Senate panel approves $675B Pentagon spending bill

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday easily passed its $675 billion Pentagon spending bill for fiscal 2019.

The committee approved the bill 30-1, with the only no vote coming from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

The bill would provide $607.1 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget and $67.9 billion for a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) account.

{mosads}The funding level represents a $20.4 billion increase over the Pentagon’s fiscal 2018 enacted level.

The bill makes research and development a focus, with a $95 billion research and development budget that would be the largest in the Pentagon’s history.

The bill would make investments in a number of advanced technologies, including $929 million for hypersonics, $308 million for artificial intelligence and $317 million for the directed energy.

“[Defense Secretary James] Mattis has warned us that failure to modernize our military risks leaving us with a force that could dominate the last war, but be irrelevant to tomorrow’s security,” committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said. “These investments I believe are needed in order for our military to maintain its technological superiority.”

The money also would go toward giving troops a 2.6 percent pay raise. It would also boost active-duty and reserve force levels by 6,961 troops.

The bill would also provide $24 billion for Navy shipbuilding, funding the construction of 13 new ships. That includes two Virginia-class submarines, three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two littoral combat ships.

The spending bill also has $42.2 billion for aviation procurement, including 89 F-35 fighter jets, or 12 more than the Pentagon requested. Those 12 extra, for which $1.2 billion would be allocated, would be split between eight F-35Cs for the Navy and four F-35Bs for the Marine Corps.

The bill would also give $10.5 billion to the Missile Defense Agency, including $100 million for the development of a space-based Missile Defense Tracking System to detect conventional ballistic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles.

Though the bill garnered bipartisan support, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), ranking member of the committee’s defense subpanel, reiterated his concerns that a cumbersome procurement process is wasting money. 

“I have asked at several hearings how it is we can be falling behind on military technology to a country like Russia with a military budget of $80 billion a year and a gross domestic product smaller than the state of New York,” he said. “One reason is we spend too much on bureaucracy and redundancy and a procurement process which is clearly broken and wasteful.”

Updated at 12:16 p.m.