HASC Rejects Base Closure, F-35 Restrictions During NDAA Markup

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/06/05/hasc-rejects-base-closure-f-35-restrictions-during-ndaa-markup/



Amendments stack up on the desks of House Armed Services Committee members at their markup of the 2014 defense bill.

HASC Rejects Base Closure, F-35 Restrictions During NDAA Markup
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 05, 2013 at 5:12 PM

[updated with final results] CAPITOL HILL: Bipartisan majorities in the House Armed Services Committee have steamrollered proposals to slow down the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and to permit the Pentagon to plan for base closures, but reformers at least made a respectable run at the windmill during markup of fiscal year 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“The one and only rule is, ‘my district can’t be reduced by anything,’ (which means)] we wind up paralyzed,” said HASC’s most senior Democrat, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, in a characteristically acerbic moment. With the $52 billion-a-year cuts known as sequestration in the offing, he said, “I don’t think this committee has the luxury to be so darn parochial anymore.”

The HASC vote came one day after nine think tanks banded together in large part of convince Congress that it must accept a round of “base closure and realignment,” or BRAC. One expert at the Capitol HIll gathering, Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that Congress must consider closing bases in the United States, where the Pentagon estimates it has 20 percent excess capacity. Eaglen cautioned against the trend on Capitol Hill to call for first closing foreign bases, which, of course, don’t have lots of congressional constituents. “It’s a nice convenient thing. It plays well at home,” she said, “but it’s terribly destructive.” In a budgetary “war game” played by the think tanks, she said, they had actually added money for overseas bases.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter vote demonstrated how powerful domestic constituencies can be. It’s backed by the three armed services that buy jets — albeit with different degrees of enthusiasm from the Marines (most pro-F-35) to the Navy (least) — and it supports jobs in 47 states. So the surprise isn’t that 51 committee members from both parties voted against Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth’s amendment to slow the program until the next installment of its complex software is “fully verified and tested.” The surprise was that nine other members joined Duckworth in voting “aye,” actually breaking (barely) into double digits.