House Lawmaker Brings In GAO To Referee Abrams Tank Plant Debate

InsideDefense.com
March 19, 2012


House Lawmaker Brings In GAO To Referee Abrams Tank Plant Debate

A senior House lawmaker has enlisted the Government Accountability Office to enter the debate on the Army's plans to mothball the only Abrams tank plant in America.

"We're asking GAO to do the best they can in 30 days to advise us," Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) told Inside the Army in a March 16 interview. "We think they will have something meaningful for us in that time frame."

Senior Army leaders, citing fiscal reasons, have steadfastly stood by their plans to temporarily shut down an Abrams plant in Lima, OH, until the beginning of scheduled tank modernization work in 2017. Service officials say it would be less expensive to shut down the plant and re-start it than to pay to keep production lines "warm" until 2017.

But Abrams contractor General Dynamics Land Systems has complained that such a stall would result in lost industrial base expertise and eliminate countless subcontractor jobs.

Bartlett, the chairman of the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee, said he agrees with GDLS. "If we shut down that line, much of our industrial base -- these second- and third-tier subcontractors -- are just going to go away," he said. "We do not have the luxury in our country now of riding on a big industrial base. These people are going to get another job; they're going to lose their skills. We'd have an increasing number of our subcontractors shipping their stuff in from overseas somewhere."

Bartlett said GAO's analysis of the situation should arrive in time to inform the House's mark-up of the fiscal year 2013 defense budget authorization bill.

Army Secretary John McHugh has said it would take 70 tanks per year to sustain the Lima plant. Earlier this month he asserted that the Army's plan to shut down and restart the production would cost between $600 million and $800 million, while sustaining it at a build-rate of 70 annually would end up costing $3 billion.

"The cost analysis is that the closure costs far outweigh keeping it open," he told members of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee during a March 7 hearing.

Meanwhile, GDLS last week began pitching a compromise plan on Capitol Hill calling for lawmakers to insert more than $180 million in unrequested funding into the Army's FY-13 budget to pay for 33 Abrams M1A2 System Enhancement Packages, according to a GDLS presentation provided to Congress and obtained by ITA. The proposal also asks that lawmakers "include language requiring the Army to fully fund continued Abrams production at levels necessary to secure and retain other workload to bridge to Abrams modernization."

Bartlett said he was open to GDLS proposal and voiced doubts about the Army's Abrams numbers, especially considering how challenged the service has been in presenting its case. Hence, his tasking the GAO to study the issue.

Congressional sources have also criticized the Army's efforts to provide detailed and accurate information.

"There is no detailed, objective, transparent, reliable sensitivity analysis by anyone -- GD or Army -- with respect to what the true minimum sustainment requirement is for the plant," a Hill source said.

The Army has commissioned the RAND Corp. to study the issue and provide a detailed analysis. This comes after the service earlier requested the same thing of the Institute for Defense Analyses, but later terminated the study. It is also the second time the Army has asked RAND to look into the issue since the first study was deemed too vague, according to congressional sources.

According to Army spokesman Matthew Bourke, "the studies assessed different aspects of the [Lima plant]." The IDA study considered "cost-effective solutions for sustaining required industrial base capabilities during the production gap," while the RAND study "assessed the costs and benefits of stopping or continuing tank production," he wrote in a Feb. 17 email.

A House staffer told ITA the Army's newer RAND study won't even be done until this summer -- too late to be considered during the House Armed Services Committee's mark-up. The delay, according to the source, is partly due to the Army's ongoing force-mix analysis, which will determine how many vehicles the service needs and in which brigades they will reside.

"Congress does not have the benefit of seeing the force mix analysis; Congress does not have the benefit of seeing a detailed industrial base impact study," the source said. "I'm not saying who's fault it was, but what IDA produced wasn't what the Army thought they were going to get. So the Army goes to RAND and asks that they do a quick look at their numbers. RAND didn't go anywhere -- they just looked at the sheets that the Army gave and the sheets that GD gave. They didn't make any side visits. There was a lot of disclaimers in there that said they hadn't had time to really look at all this stuff."

As previously reported by ITA, the Army is working with GDLS to set up foreign military sales involving Saudi Arabia and Egypt that might sustain the Lima plant, and Bourke said last week that the service was "open to reviewing" GDLS' new 33-tank proposal.

But Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno has said the service has a state-of-the-art tank fleet and does not need any more upgrades. "The conundrum we have is that we don't need the tanks," he told House appropriators on March 7. "Our tank fleet is two-and-a-half-years-old on average now. It's been recapped, it's been reset, we're in good shape, and these are additional tanks that we don't need. So, that's the other problem we have in keeping this line open."

Odierno mentioned FMS as a possible answer. "We think that this could be a solution to us keeping the line open if we're successful," he said. "But again, it's not a done deal yet, and so there's still a lot of work that we have to do."

Bartlett said he doesn't think that the future of America's tank industrial base should rest on potential FMS deals. "There's no guarantee we're going to have enough military sales to keep the line open," he said.



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