Pentagon Killing JSF F136 Engine
The head of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) is blasting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s decision to “pre-empt” Congress and stop work on the General Electric-Rolls Royce F136 engine for the Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter.
“The views of the President and Secretary Gates are well known on this topic, but those opinions — however strong — are not the law,” Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said in a statement. “The Joint Strike Fighter F136 engine program is funded under the current continuing resolution. The secretary should follow current law and not pre-empt the Congressional deliberation process by yanking funding after a single amendment vote.”
The HASC has been the GE-RR engine’s biggest bastion of support, and Gates the engine’s chief opposition. McKeon said his staff director learned about the Pentagon’s decision in a telephone call March 23 from Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief.
Congress is in recess until early next week and many lawmakers are in their home districts and states.
The Republican-run House voted to end funding for the engine earlier this year in a bill that would fund the Pentagon for the year. That piece of legislation, however, has not passed in the Senate.
And top senators on the Armed Services Committee, including ranking Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) are backing Gates. “In these times of fiscal constraint, the Department of Defense cannot waste funding of any kind, much less the $1 million per day that is being spent on the second engine that Secretary Gates and our most senior Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps leaders say they don’t want and can’t afford,” McCain said.
In a statement from the Pentagon, defense officials explained that based on the passage of the House bill, along with the Obama administration’s opposition to the program, “we have concluded that a stop-work order is the correct course.
“The stop-work order will remain in place pending final resolution of the program’s future, for a period not to exceed 90 days, unless extended by agreement of the government and the contractor,” according to the statement.
A move by Gates to stop work on the engine would seem to deal the program a fatal blow, but GE said it would continue to fight to provide the Pentagon with an alternative to the Pratt Whitney F135 engine.
“We are fully committed to delivering a better engine for the F-35 program, and have no intention of abandoning the warfighter and taxpayers,” said spokesman Rick Kennedy. “We will not walk away from a $3 billion taxpayer investment and your hard work to deliver what the Senate has called a ‘near model program.’”
Kennedy told Aviation Week that “all bets are off.” He said without a bill in place, lawmakers still have work to do to reconcile funding for the rest of fiscal 2011. GE and RR were encouraged to self-fund by members of Congress who, like McKeon, said, “It’s not over yet.”
Still, working Congress to circumvent the Pentagon’s decision is likely a long-shot. Congress would have to force the program to be recreated in what is already an anti-earmark environment. Although top Democrats, including Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and SASC Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), are generally supportive of producing two engines, strong opposition remains. Last year, the Senate voted to strip funding for the GE engine from an early version of the annual defense authorization bill.
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