Juana Summers
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Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is already using his new position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to advocate Boeing's defense, space and security operations based in Hazelwood, Mo., as well as what he says is a booming defense industry elsewhere in the state.
"Boeing is the biggest example, but we've got a big defense industry in Missouri,” he said. "And it's not just Boeing and the Boeing subcontractors, but we have a lot of people that work for the industry," he said. But he also said that although he and the Show-Me State’s senior senator, Democrat Claire McCaskill, are both on the Armed Services Committee, there might be a limit to how much they could do.
"In a state of 6 million people, 200,000 of our workers are directly related to defense, and I don't know that Boeing will benefit any more from Sen. McCaskill and I both being in a good place to advocate," he said.
Just the same, they are doing their best. Blunt has joined the chorus of defense advocates sounding the alarm about the dangers of sequestration, which he said had a reasonable goal of reducing spending but achieved it in a foolish way.
"One of my big concerns about sequestration is the sort of salami slicing view that we'll just take a little bit for everybody,” he said in an interview with POLITICO. “It could very well mean that some programs can't survive unless they have the commitment that they fully need.”
One area that could take a big hit is Boeing's St. Louis-built Super Hornet, which Blunt questioned Defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel about during his confirmation hearing before the Armed Services Committee last week.
"How do we keep our capacity at a time when there's this talk about cutting — and not just cutting but cutting everything a little bit, which means that some of the things that get cut a little bit can't survive because they're only partly there?" Blunt asked him.
Hagel cited the Super Hornet as a "good example of what we're going to have to keep strong."
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While Blunt warned of sequestration’s impact at the hearing, he said he thinks the F/A-18 is a "tried and true airplane" that will be "part of the fighter mix for a long time."
Boeing hopes that means the Navy would continue buying new aircraft, not just upgrading and operating the ones it already has. But the Navy is already planning to buy Lockheed Martin’s F-35C Lightning II fighter for decades after the run of Super Hornets is now scheduled to end. The twist is that the F-35 is new, over budget, behind schedule and unproven while the Super Hornet is cheaper and highly familiar but less advanced.
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Boeing has pushed international F-35 clients to buy Super Hornets to tide them over until their new airplanes arrive — Australia has purchased 24 of them — and it hopes the Navy follows suit. So does Blunt.
"I think they've done a better job all the time to figure out how to make it in a cost-effective way," he said. "No matter how the F-35 does, I think there's going to be a place for the F/A-18, which doesn't cost nearly as much, but is going to be out there as part of our force structure unless, again, whether it's the F-35 or the F/A-18, we decide we're going to buy so few of them that the whole capacity to build that plane just goes away."
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Boeing employs about 15,000 people in the St. Louis metro area and the aviation giant's fourth-quarter showings demonstrated some of the challenges the defense sector is already experiencing. Defense profits fell 13 percent in the fourth quarter, to $751 million, and defense revenues dropped 2 percent to $8.3 billion.
Speaking to reporters and analysts following the release of the fourth-quarter earnings last week, Boeing CEO Jim McNerney said cost-cutting measures at the Pentagon were partly responsible for the decline in defense operations, which are based in Missouri.
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As for Blunt, he said he and McCaskill would do their best, from their opposite sides of the aisle, to get the message out about their major constituent.
"Sen. McCaskill and I, on the things that we agree on, I think work together very effectively," Blunt said. "Even though we're both on the Armed Services Committee, we specifically talked about how to sort of maximize our impact by not duplicating our efforts."
