Morning Coffee: 2015 Budget Cuts Deep

Morning Coffee is a robust blend of links to news around the internet concerning the Naval Air Station Patuxent River economic community. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Leader’s owners or staff.

Military personnel spending may drop to 2008 levels as DOD cuts back from steep wartime expenditures under its 2015 budget request released Tuesday, reports the Military Times. Proposed cuts include limits on service member pay raises, reduction of housing allowances by about 6 percent, elimination of commissary subsidies in many locations and hiking Tricare fees for families of active-duty troops and working-age retirees. The budget also reduces the number of active-duty troops by 36,700 with the Army losing about 20,000 soldiers in 2015. However, the Navy was spared from major personnel reductions and numbers will remain relatively steady over the next year at 323,600, according to the Navy Times. The Pentagon’s total 2015 request is approximately $496 billion, or $57 billion less than the 2012 budget.

The proposed 2015 budget imposes cuts on most of the US Navy’s aviation programs, including the P-8A Poseidon, F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, and MH-60R helicopter, according to Defense News. Plans to buy the MQ-8C Fire Scout unmanned shipboard aircraft are on hold and procurement of the Tactical Tomahawk cruise missile will be eliminated after this year. One Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is removed from the budget, leaving funding for three LCS purchases per year. A number of ship-related funding decisions have not yet been made, including the possibility of eliminating an aircraft carrier and a carrier air wing, which should be resolved next year. The Navy’s overall base budget request slashes $7.8 billion from last year’s $155.8 billion allotment.

Civilian workers are also facing repercussions under the Pentagon 2015 budget request, which specifies a reduction of 6,300 workers, or 1 percent, by 2015, reports The Hill. The budget overview states, “The Military Services and Defense Agencies will begin to shape the workforce to reflect the changing post-Afghanistan needs and a declining military force. The budget request supports a civilian workforce appropriately sized and shaped to reflect changes to the Department’s reduce force structure.”

NavSec Ray Mabus announced Tuesday that career sea pay rates will increase by 25 percent this summer, the first hike in over 10 years, reports the Navy Times. The move is aimed at filling as many as 9,000 open jobs in the operational force and to “reward our sailors and Marines for their continued sacrifices as part of ‘America’s Away Team.’ ” The pay raise was announced along with the release of the fiscal year 2015 budget request, but the sea pay raise is unrelated and should take effect later this fiscal year.

Defense News provides a commentary supporting the continued operation of the U-2 spy plane. The Obama administration wants to cut costs by scrapping the 33 high performance aircraft and use the longer-range Global Hawk unmanned aircraft in their place. Defense News, however, believes that “the U-2 remains America’s most capable, flexible and survivable spy plane. The U-2 should remain in service until replaced by a sufficient number of stealthy, long-endurance aircraft that can carry more capable systems over contested airspace.”

A number of options, including running a competition, are being considered by the US Missile Defense Agency for a redesign of the current Raytheon “kill vehicle” on its ground-based missile defense interceptors, reports Reuters. The agency’s director said preliminary work on a new common kill vehicle by Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin allows the agency to choose from three “viable industry concepts.” Acquisition planning for a redesigned kill vehicle is incomplete, but the agency aims to deploy the new vehicle, along with a new long-range radar system and improvements to the threat detection system by 2020.

The Jacksonville Business Journal offers an opinion on “how the Pentagon screwed up the F-35 program“. The $400 billion dollar stealth fighter program is over budget and has a number of technical and functionality problems which the publication believes has “little to do with Lockheed.”  The Journal states that the Joint Program Office “often ignores NAVAIR and Air Force Materiel Command, who actually know how to build and buy airplanes.” Grouping Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps requirements into one program made the costs appear excessive and required “all three service buyers to agree on technical steps, from flight worthiness to software priorities.” Mackenzie Eaglen, a conservative think tank analyst, believes that, “The best route would have been for the Air Force and Marine Corps to have pursued their own independent fighter recapitalization programs from the beginning and let the Navy continue to purchase Super Hornets.”