The CBS program '60 Minutes' gave the United States a wake-up call tonight with its broadcast about China's development of weapons to use against U.S. military satellites. This intersects with several linked recent and ongoing defense procurement scandals involving military space purchases.
This week, the House Armed Services Committee is writing its 2015 defense spending authorization bill. Its strategic forces subcommittee just wrote its portion. This subcommittee certainly knows the problems '60 Minutes' highlighted. At a recent hearing, the commander of the Strategic Command, Admiral Cecil Haney, testified, "we've seen very disturbing trends in space, particularly from nation states like China, as well as Russia, who have been public about their counterspace endeavors and ambitions."
But, when the strategic forces subcommittee, and the other House defense subcommittees, wrote their bill portions, space weapon spending had to get in line behind an unsorted orgy of spending on other pet House Republican defense programs. Moreover, these subcommittees did not look for "pay-fors" to make cuts in unneeded and wasteful defense programs to put funds into real needs like the ones '60 Minutes' highlighted.
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said after the strategic forces subcommittee bill markup, "I'm a little worried that we don't know where our add money is coming from," and "I'm even more worried we don't seem to care a whole lot where it's coming from."
Simultaneously, the seapower subcommittee wrote its bill, with its chairman, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), adding more money than the Navy itself requested, funding the overhaul of an aircraft carrier, a three-year task estimated at $4 billion. Rep. Forbes comes, coincidentally, from the Hampton Roads area, home to the
House Republicans do have a budget solution: take off the budget spending caps for defense -- but not for domestic spending like food stamps.
Furthermore, that is not the only relevant procurement scandal. The anti-satellite threat highlighted on '60 Minutes' comes both from China and Russia. Yet the U.S. space program is dependent for heavy lift rockets on a monopoly provider,
There is a potential new entrant in the field, billionaire Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp.( SpaceX.) Trying to shift contracts to SpaceX is a very slow process. Boeing and Lockheed Martin's lobbying muscle probably does not make the process of standing up competition to Russian monopoly rocket engines, particularly faster or easier.
The chair of the strategic forces subcommittee is Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama. Coincidentally, the ULA's main production facility is in Decatur, Alabama. He does not think so well of SpaceX. He seems to prefer the ULA, which is using the Russian rocket engine. The NASA Watch website had an insightful article this week, entitled "Rep. Rogers Hates Everything Russian - Except Russian Rocket Engines."
One last related scandal: Reuters broke, some months ago, the story of how Russia sells its rocket engine in the United States through a shadowy middleman, which was marking up the price. Reuters had gotten its hands on a secret audit by the Defense Contract Audit Agency. The audit found the middleman was marking up the engine prices by 30%, which, of course, the U.S. taxpayer pays.
I was interviewed for the Reuters story, by the investigative team of Brian Grow, Stephen Grey and Roman Anin, and I told them that the audit, which was unusually blunt and critical, showed that the middleman was taking U.S. taxpayers to the cleaners.
