House Panel Votes to Require AF to Consider F-20s
The House Armed Services Committee voted in closed session Wednesday to require the Air Force to give serious consideration to buying Northrop Corp.’s F-20 fighter jet in fiscal 1986 instead of waiting until the following year.
As the committee completed its work on a $304-billion 1986 defense bill, it also agreed to slash President Reagan’s request for 48 MX missiles to 21 next year. The overall committee budget allows for a 4% increase over 1985 to account for inflation; Reagan had been seeking $313 billion, a 5.9% increase beyond inflation. The current fiscal year’s defense budget is $292.5 billion.
At the same time, members of both the House and Senate unveiled a variety of new proposals designed to stimulate competition among defense contractors. Sen. David Pryor (D-Ark.), co-sponsor of one measure, said they were designed to end what he described as “unprecedented war profiteering in peace time.”
Competition Urged
Rep. Jim Courter (R-N.J.), who attended the Armed Services Committee meeting, said the panel voted 28 to 15 in favor of a proposal he co-sponsored with Rep. G. William Whitehurst (R-Va.) to require the Air Force to establish competition between the F-20 and General Dynamics’ F-16 in the next fiscal year.
Earlier, the Air Force had agreed under pressure from Congress to consider buying the F-20 in fiscal 1987 but it had ruled out consideration of the plane next year. Courter described the committee action as a victory for proponents of the F-20, and a Northrop spokesman at the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles hailed it as a “major step” toward the eventual sale of some planes to the Air Force.
Roughly Comparable
Although the F-20 is roughly comparable to the F-16, the Air Force never has demonstrated interest in buying the Northrop planes. In its 1986 budget request, the Pentagon requested approval to purchase 180 F-16s at a cost of $19 million each. The House committee earlier trimmed that request to 150 F-16s.
But advocates of the F-20 argued that the Air Force should consider buying some of the Northrop planes, particularly because the company recently offered to sell 396 of them to the government at a reduced cost of $15 million each.
Courter said each F-20 not only would cost $4 million less than an F-16 to purchase but also would cost $1 million less per year to maintain. As a result, he said, the total cost of an F-20 is roughly half the cost of an F-16 over the lives of the two fighters.
Although the committee accepted the Courter-Whitehurst proposal to promote competition between the two fighter jets, it refused to order the Air Force to buy any F-20s. According to Courter, the committee voted 32 to 11 against his proposal to require the Pentagon to buy 24 F-20s in fiscal 1986, but he said he may revive the measure when the bill comes up for consideration on the House floor.
During the committee’s consideration of the MX, according to Courter, it limited the number of missiles to be produced in 1986 to 21. But it rejected a proposal by Rep. Nicholas Mavroules (D-Mass.) that would have prohibited the total deployment of more than 40 of the missiles.
42 Approved
Reagan’s long-range MX strategy calls for deploying 100 of the controversial missiles and producing another 123 of them for replacement and testing. So far, however, Congress has approved the production of only 42.
The F-20 vote reflected a growing sentiment in Congress to introduce more competition in the Pentagon’s selection of contractors. On Wednesday, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) estimated that only 5% of the current defense purchases are subject to competitive bidding.
Along with several House members, Grassley and Pryor unveiled a bill that would require the Pentagon to open all major purchases to competitive bidding--except in cases where the Congress specifically approved of “sole source” contracts.
The bill also tries to limit cost overruns by requiring contractors to cover the cost of repairing or replacing defective goods. In addition, it seeks to halt the so-called “revolving door” by prohibiting Pentagon procurement personnel from accepting jobs with defense contractors whose work they have supervised in the previous five years.
$10,000 Fine
A similar measure unveiled Wednesday by Reps. Charles E. Bennett (D-Fla.) and Bill Nichols (D-Ala.) would impose a $10,000 fine or a one-year jail term on defense procurement workers who go to work directly for a contractor.
California Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), a co-sponsor of the Grassley-Pryor measure, said his constituents favor such measures--even though his home district includes an estimated 60,000 defense workers. He said 92% of the people in his district who responded to a recent survey viewed wasteful defense spending as “a serious problem.”
pentagon bars F-20 froim military open house. Part IV, Page 2.
