House Armed Services seapower chairman Randy Forbes promised a “rebirth” of oversight in my interview with him last week, and he makes a down payment on that in his subcommittee’s markup of the defense bill. It includes a host of new reporting and certification requirements.
Top of the deck comes the Navy’s over-budget aircraft carrier. The subcommittee grudgingly raises the cost cap on the immensely expensive USS Gerald Ford (CVN-78), the first of a new class intended to replace the venerable Nimitz and now expected to cost $12.9 billion.
Although Forbes does not punish the Navy in any way for it, the subcommittee mark does warn: “Continued [cost] escalation on the entirety of the ship construction accounts…is unsustainable.”
Here’s a rundown of the rest of the subcommittee’s draft bill. If these make it through the Senate version and conference, the Pentagon would have to
- Demonstrate that the X-47B drone, which just last week made its first launch from and first “touch and go” landing on an aircraft carrier, can refuel itself in mid-air from flying tankers just like a manned aircraft;
- Certify that software and system engineering for the X-47B’s combat-capable successor, the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike drone, are “at a low level of … risk” before proceeding with the UCLASS program;
- Keep retired KC-135R aerial refueling tankers flyable and ready to return to service until the new KC-46 enters service;
- Tell Congress whether the Navy’s mainstay destroyer, the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class, can really keep being upgraded to accommodate a power-hungry new radar for missile defense (there’s an interesting suggestion that the radar might be installed instead aboard the roomier LPD-17 San Antonio-class amphibious warfare ships, built in Pascagoula; someone in Mississippi must be happy that provision made it in);
- Do a report on whether the Arleigh Burkes and other surface combatants can accommodate another high-energy technology, laser weapons (this may be a plug for the competing DDG-1000 Zumwalt class, which was cut off after three vessels because of its cost but which boasts far more electrical power)
- The status of the Marine Corps’s prized Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV), the replacement for the disastrously over-budget Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle cancelled in 2011;
- Whether the Navy’s current contracting structure, based on so-called “fixed-price incentive fee” (FPIF) contacts, is really reaping the savings it was intended to.
