A fleet of ships including the Nimitz-class carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower that will sail to the Middle East to support airstrikes against the Islamic State group will be using second-hand parts from other operational units, Military.com reported Thursday.

Hope Hodge Seck writes U.S. Navy operational commanders disclosed this at a House subcommittee hearing as they discussed the current readiness status of service ships and aircraft as a result of reduced maintenance funding and sequestration.

Adm. Phil Davidson, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, has said the command and U.S. Pacific Fleet have a maintenance and operations budget shortfall of $848 million.

Capt. Scott Robertson, USS Normandy commander, has added that 13 mission-essential parts were “cannibalized” from the guided-missile cruiser to support the Eisenhower carrier strike group deployment.

“If a part fails on a unit that’s operational, we look in the supply system, and the supply system says either there no parts available at all or parts are not going to be available for a few months,” said Capt. Gregory McRae, Submarine Squadron 6 commander.

He noted that parts are being salvaged from the submarine force at a rate of 1.5 per day to help fund current operations, the report said.

“Accepting these risks means accepting less readiness across the whole of the Navy,” Davidson added.

Pentagon officials are investigating the use European-built rockets to launch U.S. military satellites to space as part of an effort to sever the nation’s reliance on Russian engines, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Claire Leon, U.S. Air Force’s rocket-acquisition officer, told a space conference that the military has kicked off a study on the feasibility of sending national security payloads into orbit with Arianespace-built rockets, Andy Pasztor reports.

The goal is to use the Ariane 5 launcher over the coming years for satellite launch missions until U.S. launch companies address the financial and technical issues surrounding their space launch initiatives, according to the report.

Pasztor writes the Air Force and Arianespace officials are set to conduct further negotiations and the study is still in an early stage.

Lawmakers who oversee military funding will have to approve that policy decision, the Journal reports.

Arianespace told the Journal that the company has carried national security payloads for NATO allies over the last 30 years and that the company is poised to provide backup launch for the U.S. if called upon.

The Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a bill that would authorize $515.9 billion for the Defense Department‘s base expenditures and another $58.6 billion wartime overseas contingency programs in fiscal 2017, Defense News reported Thursday.

Joe Gould writes defense authorization bill, which the committee unanimously approved Thursday, will now go to the full Senate for consideration.

“The bill sustains a strong US force structure, and it makes significant investments in readiness, shipbuilding programs, aircraft procurement and missile defense,” Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), was quoted as saying.

The report said the panel’s proposed DoD budget for the next fiscal year is $1.7 billion less than President Barack Obama’s request.

Senate appropriators rejected the House’s proposal to move a portion of war funds to the base defense budget and added 8 amendments to the funding bill.

Gould noted one amendment calls for the department to expedited efforts to replace its fleet of UH-1N military helicopters and another amendment seeks to elevate the status of the U.S. Cyber Command to a combatant command.

The spending bill would allow DoD to reallocate about $15.1 billion in department funds to procure items on the “unfunded priorities” list of the four service branches, according to the report.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has led a public-private team to develop an international standard that aims to provide manufacturers with a systematic method on how to outline the environmental aspects of any production process.

NIST said Thursday the ASTM International E3012-16 standard seeks to help manufacturing firms achieve their sustainability goals through the adoption of a science-based approach.

The approach aims to guide firms on how to collect and define data about a production process’ environmental impacts as well as support them in their decision-making processes, the agency added.

“We designed ASTM E3012-16 to let manufacturers virtually characterize their production processes as computer models, and then, using a standardized method, ‘plug and play’ the environmental data for each process step to visualize impacts and identify areas for improving overall sustainability of the system,” said Kevin Lyons, NIST systems engineer and chair of the ASTM committee that created the standard.

According to NIST, members of the ASTM committee plan to incorporate into the standard several key performance indicators of sustainable manufacturing.

“In the long term, we’d also like to establish a repository of process models and case studies from different manufacturing sectors so that users of the standard can compare and contrast against their production methods,” Lyons added.