Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) vowed Monday to find funding for the Air Force’s commercial satellite communications (COMSATCOM) “Pathfinder 2” program, which he said was not funded in the service’s fiscal year 2016 budget request.
“I’m going to make sure, to the best I can, that Pathfinder 2 is funded,” Bridenstine said at the Satellite 2015 convention in downtown Washington. “We’re going to get that money put back in the budget.”
Though Bridenstein, as a member of House Armed Services Committee (HASC) and its seapower and projection forces and strategic forces subcommittees, is an authorizer and not an appropriator, he said he felt good about successfully convincing his colleagues to support funding for Pathfinder 2. Bridenstine is also on the House Science environment subcommittee and oversight subcommittee.
“I think it’s going to work out well,” Bridenstine told reporters. “I know that, especially on the strategic forces subcommittee, there’s a lot of support for the pathfinders. It’s bipartisan, and I think we’re going to have success getting it done.”
The Air Force has issued a series of pathfinders in an effort to better procure COMSATCOM services from industry. The service last summer issued a Pathfinder 2 request for information (RFI) to investigate the feasibility of procuring pre-launch transponders in late FY ’15-early FY ’16 to support Ku-band airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).
Pathfinder 2 was also to allow the Air Force to identify which capabilities could be obtained within a constrained budget. A previous pathfinder, Pathfinder 1, provided Ku-band transponders over Africa.
Bridenstine said the Pathfinder efforts are the correct way to integrate commercial and military architecture.
“People understand the long-term implications of having an architecture that is integrated with commercial and military and the Pathfinder is the process to get there,” Bridenstine told reporters. “If we want long-term savings for our government, if we want the best capabilities for our warfighters, Pathfinder is the way to go. So there has to be a way to find the money to get it done.”
Industry has asked the Air Force for years to find better ways of procuring COMSATCOM services, like through long-term leases–as opposed to spot market buying–to fill requirements. Spot market buying, or buying services at the last minute, is expensive and is subject to capabilities being available. While the Air Force has warmed to the idea, it is still constrained by an annual appropriations process and a preference for its own programs.
Bridenstine said the way Congress works on budgeting isn’t enabling long-term investments by the Defense Department. Bridenstine said the current proposed Republican budget idea of funding defense spending, which is discretionary, at sequester levels, then “plussing up” the difference proposed by DoD’s budget request with overseas contingency operations (OCO), or wartime funding not subject to sequestration, doesn’t allow for long-term planning.
“[This] compels us into a position of actually spending more money on a less robust system, rather than actually having a planning process that we can all get behind and say ‘look here’s what we have to do for our architecture,'” Bridenstine said.
The Air Force did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) wrote in a 2013 white paper that DoD and Congress should eliminate hurdles that inhibit it from exercising innovative COMSATCOM business arrangements. One proposal the white paper put forward was DoD establishing a stable budget for COMSATCOM, including reflecting multi-year funding in the services’ total obligation authority and setting it apart from the annual uncertainty it said the DoD process known as Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) brings (Defense Daily; Oct. 17, 2013).
Satellite 2015 is produced by Defense Daily parent company Access Intelligence LLC.