House Armed Services chief backs increases for weapons, pay
The new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee says he'll push to significantly increase military spending on weapons, technology and troop salaries.
New House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said Thursday that his committee's mission this year and next will be to significantly increase military spending on weapons, technology and troop salaries, well beyond even the increases President Bush is expected to announce next month.
While that should be good news for defense contractors, Hunter told an afternoon news conference he would push Pentagon officials to set up a system that lets small vendors "challenge" current arms makers by offering technology that would be cheaper, better and delivered faster into the field than what might already be in the procurement pipeline.
This would bring competition to the existing system and "will put pressure on producers who have become too comfortable" selling "overpriced" and less innovative warfighting platforms and weapons to the Pentagon, the San Diego Republican explained.
Hunter also castigated the "procurement bureaucracy" for taking too long, sometimes "dozens of years," to bring new equipment to U.S. combat forces. "Some big success stories-like the Predator-occurred because the exigencies of war drew them into the theater," he said, referring to the pilotless surveillance and attack aircraft that has been deployed successfully in the overseas war on terror.
In addition, the new chairman said "bureaucrats" were too afraid of testing new weapons systems, suggesting that too much attention has been paid to the test failures of the ballistic missile defense system rather than the successes. "I want lots of tests," he said about weapons development in general.
Hunter said he wants to push spending levels for buying new weapons up to at least $90 billion a year, with particular emphasis on munitions and cutting-edge technology, plus new ships, vehicles and aircraft to replace aging stocks. The fiscal 2003 Defense appropriations bill, which Bush signed into law last month, allocates $71.6 billion for procurement, $10.7 billion more than the previous year's spending. "We still have a long way to go," Hunter said.
"Precision-[guided] munitions are expensive," he said, noting that multi-year purchase contracts and his suggested changes to the procurement process would lower their cost.
Citing recent reports that the president's fiscal 2004 budget will call for a $14 billion increase over current overall defense spending, Hunter said a $20 billion increase is "probably required to get us through the year," especially if the United States launches a war against Iraq. "There is a very strong case to be made for more money," mainly to modernize the armed forces, he said.
Despite successive years of pay raises for military personnel that exceeded raises for federal workers, a 6 percent pay gap still exists between soldiers and their civilian counterparts, Hunter added, vowing that his panel will work to close it.
He sidestepped a question on future military base closings, which the last Congress agreed would not be decided until 2005, after the next election. He chose instead to rail against environmental laws that he said hamper military readiness by restricting training exercises.
Hunter announced that Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., will be the full committee's vice chairman and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee; Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., will be chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee; Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., will head the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee; Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., will lead the Total Force Subcommittee; Rep. Terry Everett, R-Ala., will be chairman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee; and Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., will head the Projection Forces Subcommittee.