Incoming House Armed Services Committee chair Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) accused military industrial complex critics of failing to grasp “our constitutional system.”
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, Thornberry said that Congress favoring appropriations over Pentagon wishes in recent years has derived from a straightforward difference of opinion and not “some donor, or some lobbyist, or some parochial interest.”
He specifically brought up legislative pushes to allocate more money to the M1 Abrams tank program–financing that the Department of Defense did not want or need, it repeatedly stated.
“Here’s the reality,” he said. “We made a judgment call.”
Thornberry claimed that, at the time of the decision-making, in 2013, there was “one plant in the country left that makes tanks.” He said some lawmakers didn’t believe the Army when it stated exports would keep the Lima, Ohio facility running until it needed more armored vehicles near the end of the decade.
“The House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and the House and Senate Armed Services Committees went through all of their arguments and believed that their math didn’t add up,” he recalled.
“We decided to start upgrading our tanks earlier than the army had planned to make sure that the plant stayed open, to make sure that the trained workforce stayed engaged, and tanks would get fielded sooner,” Thornberry added.
As the Associated Press pointed out amid this fight, outside experts questioned the logic of Thornberry and his allies in Congress.
Steven Grundman, an industry expert at the Atlantic Council, told the AP that idling the workforce in Lima would not leave the US vulnerable. A former deputy undersecretary of defense, Grundman said that according to “the fairly insular world in which the defense industry operates, these capabilities seem to be unique and in many cases extraordinarily high art.”
“But in the greater scope of the economy, they tend not to be,” he said.
Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno also, at the time, told the wire service that it wouldn’t spend what Congress was asking it to spend on M-1s, “if we had our choice.”
Thornberry remained undeterred, however. He also claimed Tuesday that the army’s decision last month to send 100 M-1 Abrams tanks to Europe because of fighting in Ukraine “is evidence we made the right call.”
At the time of the armored vehicle disute, the US military had roughly 2,400 tanks in its fleet, according to the AP.
“Why are the tank dollars still flowing?” the wire service asked 21 months ago. “Politics.”
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, last election cycle, Rep. Thornberry received over $327,900 in campaign donations from the defense industry–a sum amounting to slightly more than one-fifth of his re-election financing haul.
