KEI Kill?

House lawmakers today sought to delete $80 million allocated to the Missile Defense Agency’s last week by the House Appropriations Committee to keep Kinetic Energy Interceptor-related technology development going until the Defense Department's renewed emphasis on “early intercept” efforts gets under way.

The committee’s report on the FY-10 defense appropriations bill states that MDA “is determining how to make the best use of the current technologies and their technical worth as well as the possible benefits of integrating these developments with other MDA programs.”

But this morning, during a House floor debate on the FY-10 defense appropriations bill, Reps. John Tierney (D-MA) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) submitted an amendment that would delete those funds.

A program that has been killed by the defense secretary and had no funding included for it in either the House or Senate authorization bills "no longer warrants Congress' support," Tierney said, adding:

It's never too late to do the right thing, and here's our opportunity to do the right thing. We have to at some point in time start looking at all of our budgets and that includes the defense budget to make sure that we're not putting money out that needs to be put towards other priorities. Here you have the Missile Defense Agency's director himself saying that this program should be terminated, you have the secretary of defense and two administrations saying the program should be terminated; you have from what i can hear from the silence of those who say they're against this amendment not arguing in fact that this is a program that should move forward.

For his part, Holt said:

I understand the desire of the distinguished Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee to get something of value from the billions of dollars already spent, but stringing this program along is not the answer. Even after removal of $80 million in funding for the KEI, the underlying bill still would provide $20.6 billion in R&D funding to learn from the mistakes of this program.

Mr. Chairman, even if the KEI were “successful,” it would never work well enough to change our strategy. Missile defense systems must be perfect to achieve their professed goals. But we can never count on their perfection. The fact is we don’t need them against our friends and they only encourage our enemies to build more offensive systems to get around the so-called shield.

The best this flawed system could provide us is a provocative yet permeable defense, creating an inherently destabilizing situation that would weaken the security of all Americans.

Rep. John Murtha (R-PA), the House Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, opposed the amendment, but said House and Senate lawmakers "may need to adjust this in conference." Further, he said, "this program's already spent a billion dollars, we ought to get something out of it."

The House subsequently killed the amendment via voice vote.