Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee - Air Force Strategic Initiatives

Statement

Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee - Air Force Strategic Initiatives

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REP. RICK LARSEN (D-WA): Mr. Secretary and General, thanks for coming, helping us out today.

General, you are somewhat apologetic in what you profess is your inability to communicate to folks like us the need for the flexibility in order to manage your platforms the way you need to do that. And I'm with you on it. I wrote down something. Maybe you need just a more pithy, that is, we are forcing you to choose between requirements and retirement. And that is essentially what we are doing; we're forcing you to make that choice in a budget context that is very restrictive for you as well. And perhaps if we focused more on helping you meet your requirements and less on preventing retirement of platforms we could have easier conversation with the Air Force.

Secretary Wynne, just a quick note. I want to just review what I heard earlier in response to Mr. Everett's questions about the KCX. You said you hoped the KCX decision will be in January, '08, so it's not going to be this calendar year?

SEC. WYNNE: I tried very hard to retain it. But in response to our inquiries, the contractors did a superb job of responding to us, and in some depth, and that's what caused us to miss the interim milestones. And bless their hearts, I know they're working their butt off, and I want to give them fair treatment.

REP. LARSEN: And fair treatment is going to be important. Do you -- do you however, do you yet anticipate that the phase one of the buy will be an all or nothing, that is, that it won't be a split procurement? Do you at least anticipate that?

SEC. WYNNE: Yes, sir, I do now.

REP. LARSEN: You do now anticipate that it will be an all or nothing, phase one?

SEC. WYNNE: Phase one.

REP. LARSEN: Yeah, sure. Okay. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about something other than airplanes. So you recently found, I assume, or I heard, that the Air Force recently some additional problems in the SBIRS systems, and released a memo with a cost estimate of a billion dollars to solve that problem.

Have you identified the problems and the mitigation effort?

SEC. WYNNE: The problem is in the software integration. It is as a result of a lesson learned from a current flyer, and it is a problem of fail safe. In other words one of the satellites that is in fact in orbit could not fail in a safe mode and so it had to be taken offline.

We think the same software is in the SBIRS. It is a very fragile architecture, and we need to take some time so we don't essentially break the architecture trying to fix what I consider to be a relatively easy problem. That having been said, I can tell you that because of the marching army that associates with the satellite, once it's in construction you have to keep it going, and that's where the money comes from, and it pushes the entire program out.

So it is my -- I mean, reach for how bad could this get. It is not an estimate that I would be proud of, and I'm hoping that by the November 7th meeting with the undersecretary of AT&L we have a much better handle on it.

REP. LARSEN: So the $1 billion estimate is an estimate, and you are trying to work that --

SEC. WYNNE: Down.

REP. LARSEN: -- that number down?

SEC. WYNNE: Yes, sir.

REP. LARSEN: And the problem -- I don't want to get into too much detail, but as I understand it, and the problem you've identified is a software problem that you found in a current satellite --

SEC. WYNNE: Right.

REP. LARSEN: -- that could be in -- that will be in SBIRS, and you want to be sure you fix that in SBIRS as you move forward.

SEC. WYNNE: Yes, sir.

REP. LARSEN: Okay, that's understandable. So do you -- by November 7th, then, will you have an idea on the schedule then, the impact on the schedule?

SEC. WYNNE: Yes, sir. That's our forecast for the undersecretary is to come to him with an impact to cost and schedule, and -- which we hope to be robust.

REP. LARSEN: Okay. Can you at that point then get back to us on what costs -- what the impact of costs and schedule will be?

SEC. WYNNE: Yes, sir, I'm pretty sure he'll put out an ADM. You'll be able to do that.

REP. LARSEN: Okay, all right. Good. That's fine, then, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. And thank the gentlemen.

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