A top Democrat who steers Pentagon policy said yesterday he is has multiple concerns about the health of the defense industry including figuring out how to maintain a skilled industrial base.
House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) enumerated his concerns, during a breakfast in Washington, as a special HASC subcommittee is finalizing a report with recommendations for helping small and mid-sized businesses work with the Pentagon (Defense Daily, Feb. 18). As the lead Democrat on the committee, he will help decide whether to include the recommendations in the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill the committee will craft in May.
Smith said he wants to work on maintaining “core capabilities” in the industrial base as the Pentagon budget tightens, though he acknowledged not having a good answer for how to do that.
“We want to make sure that we maintain the factory capability, the technological skill, the workforce necessary to build the defense equipment we need,” he told the Defense Writers Group. “Is there a way to do that responsibly?”
Options floated include “paying (defense companies) to do something we don’t need for a few years,” changing “the way …these things are delivered,” or stretching out a system’s development timeframe, he said. Yet he cautioned: “You can’t say we don’t really need this (equipment) right now, but we’re going to pay these people for the next three or four years to…build it and tear it down, build it and tear it down just to make sure that they’re still there if we need them in the future.”
“You don’t want to do that, so how do you strike that balance,” he said.
He acknowledged the shrinking defense budgets make this task tricky. He added that “even if we had the same amount of money, we’ve started more projects in the last 10 years, projected out forward, than we can probably afford to do.”
His comments came as the Army is proposing a temporary halt in production of General Dynamics’ [GD] M1 Abrams tank and Stryker vehicle and BAE Systems’ Bradley Fighting Vehicle starting in fiscal year 2014.
Referring to this potential Army vehicle “procurement holiday” as a “controversy,” Smith questioned if certain core capabilities would be lost during the shutdown.
“Are there engineers and workers who say I’m making tanks and I’ve got to do something else, and two years later you can’t come back and all of the sudden learn how to make tanks,” Smith asked, saying his concerns about losing industrial expertise applies to other weapon efforts as well.
“I don’t know the answer to that question nor do I know the solution for how you do it, but it’s something we should look at,” he said.
Smith said he also wants to increase small businesses’ access to defense contracts and “encourage” them to offer their products to the Pentagon so “it isn’t the same usual suspects getting every contract.”
“We’ve got a lot of small companies coming up with new technology ideas, new manufacturing ideas, all kinds of great new ideas,” he said, but they struggle with working with “the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense.”
Smith said another defense contracting concern of his relates to the regional approach military-construction contracting takes, with projects limited to companies in specific areas of the country.
Regarding the Pentagon budget, Smith said he hopes Democrats and Republicans can come together to craft a plan to prevent so-called sequestration cuts.
Those cuts are the $500 billion in added longterm reductions to projected Pentagon spending, which would come on top of a $487 billion cut to planned Pentagon spending, due to start next January through a sequestration process triggered by Congress’ failure to pass a $1.2 trillion deficit-cutting plan. Sequestration also would cut non-defense spending by $500 billion over nearly a decade.
Smith said he doesn’t support the proposal–from Republicans including HASC Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) and Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.)–to prevent the first year of sequestration cuts by cutting the federal workforce through attrition.
“The way to prevent sequestration is simple and straightforward: find $1.2 trillion in savings over the course of the next 10 years,” Smith said. Like other Democrats, he said he does not foresee a plan that does not include new revenue such as taxes, a path Republicans oppose.
Smith said he likes aspects of previously floated deficit-cutting plans, including one from Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton, and Alan Simpson, a former Wyoming Republican senator.
If Congress does not address the sequestration issue until December, after the November elections, Smith said he could support ending former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts and using the resulting revenue to offset sequestration.
“In this case the vote to extend the Bush tax cuts in their entirety would in essence be the vote to lock in sequestration, and that will be interesting,” he said.
Smith rejected the suggestion he isn’t being vocal on fighting the sequestration cuts.
“I am making a big issue of it,” he said. “I’m arguing every day we have to put revenue on the table and find the $1.2 trillion over 10 years.” He said he believes “in order for anything to actually pass it has to be bipartisan.” He said he has met multiple times on the matter with McKeon.