Legislative Proposals

While the White House and Congress try to avert a government shutdown at midnight tonight and somehow pass a spending bill for the rest of fiscal year 2011, the Pentagon has been quietly lobbying lawmakers to include language for the FY-12 defense bill for a variety of programs. To wit:

On Tuesday, InsideDefense.com reported the following:

The Defense Department last week asked Congress to establish a fund to finance the development and fielding of new technologies and weapons requested by commanders to meet urgent wartime needs, according to Pentagon documents.

The fund would be backed by a $100 million account in the Pentagon's base budget that could be supplemented by another $100 million annually in war-cost appropriations bills.

On April 1, the Pentagon sent Congress a third package of legislative proposals for consideration along with the Defense Department's fiscal year 2012 spending request. The package calls for the creation of a Joint Urgent Operational Needs Fund within the defense-wide procurement account.

The fund would be “used to resolve immediate warfighter needs of the combatant commanders within the year of execution,” states the request.

The request seeks a total of $200 million for the fund in FY-12. Should Congress agree to establish it, the Pentagon would assume $100 million annually across its future years defense plan for the new fund in its base budget, according to the DOD proposal, which would add a new section to title 10 of the U.S. code.

Then on Thursday, Inside the Pentagon reported:

The Pentagon wants Congress to eliminate statutory language that pushes the Defense Department to acquire unmanned drones over manned systems in new programs and directs DOD to provide an explanation when that does not occur.

In a recent legislative proposal obtained by Inside the Pentagon, DOD states that this requirement in the Fiscal Year 2007 National Defense Authorization Act "potentially imposes cost and schedule burdens." The department wants to excise the preference for drones from the law.

"Because it does not allow for consideration of development and ownership costs, it forces the DOD to procure a system that may be more expensive to develop and operate than a manned system, which is equally or more effective and provides the same or more protection to service members," DOD writes in its request. The department notes that although the law's intent is "desirable," it creates a "burden."

But a congressional source said the current law does not bar the Pentagon from considering costs.

The intent of the legislation "was to make the default position unmanned," the source said.

DOD similarly sought last year to have Congress change the law, arguing the requirement is expensive, but Capitol Hill was not persuaded, the source said.

The Pentagon's proposal also notes that the current requirement could hinder DOD's ability to quickly fill a capability gap "because of the time required to mature unmanned technologies." The required certification that an unmanned system is incapable of meeting program requirements can also bump up the price and time needed to initiate new acquisitions, the department complains.

And this morning, Inside the Air Force reported:

The Defense Department has made the most sweeping changes to its Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) program in 15 years, according to a senior Air Force official.

DOD will realign the incentives for commercial industry partners who participate in the service's peacetime missions in a bid to make the partnership "stronger" and "more viable," according to Gen. Duncan McNabb, commander of U.S. Transportation Command. It is also looking to make some legislative changes to facilitate its relationship with those partners, according to a proposal released by the Pentagon on April 1. Through the long-standing CRAF program, the military's organic air fleet and its commercial partners have airlifted more than 2 million passengers and 848,000 tons of cargo.

McNabb said in his prepared statement for an April 5 hearing with the House Armed Services Committee that the Air Force implemented the "flyer bonus" plan to "address congressional mandates to improve predictability of DOD commercial requirements and incentivize carriers to use modern aircraft." It is the first bonus of its kind, McNabb said during his opening statement.

"Our plan for [fiscal year 2012] FY-12 is to amend the flyer bonus to provide increased reward to those carriers who fly peacetime CRAF missions with modernized aircraft," he said.

McNabb's announcement of a flyer bonus comes after the Pentagon sent a package of legislative proposals to Congress on April 1 along with the Defense Department's FY-12 spending request. In a section-by-section analysis of one proposal on CRAF, DOD says it wants Congress to allow for changes to be made to the current CRAF memorandum of understanding covering the operation of the program.

That legislative proposals package that all the above stories mention? We have it now -- click here to read it.