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The U.S. House passed a $696.5 billion defense policy bill in a bipartisan vote on Friday, but it exceeds statutory budget caps, setting up a showdown.

The House’s version of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act now awaits Senate passage of its bill so the two can be reconciled. The Senate has yet to take up the $700-billion NDAA passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 28.

The House passed the bill 344-81, with 227 Republicans and 117 Democrats who voted yes and 8 Republicans and 73 Democrats who voted no.

The bill proposes $621.5 billion for the base budget and $75 billion in the wartime Overseas Contingency Operations account. Of that amount, $10 billion is allocated to base budget items.

The bill adds $21 billion of $31 billion in DoD-requested weapons programs left unfunded by the White House budget request.

HASC Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, argued a need to augment the military in the face of global threats and to repair damage wrought by years of defense budget in stability.

“We’ve done deep damage to our military because of the budget cuts, the continuing resolutions, the erratic nature of funding over the last few years,” Thornberry said. “Certainly, the members of our committee who go out and actually talk to the people who serve have heard, seen, witnessed firsthand airplanes that can't fly, ships that can't sail, training that has not gone on.”

But while HASC ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., lauded the bill, he said, “It’s going to be better” when Congress begins to make budgetary choices that consider domestic spending. The bill “really doesn’t make choices” and is “in jeopardy” because it exceeds budget caps by $72 billion.

Democrats have insisted on parity for increases in the defense and nondefense sides of the federal budget in recent years. To ease budget caps requires 60 votes in the Senate, a threshold Democrats are needed to meet, which has given them some leverage in budget negotiations.

Smith said there probably should be parity for defense and nondefense, but the parties could probably “negotiate around” an exact dollar-for-dollar match.

“But to simply gut the nondefense discretionary budget, to plus-up defense does not make this country safer,” Smith said, adding, “I care enough about national security that I would raise taxes to pay for it.”

The House Rules Committee sent over 200 amendments to the floor this week — more than ever before for an NDAA, according to Thornberry.

The Republican-led House Rules Committee received more than 400 proposed amendments but screened out many that — depending on your point of view — were nongermane to the bill or would have led to floor fights the GOP did not want.

Language to establish a new standalone military branch for space survived over the objections of the White House, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and U.S. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, who mounted an appeal to lawmakers to drop it.

However, it would have to be reconciled with Senate’s NDAA language that proposes not a Space Corps, but a position of chief information warfare officer who oversees military cyber and space policies. The Senate bill would also require the chief of Air Force Space Command see a six-year term.

House Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who argue reorganizing the U.S. Air Force is necessary to catch up to Russia and China, prevailed in a procedural fight. The House Rules Committee did not advance an amendment to strip the Space Corps language spearheaded by House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio.

The House on Thursday rejected an amendment to strip NDAA language prohibiting a new round of military base closures. California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock's Base Realignment and Closure amendment failed 175-248.

The House also narrowly voted down a Republican proposal to bar the Pentagon from paying for gender-transition surgeries that may have cost Democratic support of the bill. It lost in a bipartisan vote, 209-214 — with 24 Republicans joining the minority.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., and proponents said her proposal would prioritize limited defense resources and bar troops from a class of procedures that would render them nondeployable.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., came to the floor with other Democrats to decry the measure as ignorant, discriminatory and mean-spirited. “This isn’t going to help readiness. This is a social agenda that has no place in this bill,” Smith said.

A proposal to block the U.S. sale of Lockheed Martin-made F-35 fighter jets to Turkey over an attack on protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington two months ago never made it out of the House Rules Committee. The amendment, from Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., was not debated on the House floor.

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Jura said:

LOL "more than 400 proposed amendments"

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bd popeye said:

These "op ed" folks

that dissect every word politicians , statesmen or who ever speak...make me ..yeesh....

They are just like Satan who came to "kill, steal and destroy".

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bd popeye said:

Nothing NEW here to see so let's all move along...Hopefully this year Congress can fully fund the US DoD...

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The

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on Thursday canceled an already overdue project with Northrop Grumman to develop a critical network upgrade it needs to conduct air operations, and counterterrorism and humanitarian missions.

The service “terminated the current Air Operations Center 10.2 contract with Northrop Grumman in order to more quickly develop and field AOC capabilities via an Agile DevOps process known as AOC Pathfinder,” said Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Emily Grabowski.

“The Air Force is working through funding options with Congress for the new approach,” she said in an email statement.

It was revealed in November that costs for the program surged from an original $374 million slated for the project to $745 million, Bloomberg News

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. The upgraded system in total was estimated to eventually climb to $3 billion, according to a report submitted to Congress in that month, Bloomberg said.

The technology is designed to enhance battlefield command and control in part by converting “raw data into actionable information that is used to direct battlefield activities,” according to

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from Northrop.

“AOCs are the nexus of combatant command theater-level air war planning and execution, and must remain effective in order to deliver air superiority to the joint force while ensuring cybersecurity, Grabowski said. “The airmen operating AOCs provide airpower on demand to troops on the ground, responding to battlefield needs and humanitarian crises the world over.”

Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, head of Air Force Material Command at

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, Ohio, said Friday the service still plans to maintain elements of the program for future endeavors.

