Yesterday, I discussed how munitions procurement funding changed between the President’s Budget request, Congressional enactment, and actual execution. Today, I want to briefly touch on year-to-year stability of actual funding execution for particular missile and ammunition accounts. Since a single munition can draw from multiple budget lines, or they change designation, I mapped them all to parent identifications.
For example, Sidewinder missile lines are named: Sidewinder, Sidewinder (AIM-9X), and Sidewinder Mods. These may technically be different models or mods vs. all up round, but I bucketed them together for an enterprise view.
I looked at 80 missile and ammunition accounts that had significant year-to-year purchases between FY 2001 and FY 2021, and only looked at the “Actual” funding in the P-1 docs (i.e., not looking at request or enactment).
If we look at the absolute value of year-to-year percentage change in procurement dollars, and take the median change for each munition, the average across 33 missile types was a 62 percent change. The figure for 47 ammunition types was 53 percent. In other words, a particular munition’s actual funding is likely to swing more than 50 percent every year!
Let’s break that down another way. For both missile systems and ammunition, 19 percent of the time there are funding increases greater than 100 percent — a doubling of funding over the prior year. Then, 17 percent of the time, the missile or ammunition’s funding gets cut in half over the previous year (decreases by 50 percent). More than one-third of the time, these accounts are either doubled or cut in half relative to the previous year. And more than 70 percent of the time, the accounts swing by more than 25 percent (up or down). Compare that to the total munitions procurement accounts, which on average swing about 10 percent a year.
But maybe these swings are due to contracting issues and production issues, so actually the plants are more stable than the funding makes the seem. Similarly, some accounts may have rational ramp-up and ramp-downs. For example, the AGM-129 ramped up to $10 million in FY 2004, then ramped down under $1 million in FY 2007. But the high volatility even occurs in recurring buys like the AMRAAM, Sidewinder, JSOW, Hellfire, .50 caliber, JDAM, 155MM, 30MM, 40MM, Hydra 70, and so forth. This logical “ramp-up and ramp-down” is rarely seen.
In certain cases, you see fits or starts and stops. AGM-84E SLAM, for example, took a procurement break in FY 2005-2006, then came back for one year, then on break again FY 2008 to FY 2017 before starting the line back up for three years before getting zeroed out yet again in FY 2021. The MGM-140 ATACMS line stopped between FY 2009 and FY 2013, back in procurement one year for FY 2014, stopped again until FY 2020 with a massive $1 billion order. HIMARS took a production hiatus between FY 2014 and FY 2017, got back into it for a couple years, zeroed out in FY 2020, and then came back again. This volatility at the munition level was far more severe than experienced at the top-line level for these budget activities. The Budget Control Act in the early 2010s seems to have played a role in the missiles and ammunitions accounts as tough choices had to be made, but is not the only explanation.
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