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[21stCen]

Defense Budget Increase Sailing Through House

July 6, 2011

The following appeared July 5th in The Fiscal Times:
The White House and Republican leaders may be locked in a bruising battle over how to slash the long-term deficit, but defense cuts seem to be off the table. This week, House lawmakers are moving rapidly toward approving a $649 billion defense appropriation bill that would boost baseline Pentagon spending by 3.4 percent in 2012...

The procurement portion of the bill includes:

• $15.1 billion for the Navy’s ship-building program, which is enough to launch ten new ships next year from shipyards in Portsmouth, Va., Kittery, Maine, Brementon, Wash., and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The overall budget will support a 288-ship Navy, an increase of four ships over 2011.
• $5.9 billion to build 32 F-35 jets and $2.7 billion for continued development of the advanced fighter, which is slated to replace the military’s entire jet fleet over the next several decades at a cost approaching $400 billion. Some analysts say the program could be scaled back by slowing purchases and substituting updated versions of older, cheaper planes.
• $2.5 billion for 35 new Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, that can take off and land like helicopters. Local legislators from just outside Philadelphia, where it is built have beaten back repeated efforts to curtail a program that was bedeviled by technical problems in its early days. The Osprey’s use in rescuing a downed pilot in Libya “has laid to rest all doubts about its operational effectiveness,” the report that accompanied the appropriations bill asserted. The report also called for “a new multiyear procurement contract for fiscal year 2013 and beyond.”