The Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) on Thursday voted near unanimously to advance its $831.8 billion fiscal year 2024 defense spending bill.
The bill factors in $8 billion for emergency spending above the defense spending cap mandated by the debt ceiling agreement, part of a deal committee leadership detailed last week.
“The bill accelerates implementation of the National Defense Strategy by supporting the department’s request to retire old ships and aircraft that can’t survive in today’s fight and, instead, invest in new capabilities such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence and science and technology research. Modernizing our military weapons and fielding new capabilities is absolutely, unequivocally key. We cannot hold onto legacy systems that were designed for a different fight in a different era,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), chair of SAC’s defense subcommittee, said on Thursday.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) cast the sole ‘No’ vote against the defense spending bill during the committee’s markup.
When announcing the emergency spending deal last week to include $13.7 billion in additional funding across FY ‘24 spending bills, split between the $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for non-defense items, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the committee chair, said it was aimed at addressing “serious bipartisan concerns” over the cuts to non-defense programs and the mandate to match the president’s requested defense topline in the debt ceiling agreement (Defense Daily, July 20).
“The $8 billion really will matter. In Washington terms, that’s probably not that much money but it really will matter. And the both of y’all deserve a lot of credit for listening to other members of the committee, looking at the facts and, sort of, hear the facts. This is a great step in the right direction. We’re still below inflation. Hopefully, we can do more,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Thursday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) noted the bill includes over $5 billion to address items included in the unfunded priorities list the service chiefs and combatant commanders submitted to Congress, with the additional funds including $508 million for Indo-Pacific Command activities across all of the services and $294 million for long-range radars and sensors “to close awareness gaps identified by Northern Command in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon overflight.”
A key difference from the House Appropriations Committee’s (HAC) defense spending bill, which was approved in June, is SAC’s move to fund all of the administration’s multi-year munitions procurement requests.
“It maximizes the production capacity of Patriot air defense missiles, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles and other munitions that are in high demand in Ukraine and are needed to adequately deter our adversaries. These investments will also support a transition from a ‘just-in-time’ approach to a ‘just-in-case’ stockpile of munitions to bolster deterrence of China,” Collins said, adding the bill “promotes stability in the defense industrial base.”
HAC’s bill grants funding for only five multi-year munitions procurements to include Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile, Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] GMLRS rocket and PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhanced interceptors as well as the Air Force’s LRASM and JASSM, but not the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile and the Navy’s request for RTX’s [RTX] SM-6 missile (Defense Daily, June 23).
“In many cases, reductions were made because the department failed to justify the request. One example is the department’s request for economic order quantities for certain munitions tied to multi-year procurement,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chair of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said during the panel’s markup at the time. “Because of the poor justification, other urgent unfunded needs, and sufficient enduring support for the munitions industrial base, the bill does not fund this request.”
SAC’s FY ‘24 defense spending bill funds $33.3 billion for Navy shipbuilding, with Collins noting it includes a “down payment” for for an additional DDG-51 destroyer and an amphibious ship “that is the Marine Corps’ top unfunded requirement.”
“The president’s budget request would have resulted in a fleet of 291 ships at the end of the next five years. That is smaller than today’s fleet of 299 ships, far short of the chief of naval operations’ requirement for 381 ships and alarmingly smaller than the 400 ships China will have in just two years,” Collins said.
A summary for SAC’s defense spending bill notes the committee also included $3.6 billion for Army combat tracked vehicles, $532 million to build an additional 53 Abrams tanks, $497 million to full fund the F-35 Engine Core Upgrade effort and $37.2 million to accelerate the E-7 Wedgetail program.
Collins said she wants the 12 spending bills, which were all passed out of committee for the first time in five years, brought to the Senate floor for consideration “just as soon as we return in September” after the upcoming recess.
HAC advanced its own defense spending bill with a party line vote, after Democrats objected to the legislation’s nearly $2 billion cut to multi-year procurement for select munitions and a slew of GOP-led proposals Democratic members criticized as “needlessly divisive” (Defense Daily, June 22).