Mike Levin: “the Armed Services Committee conducted an exhaustive examination of the proposed missile defense budget request. We held…”

“the Armed Services Committee conducted an exhaustive examination of the proposed missile defense budget request. We held two strategic subcommittee hearings on missile defense under Senator Reed's leadership. We reviewed 400 pages of missile defense budget documentation, participated in more than 25 hours of staff briefings by the Department of Defense. Based on that exhaustive review, the committee recommended funding the vast majority of the Department's missile defense request, an amount that is sufficient to aggressively fund all the specific systems that the Department wants to develop. At the same time, the committee identified roughly $810 million of the missile defense request--about 11 percent--that the Department did not justify, after a detailed review of available documentation and repeated hearings and briefings. For example, the budget request included $1.1 billion in the ballistic missile defense program element, an increase of $258 million over the current funding level. The major purpose of this program element is to develop integrated architecture ballistic missile defense systems. While this is an important goal, most of the systems that will comprise the ballistic missile defense architecture are years away from being deployed, making the development and definition of a detailed BMD architecture impossible at this point.”