Multi-year procurement (MYP) of key munitions is vital to rebuild U.S. stockpiles, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), said on Jan. 23.
Gallagher chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber, information technologies, and innovation panel.
Congressional appropriators “traditionally hate multi-year appropriations, which are essential if you wanna send a consistent signal to the defense industrial base to maximize the production of critical munitions and allow for companies to invest in facilitization,” Gallagher said during a virtual JINSA forum, The U.S., Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan: Competing Demands for the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.
“I think because things like 155 [munitions], or Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, or SM-6, or JASSM/JASSM-ER aren’t quite as sexy as other platforms that get more attention, we moved to minimum sustaining rates of production, as opposed to maximum production rates, and therefore we have very brittle stockpiles right now,” he said. “It’s a huge problem. I think we are missing a massive opportunity right now to completely rebuild and revitalize our arsenal of deterrence.”
In February last year, the U.S. Army chose General Dynamics Ordnance & Tactical Systems [GD] and American Ordnance to compete to build 155mm artillery rounds under a $993.8 million contract to aid an effort to expand capacity of M795 projectiles by 12,000 to 20,000 rounds per month (Defense Daily, Feb. 17, 2023).
Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds the U.S. Air Force Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), JASSM Extended Range (JASSM-ER), and the SM-6 and JASSM-based AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) for the U.S. Navy.
“We are having this debate about Ukraine funding, the border,” Gallagher said on Jan. 23. “I think the president [Biden] missed an opportunity–and Congress bears a big share of the blame too–after [the] Oct. 7 [Hamas violence] happened, and he gave his Oval Office address–to make the case for support to Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine in a way that would have been more palatable politically right now. Put differently, he could have talked to the American people about the fact that we need to rebuild our stockpiles of critical munitions. As opposed to making the argument more about the fight for democracy in Ukraine, I think there was a more effective way to do this. I still think we have that opportunity.”
On Sept. 27 last year, Gallagher introduced H.R. 5753, the Funding Pacific Readiness and Enhancing Stockpiles (FIRES) Act, which he said would redirect about $10 billion in DoD unused funds at the end of each fiscal year to a new “FIRES Fund” to devote to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Pacific Deterrence Initiative, to increase the ship build rate to reach a 355-ship Navy, and to build military expeditionary infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.
Fund use could include priority weapons and “expansion of munitions production capacity and the construction of facilities for the production, storage, and transport of munitions, including government-owned munitions facilities specializing in solid rocket motor production,” H.R. 5753 says.
10 percent of the FIRES Fund would go to nontraditional defense contractors and small and medium-sized businesses.
The bill has no co-sponsors, but Jordan Dunn, a spokesman for Gallagher, wrote in a Jan. 23 email that Gallagher “is in touch with other members who are interested in the concept and working to make sure it gets included in the coming year.”
On Jan. 23, Gallagher told the JINSA forum that his office had asked DoD for technical feedback on a draft of the legislation, but the “DoD comptroller basically said, ‘We don’t want this. We don’t need it,'” which really shocked me because here I was trying to give them more money…in the wake of Ukraine, Oct. 7th, in light of the eroding balance of conventional power in the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific and across the Taiwan strait, in particular, this is something we all agree we need, and yet the response from DoD was, ‘No, thank you. Thanks for your interest in national security.’ I don’t know if that’s just bureaucratic inertia or general skepticism of Congress, but that was really disappointing, and I think that we need to explore creative options like this.”
The Pentagon’s new National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) favors increasing use of MYPs “to create sustained demand signals that will promote investment into the capacity of the industrial base, which have typically been reserved for only the most expensive acquisition types, such as procurement of large sea-going Navy ships” (Defense Daily, Jan. 11).
“MYPs are a step in building a consistent and predictable demand signal that creates more transparency and less risk for both prime contractors as well as more fragile sub-tier suppliers,” the NDIS says.
Asked on Jan. 23 whether there is significant opposition to MYPs among subcontractors worried that MYPs would shave profit margins, Gallagher replied, “I haven’t encountered vociferous opposition [to MYPs] from subcontractors.”
“The predictability and guaranteed profit over time, I think, would outweigh any short-term reduction in the [subcontractors’] margin,” Gallagher said. “It’s a good point, but I certainly haven’t encountered a ton of opposition from subcontractors.”