Air Force Magazine – House appropriators want to pull more than $200 million from a key missile warning satellite program in fiscal 2020 and are linking it to the future of the Pentagon’s new Space Development Agency, according to the report accompanying the House Appropriations Committee’s version of the 2020 defense spending bill.
The Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared program’s execution raises questions among lawmakers who are concerned about its steep uptick in proposed funding for 2020. The Air Force requested $1.4 billion for OPIR in 2020, three-quarters of a billion dollars above the 2019 spending level. HAC would shrink that to $1.2 billion, in its fiscal 2020 spending bill, which the committee approved with a vote of 30 to 22 on May 21.
Appropriators called out the Air Force’s “strategy of relying on significant reprogramming requests to keep the program on schedule,” according to the report, and questioned whether rapid prototyping is the right approach. OPIR will replace the Space-Based Infrared System.
“The Department of Defense lacks a comprehensive long-term architecture for overhead persistent infrared which integrates the requirements and capabilities across the military user community, to include integration of missile defense and hypersonic defense capabilities,” the report states. “The committee views the current [OPIR] Block 0 program as an important interim step to a currently undefined, but much needed, future comprehensive OPIR architecture.”
