud­get calls for can­cel­ing the Air Force’s Global Hawk pro­gram, a high-altitude unmanned air­craft used for intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance. The Pen­ta­gon said the aircraft’s cost at $215 mil­lion apiece make it less cost-effective than the exist­ing U-2 spy planes that burst on the scene in the 1950s and were crit­i­cal in find­ing Soviet mis­siles in Cuba in 1962.

Northrop Grum­man, the aircraft’s prime con­trac­tor, builds the planes in Palm­dale, Calif., located in the dis­trict of the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee Chair­man Howard “Buck” McKeon.

The air­craft is based at Beale Air Force Base, near Marysville, Calif., soon to be in the redrawn con­gres­sional dis­trict of Demo­c­ra­tic Rep. John Gara­mendi, a mem­ber of the com­mit­tee. The pro­gram also is one of many that the Air Force man­ages at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the dis­trict of Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, another com­mit­tee member.

McK­eon has crit­i­cized the over­all mil­i­tary cuts but has not com­mented specif­i­cally on the Global Hawk. The Repub­li­can did send a clear mes­sage to the Pen­ta­gon and the White House when he promised to hold hear­ings on the bud­get “keep­ing in mind that while the pres­i­dent pro­poses, Con­gress disposes.”

Gara­mendi ques­tioned the Pentagon’s ratio­nale, espe­cially since six months ago it called the Global Hawk a crit­i­cal pro­gram with no alter­na­tives “that will pro­vide accept­able capa­bil­ity to meet the joint mil­i­tary require­ment at less cost.”

“Now we’re going in the other direc­tion and I’m going, ‘guys you got some explain­ing to do. What changed? What is the rea­son here?” Gara­mendi, who has been a strong pro­po­nent of Beale AFB, said in an inter­view. He called the U-2 an “incred­i­ble machine, but it can’t stay over the tar­get for 20 hours. Global Hawk can stay there for a day or more. So expla­na­tions are needed.”

Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary Ash­ton Carter’s rea­son at the brief­ing with Panetta: “That’s the fate of things that become too expen­sive in a resource-constrained environment.”

But just a few months ago, the Pen­ta­gon had said that “when ana­lyzed in the con­text of the Global Hawk mis­sion, the U-2 costs $220 mil­lion per year more than the Global Hawk.”

Panetta also called for slow­ing the pace of build­ing new ships and speed­ing up the retire­ment of older ones. The Pen­ta­gon blue­print said it would reduce the pur­chase of Lit­toral com­bat ships, the speedy boats built at ship­yards in Wis­con­sin and Alabama, by two. It didn’t pro­vide more specifics.

The ship is built in the city of Marinette on the Wisconsin-Michigan bor­der, and has meant hun­dreds of jobs in the two states. While Wis­con­sin has an unem­ploy­ment rate of 7.1 per­cent, Michigan’s job­less rate of 9.3 per­cent is well above the nation’s.

The chair­man of the Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee is Michi­gan Demo­c­rat Carl Levin, who declined to com­ment about specifics of the bud­get pro­posal. Fresh­man Sen. Ron John­son, R-Wis., praised the Lit­toral as a ship that “just keeps us a lit­tle more nimble.”

Con­tribut­ing to the ner­vous­ness on Capi­tol Hill — and in the defense indus­try — is the prospect of deeper cuts in the mil­i­tary. The deficit-cutting supercommittee’s fail­ure last fall to come up with at least $1.2 tril­lion in sav­ings last year means auto­matic, across-the-board cuts for defense and domes­tic pro­grams begin­ning next January.

For the Pen­ta­gon, that would mean an addi­tional $492 bil­lion reduc­tion over a decade on top of the $487 billion.

Top Repub­li­can sen­a­tors have pro­posed reduc­tions in the fed­eral work­force and a freeze in fed­eral pay to delay the auto­matic cuts for a year. Both the White House and con­gres­sional Democ­rats have rejected any move to undo the auto­matic cuts absent a far-reaching deficit-cutting plan.

Jeremy W. Devaney, a senior equity ana­lyst in defense tech­nol­ogy for BB&T Cap­i­tal Mar­kets, said con­trac­tors look at Con­gress and the admin­is­tra­tion, and “they don’t believe sequester is going to hap­pen, but they don’t know how it’s not going to happen.”

Posted by AP News on Feb 6 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.