Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) has declared defense appropriators want the Pentagon to pursue the alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Megan Scully of CongressDaily reports that the House Appropriations defense subcommittee has included $480 million in the Fiscal 2008 defense spending bill to pay for continued work by General Electric on the second engine. Murtha’s panel joins with House and Senate armed services committees, which earlier this year directed DOD to continue the GE engine development program in their versions of the 2008 defense policy bill. The Pentagon maintains that a second engine is unnecessary and twice has tried to kill the program over Congressional objections. The Air Force has acknowledged that it is a question of budget priorities and an assumption of slightly greater risk.
The future U.S. bomber force could provide a way for the Pentagon to simultaneously deter conflict with peer adversaries in two geographically disparate theaters, said Mark Gunzinger, the director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, during a March 21 event. But doing so…