Defense Cuts Coming, Gates Testifies

WASHINGTON -- Defense spending, particularly for expensive new weapons such as the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship and the F-35 fighter, is going down and the Obama administration is preparing to make hard choices to end programs that exceed their budgets, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

"The spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing," Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

The demands of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the nation's economic crisis, require military planners to separate "those things that are desirable from those things that are truly needed" in the way of new weapons, Gates added.

He suggested that the new administration will avoid across-the-board spending reductions, "which inefficiently extend all programs," and will try to save money by eliminating unneeded programs.

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The secretary did not signal which programs he has in mind, but said the cuts will begin in the administration's 2010 defense budget proposal. That plan is expected to be released this spring.

Some of the Pentagon's most costly new weapons are being developed by the Navy, including the new Ford class of aircraft carriers -- being built at Northrop Grumman's Newport News shipyard -- and the DDG-1000 destroyer.

The initial Ford carrier is projected to cost nearly $14 billion, more than double the cost of ships in the former Nimitz class. Navy officials say costs will drop to around $8 billion per hull with subsequent ships.

The carrier program has subcontractors in more than 40 states, creating a built-in constituency in Congress. But the high cost of the ships, and continuing questions among some lawmakers about whether the Navy needs the 11-carrier fleet now set by federal law, could make the carrier program an attractive target for the new administration's cost-cutting.

The Navy announced plans last summer to stop production of the DDG-1000 destroyers, which cost more than $3 billion each, after just two ships; officials agreed to a third ship after protests from lawmakers in New England states where the ships are being designed and built.

Another Navy program, the Littoral Combat Ship, has been wracked by cost overruns, with the cost per hull rising from around $250 million to more than $500 million. Even with those increases, the new ship would be the service's most economical surface vessel.