Appropriators beef up Navy budget for new network
By
Bob Brewin
Senate panel adds $217.7 million to boost project to replace Navy Marine Corps Intranet.
The Senate Appropriations Committee made a sizable down payment on the Navy's Next-Generation Enterprise Network, but cut funds for a key Army battlefield network project in the omnibus appropriations bill the panel approved on Tuesday.
The detailed, line-item budget in the 950-page "Explanatory Statement" published in the Congressional Record to accompany the omnibus bill shows a recommended transfer of $217.7 million in the Navy's operations and maintenance funds from other accounts to finance the startup of NGEN, a project that will replace by 2014 the decade-old Navy Marine Corps Intranet contract held by HP Enterprise Services, formerly Electronic Data Systems.
NMCI currently serves more than 700,000 Navy and Marine personnel via a network serving more than 370,000 PCs in the continental United States, Hawaii and Japan. NGEN will replace the sole NMCI contract HP holds with five separate contracts valued by industry sources at $14.5 billion over 10 years.
The Navy's new shipboard network, the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services, did not fare as well as NGEN in the Senate committee's omnibus bill, with its budget chopped $24.1 million from the requested $34.4 million to $10.3 million, as the Navy asked for larger budget before it was needed. The Senate panel also recommended $44.6 million for the CANES research and development budget -- a $19 million decrease from the president's proposed figure of $63.6 million -- due primarily to contract delays.
In addition, the Navy awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. competitive CANES prototype development contracts in March and will award a single contract for the fleetwide system next year.
The Senate panel also sliced $40 million from the overall procurement budget of the Army's Brigade Combat Team modernization project from the proposed figure of $176.5 million to $136.5 million. The Army intends to use this project to equip infantry battalions with high-speed networks and unmanned ground and air vehicles. The Senate fully funded the procurement of unmanned ground vehicles to tactical brigades.
The committee also shaved the Army's requested procurement budget for its current battlefield network, the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical by $26.0 million -- from $421.8 million to $395.8 million -- because of slow development of mobile satellite terminals.