“There are elements of it that we will be able to use as we go forward,” she told audiences during an Air Force Association breakfast in Washington, D.C. “I don’t have all the details as to what all the money was spent on, but not all of it is going to be completely thrown away.”

Pawlikowski’s speech focused on the increased need for agility in software systems.

She continued, “I don’t even want to call it a program — that capability that we’re trying to get into, the AOC that 10.2 represented is one of the key drivers to tackling these issues.”

When asked how the cancellation would roll back the service’s efforts, Pawlikowski said, “Not at all. Because remember, the requirements are still there. So I have the opportunity to get after those requirements using an agile software development construct as opposed to a traditional, ‘OK, I have this [program] here that’s going to cost a bazillion dollars that’s going to take this amount of time,’ ” she said. “We’re going to start to get after those requirements.”

The Air Force said that Pathfinder’s approach implements industry “best practices” by allowing airmen to communicate software requirements directly to the developers throughout the life of the system, among other attributes.

“AOC modernization through a truly open systems approach will significantly reduce life cycle costs and enable the Air Force’s future operational concepts,” Mike Twyman, vice president and general manager of the Defense Systems division for Northrop Grumman Information Systems, said in 2013.

The AOC team consists of personnel from the AOC System Program Office, Air Force and Defense Digital Service, and Defense Unit Experimental, or DIUx, who work together to understand and apply commercial industry insight and best practices to the Defense Department acquisition process.

“The team will replace manual stakeholder processes with software automation to satisfy requirements, to the greatest extent possible,” Grabowski said.

How the Air Force plans to preserve the aspects of the program through this process is still being determined.

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The Air Force is working to change the way it develops new software through several pathfinder programs that are focused on business and logistics systems, Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, said Friday.

These efforts, similar to the one just announced for the

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, will seek to demonstrate the service’s ability to abandon traditional Pentagon systems engineering methods and embrace commercial software development processes, known as “agile software development,” Pawlikowski told the audience at an AFA Mitchell Institute event in Washington D.C.

Pawlikowski said she began to see the need for change when she led the Space and Missile Systems Center from 2011-2014. At SMC, key software development programs for the next-generation GPS ground-control system (OCX) and the Joint Space Operations Center mission system were plagued by “cost overruns,” “delays,” and a history of “ineffectiveness,” she said.

The problem is a serious one because while “software is at the heart of most of what we do,” Pawlikowski said the Air Force continues to prioritize hardware development on major weapons systems—leaving software development as an afterthought. But in the multi-domain command and control (MD2C) warfare of the future, speed of networking and decision-making will be decisive, she said, and a responsive, agile software development process will be indispensible.

But the traditional Pentagon systems engineering process is not setup to produce new and updated software with speed. A typical milestone, like the preliminary design review, “doesn’t make very much sense” in the software development process, Pawlikowski said. Also the Pentagon testing regime puts barriers between coders and operators that prevent quick adjustment of software capabilities to on-the-ground needs.

The Air Force’s software process is also slowed-down by requiring four-star generals to authorize changes. To get faster, the service needs to push decision-making authority further down the chain of command, Pawlikowski said.

“Empowering two and three stars” and “even a lower level than that” to authorize changes to software systems would help, she said. “We hold on to stuff too long” in the Air Force, creating a situation where operators have to “figure out how to connect a dinosaur to a jet plane.” Completely jettisoning old systems faster will make it easier to develop software solutions for the equipment the Air Force is using.

She also called out SMC in particular for maintaining “a zero risk tolerance culture.” She recalled her time as commander there, when she “didn’t want to be the first SMC commander” to have a National Security Space mission fail. But she said a willingness to take on more risk is crucial to getting the service up to speed on software.

Finally, Pawlikowski said software development is often impeded by confusion over funding streams, with program managers uncertain whether a software upgrade should fall under research and development or operations and management money. This “color of money” problem could be solved, she said, if the Pentagon had specifically designated “software development money.”

Organizationally, Pawlikowski said the Air Force is working to develop “software teams” that can integrate into squadrons and bring coders and operators closer together. In some cases, she said the Air Force might even need to develop “software squadrons.”

She also suggested that the Pentagon needs to “think about how we define a weapons system” in order to raise the profile of software development in relation to hardware components.

The pathfinder efforts in business and logistics systems will precede more complicated work on software problems like an “operational flight profile,” Pawlikowski said, where the risk is greater and mistakes could lead to “losing an airplane.”

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Navy Lays Groundwork for Triton Deployments to Guam

The Navy is establishing a launch-and-recovery detachment for the MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in Guam to handle the aircraft’s first overseas deployment.

According to a Navy directive, the service’s first Triton squadron, Unmanned Patrol Squadron 19 (VUP-19) will set up Launch and Recovery Detachment Seven at Anderson Air Base in Guam. The detachment, which will be established on Aug. 1, will support the early operational capability of the MQ-4C when it deploys to Guam in 2018.

VUP-19, headquartered at Naval Air Station (NAS) Jacksonville, Fla., will rotate personnel to Detachment Seven from its maintenance detachment at NAS Point Mugu, Calif., and its air crews from Jacksonville. The rotations will continue until VUP-11, to be established at NAS Whidbey Island, Wash., assumes the operation of deployments to Guam.

The Navy is on track to deploy the Triton operationally from five sites worldwide in orbits that will provide surveillance of the world’s oceans.

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