Provision Doesn’t Specify Which Nation Is Site

The Senate voted out a defense authorization bill for the soon-to-begin fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2009, approving an amendment that would provide $89 million for activation and deployment of an AN/TPY forward-based X-band missile defense radar.

Just which nation would host the radar isn’t specified in the amendment because that is classified.

That amendment was sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), and it also drew co-sponsorship from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), and Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the panel. Other SASC members — Sens. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) and David Vitter (R-La.) — also were cosponsors.

Under the amendment, funds may not be made available until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gives SASC and the House Armed Services Committees a report on deploying the X-band radar.

That report would spell out where the radar would be deployed, details of its deployment such as whether and how it would be used for force protection, figures on costs for the radar, how those costs could be divided between the United States and the host nation, and details of the agreement with the host nation.

Other than this provision, the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2009 was little amended from a SASC-passed version, because a huge manager’s amendment containing many individual changes to the bill failed to win passage on the Senate floor. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, May 5, 2008.)

With Senate passage, the authorization bill now goes to a House-Senate conference to work out differences between the Senate version of the defense authorization bill and the House version that in some ways was less generous in enabling missile defense programs. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, May 12, 2008.)