Defense Secretary James Mattis has said defense panels in Congress have approved the Pentagon’s plan to shift approximately $440 million in unspent fiscal 2017 funds from operations and maintenance accounts into missile defense initiatives amid North Korea’s nuclear weapon pursuit, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.Mattis announced the approval at a Senate hearing on Afghanistan Tuesday.
The report said Raytheon, Boeing and Orbital ATK are among the contractors that are likely to benefit from the Defense Department’s reprogramming request.
A six-page reprogramming request prepared by Mattis and obtained by Bloomberg listed approximately $416 million in total funding shift requests in support of missile defense programs.
The funding shift request would reprogram $16 million in funds to extend a radar platform, $13 million to advance Baseline 9.2 updates to four U.S. Navy ships to facilitate launch of Raytheon-built Standard Missile-3 Block IIA anti-missile interceptors and another $15 million to fund software upgrades to the Boeing-made Sea-Based X-Band radar that works to monitor an intercontinental ballistic missile.
