The House Armed Services Committee on April 29 authorized $40 million for establishing a joint program between the United States and Israel to develop technologies that can detect and defeat tunnels.
Terrorists and other malignant groups are increasingly using tunnels to conduct attacks or to smuggle weapons, drugs and people, argued the sponsors of the amendment, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) and Rep. Gwen Graham (D-Fla.), during the markup of the emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee’s National Defense Authorization Act proposal. In the United States, tunnels have been employed to traffic drugs across the southwestern border, while Hamas has used them as underground rocket launching sites and weapons caches in the 2014 conflict against Israel, the legislation said.
The amendment directs the president to develop an anti-tunneling defense system with Israel, though it authorizes the president to broaden the program to include other interested ally nations. The $40 million in funding–pulled from Navy spare parts and the Army’s common bridge transporter and generators–cannot be spent until the president has finalized a memorandum of understanding with Israel detailing their cost-sharing agreement. 
HASC adopted the tunnel defense proposal as part of a larger package of amendments to the subcommittee’s mark.
An amendment offered by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) restricts 75 percent of research, development, testing and evaluation funding for special operations forces’ Distributed Common Ground System until the U.S. Special Operations Command commander submits a review of the program to Congress, including whether commercial, off-the-shelf products could meet software requirements.
Other notable changes to the mark centered on increasing the use and development of directed energy weapons such as lasers.
Lamborn offered two amendments on the subject, the first of which would require the Joint Chiefs of Staff to brief HASC by November 2015 on potential combatant command requirements that could be filled using directed energy. His second amendment called for an assessment of the directed energy defense industrial base.
Rep. Rich Nugent (R-Fla.) authored an amendment contained in the package that would require the U.S. Special Operations Command commander to brief HASC on the need for a directed energy test program.
The emerging threats and capabilities markup was the first to be completed today by the committee. Other subcommittee markups will follow before HASC marks up the full defense authorization bill in a long session that House aids predict will end early tomorrow morning.