Since fiscal 2018, Congress has added $1.6 billion to the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding and conversion accounts for warship line items, including the -class attack submarines, to ramp up production through shipyard upgrades and workforce additions.
That approach often is the one taken for munitions, if congressional appropriators don’t allow multi-year procurements in fiscal 2024 for munitions or significantly cut such requests, comparable to those for the AGM-158B U.S. Air Force Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Prolonged Range (JASSM-ER), AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM).
Lockheed Martin [LMT] makes JASSM-ER and LRASM, while Raytheon Technologies [RTX] builds the AMRAAM.
Section 3501 of U.S. Code Title 10 provides that congressional appropriators, and a further legislative act apart from appropriations, must authorize MYPs of $500 million or more. Last yr within the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), legislators, eying DoD’s stated have to counter China and the drawdown of DoD stocks to support Ukraine, took a preemptive step toward easing munition MYPs.
Section 1244c of the fiscal 2023 NDAA waived the requirement for certain munitions that DoD show legislators significant cost savings would result from an MYP before Congress authorized the MYP. The section allowed MYPs starting in fiscal 2023 for five,100 AMRAAMs, 3,100 JASSMs, and 950 LRASMs. Section 1244c also allowed MYPs for 864,000 155mm rounds for the U.S. Army; 12,000 Army AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Ground missiles by Lockheed Martin; 700 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) by Lockheed Martin; 1,700 MGM–140 Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) by Lockheed Martin; 2,600 Navy Harpoon missiles by Boeing [BA]; 1,250 Naval Strike Missiles by Kongsberg; 106,000 Army Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) by Lockheed Martin; 3,850 PATRIOT Advanced Capability–3 (PAC–3) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) systems by Lockheed Martin; 5,600 FIM–92 Army Stinger missiles by Raytheon; and 28,300 Army FGM–148 Javelins by Raytheon.
Defense officials this yr have said that they imagine the munition MYPs are needed to ramp up production. The officials have mostly not focused on the associated fee savings related to MYPs–cost savings that the Congressional Research Service has estimated customarily range from five to fifteen percent.
House appropriators were fully aware of last yr’s NDAA provisions to waive certain requirements for authorizing MYPs, however the committee’s leadership, including Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), the chair of the defense panel, maintains that projected, significant cost savings are a critical a part of MYP authorization, a congressional staffer said.
The panel authorized five of the seven MYP requests for fiscal 2024 but didn’t support the AMRAAM MYP authorization, because the AMRAAM program of record ends in fiscal 2027 and the panel contends that the AMRAAM unit cost has been inconsistent.
Along with not acceding to the AMRAAM MYP authorization request, the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel didn’t support MYP authorization for the Navy SM-6 missile by Raytheon due to Raytheon’s “serious performance issues on their last multiyear,” the staffer said. In fiscal 2019, the Navy received MYP authority to purchase 625 SM-6s over five years. The multi-year resulted in fiscal 2023, and Raytheon only delivered 138 of the 438 SM-6s under contract, the staffer said.
The debt ceiling agreement puts an $886 billion fiscal 2024 cap on defense. The Senate, nonetheless, may propose an emergency supplemental funding bill with MYP munition adds.
A fiscal 2024 Continuing Resolution wouldn’t allow Pentagon MYPs to proceed unless already authorized in an NDAA and a defense appropriations act, the staffer said.