Weapons that aren't ready dot Bush's war budget

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's proposed war budget includes many high-cost weapons that won't be operational for years, using a funding request aimed at supporting the troops to seek money for some of the Pentagon's favorite projects.

The president's war package seeks $400 million this year alone to fund a pair of F-35 fighters, even though the new model of plane won't be ready for combat until at least 2010. It also contains $74 million to begin designing a spy plane that won't be tested for two years.

In the war budget, the Pentagon listed the planes among the costs of "reconstituting the force" -- that is, replacing equipment lost in battle. The administration requested more than $51 billion in such replacement spending for the rest of this year and next. In 2005, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the price tag for replacing equipment lost in Iraq would be no more than $8 billion each year.

The war has escalated since the CBO estimate, but analysts say Bush's request strikes them as disproportionately high.

"There are a number of reasons to be suspicious" that programs requested as war spending may not go to the war, said Steve Kosiak , a defense budget specialist at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "Reconstitution costs have really jumped. That's a big question mark."

Pentagon officials stressed to Congress this week that the funding is needed to buy ammunition, communications gear, and other equipment in high demand in the field. They said the funds would also replace armored vehicles, helicopters, and other aircraft that have been lost.

Nonetheless, independent budget analysts expressed concern that the Pentagon is seeking extra dollars for non-Iraq-specific projects that have either spiraled in cost or are facing constraints in the regular defense budget. They said that only a handful of planes have been lost in the war and that the president's request goes well beyond replacing those aircraft.

For example, they said, only three F-16 fighters have crashed during the war, but the president is asking for a dozen F/A-18 fighter jets .

Other requests include 22 new C-130J Hercules cargo planes; seven new V-22 Osprey transport aircraft; and six copies of a new plane called the Growler that jams radar and that made its first test flight in August, according to Pentagon budget documents.

Some of the Pentagon documents sent to Congress this week to justify the war budget were labeled "shopping list."

Analysts raised particular concerns about the nearly $300 million requested for the problem-plagued Osprey, which has never been used in combat. Boeing has yet to deliver an operational version of aircraft, designed to take off vertically like a helicopter but fly like a plane.

The 2006 annual report by the Pentagon's top weapon evaluator said the Osprey remains plagued by "frequent part and system failures."

"They have a whole appropriation for the V-22 Osprey," said Laura Peterson , a senior policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense. "That is not something that has been deployed in theater before, so there is no reason for it to be included in a war budget."

The war budget includes at least one new program. The Pentagon is seeking $74 million for "design, development, integration, and testing" of the first "Global Observer," envisioned to be an unmanned spy plane with "long endurance."

The Pentagon plans to ask for funds for the project every year at least through 2013. Analysts say the proposal may have merit, but can't be justified as part of the war budget.

Some of the requests can be traced to a little-noted decision by the Pentagon last fall to expand the definition of war costs.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England told the military branches in November that they could request items that are needed for the wider global war on terrorism rather than merely the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many observers have said the definition is so broad that virtually every piece of the US arsenal could qualify.

The Pentagon's top budget official acknowledged this week that the military branches had more leeway in requesting war funds, but maintained that the final cut was selective.

"We did scrub quite a bit out of here," Tina Jonas , the Pentagon comptroller, told reporters Monday. "We did return to the services some of their ideas."

Still, fiscal conservatives and other Pentagon critics said far more scrutiny is required to determine if all the new procurements are legitimate war expenditures or should instead be included in the Pentagon's regular budget.

"Our soldiers knocking on doors in Baghdad don't have translators, but they want billions of dollars for high-tech weapons that are designed for the Cold War," said Senator Bernard Sanders , independent of Vermont and a member of the Senate Budget Committee, in an interview.

Others expressed concern that if the Pentagon is allowed to load up the war budget, it will leave more room in the regular budget for unnecessary expenses and pet projects -- including so-called congressional "earmarks" that benefit lawmakers' states and districts.

The new war funding "is as prone as ever to all the games and gimmicks the Congress has been exploiting for their own benefit," said Winslow Wheeler , a defense specialist at the nonpartisan Center for Defense Information in Washington and author of "The Wastrels of Defense."

He added: "They are shoving peacetime spending into the war account and filling the hole in the base-line budget with earmarks."

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com