The Huntsville Times January 23, 2005
War costs could cut missile projects
Pentagon plan may slash hundreds of jobs here over five years
By Shelby G. Spires
Plans to reduce Pentagon spending for weapons in order to pay for the war in Iraq would cut sharply into missile-defense programs managed in Huntsville and kill two Army missile programs outright.
The move could cost Huntsville 600 to 1,000 jobs over the next five years, experts say.
According to Pentagon budget documents published in the defense trade press earlier this month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office wants to slash missile-defense spending by $1 billion in the fiscal 2006 budget that the White House plans to send Congress in the next few weeks. The plan would continue to reduce missile-defense spending by $800 million a year until 2011. That would leave about $9 billion a year in missile-defense spending. In earlier budgets, the Bush administration had proposed to spend more than $10 billion a year on missile defense for the next five years.
Rumsfeld's plan is baffling, said Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Huntsville. "We picked up on these late in the year, and the delegation started meeting about this last month in an effort to find out more information," Cramer said in an interview last week.
"I don't know if it will stand like it is or not," Cramer said. "I would have to think there is a good chance over the next few months it won't be exactly the same request ... we are going to negotiate."
Congress and the White House usually haggle over the budget until late in the calendar year. The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
John Pike, a military expert who runs GlobalSecurity.org, said the cuts may just be a Pentagon ploy to "look like they are cutting programs so as to keep a handle on spending and the budget deficit.
"This is another one of those times that an administration tries to say that things are so bad they may have to sell the Washington Monument," Pike said. "Well, they don't really have to sell the Washington Monument, but they just want to make it look that way."
Pike said Congress is just as likely to put many of the programs back in the budget. The C-130J transport plane is a prime example, he said. "That's been cut out and put back in so many times over the past decade."
Missile defense and ships are examples of areas where Congress has restored money Pentagon budget planners have cut, Pike said.
The cuts this time are intended to ease wartime spending. As of Sept. 30, the war in Iraq had cost more than $100 billion. The Pentagon is very likely to come back and ask Congress for $70 billion this year for the Iraq war, experts say.
"We will have to deal with war costs in a supplemental budget," Cramer said. "And those will be high."
Cramer and U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, serve on appropriations committees that approve the federal budget. U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Shelby's office said the senator does not comment on unreleased budgets.
Cramer said the proposed cuts are "surprising because missile defense is an area the White House has supported heavily in previous years."
About 3,000 people work on missile defense in North Alabama, and Lockheed Martin has announced plans to hire about 1,200 people in Courtland to produce booster interceptors for the ground-based missile-defense program. These missiles would be placed in Alaska and California to shoot down enemy missiles.
Rumsfeld's plan also calls for the termination of the $5 billion Joint Common Missile a battlefield weapon - and the eight-year, $4.5 billion Kinetic Energy Interceptor missile-defense system - both programs with Huntsville ties.
The Pentagon has not awarded a contract for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, but the Joint Common Missile is managed at Redstone Arsenal and is to be built by Lockheed Martin Corp. in Troy. Lockheed planned to hire about 500 people for the program.
The specific cuts have not been released for the missile-defense program, but Rumsfeld's office may cancel the Air Force's anti-missile airborne laser program and delay or cut 10 interceptor missiles from the ground-based missile-defense program, said a congressional aide.
"The cuts would delay or slash some of the ground equipment for ground-based missile defense, and it could cut out" 10 missiles, the aide said. "That affects Alabama and Huntsville." The proposed cuts would mean work would wrap up earlier than expected on the missile-defense program. No information was available on how many jobs could be lost if 10 missiles were slashed from the program.
The Missile Defense Agency plans to have 16 missiles ready in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., by the end of this year.
A further 10 would be placed at Fort Greely by the end of 2006, and the last 10 are planned for an "unspecified location," said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency. "It could be in the United States or it could be Europe. We don't know yet."
Lehner would not discuss specifics about his agency's proposed budget for 2006, saying that information is traditionally released by the White House when the budget is released as a whole.
Sessions said last week that the budget figures could change during the appropriations debates this year.
"We are going to take a hard look at that. I am not confident of some of the figures floating out in terms of reductions," Sessions said.
Sessions said the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is costly, and that some hard - but correct - choices might have to be made.
"I will say the U.S. Army and Marines in particular are stretched. They are really challenged at this point. ... We need to look at what we are doing to assist them," Sessions said. "Some programs may have to be slowed down or pushed out a year or two, but we don't want to push so aggressively that we end up costing more than we save."
Countering the cuts might be a long fight, Cramer said, because many lawmakers are worried about deficit spending.
And the budget cuts would affect all the services. The Navy would give up an aircraft carrier, new destroyers and advanced submarines. The Air Force would lose transport planes, and advanced Army technology programs would be delayed.
"The problem is that if other communities and programs throughout the Department of Defense are hurting, then we can't complain about our programs hurting," Cramer said. "It makes the appropriations process long and sometimes tricky."
© Copyright 2005, The Huntsville Times
