Pricey jet engine tests budget cutters' resolve

A showdown looming, Defence Secretary Robert Gates urged the United States Congress to cancel a costly alternative engine for the Pentagon's next-generation fighter jet Wednesday, and vowed to explore "all available legal options" to stop production if lawmakers won't.

"The president, the military services and I continue to oppose this extra engine," Gates said in testimony before the House Armed services Committee.

He spoke a few hours before a scheduled vote on the House floor to strip a spending bill of US$450 million ticketed for production of the engine.

The vote loomed as an early test for 87 GOP freshmen who confronted a choice between cutting spending and injecting competition into the F-35 programme, the costliest weapons programme in Defence Department history.

The money for the engine is included in a US$1.2 trillion spending bill that would make deep cuts while wrapping up the unfinished business lawmakers inherited after last year's collapse of the budget process.

That includes US$1.03 trillion for agency operating budgets that need annual approval by Congress and US$158 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like Obama, former President George W. Bush tried to kill the alternative engine, and their efforts have been supported by lawmakers from Connecticut, where the main F-35 fighter engine is built by Pratt & Whitney, as well as members from Florida, Texas and other states.

Gates has said the engine would waste almost US$3 billion over the next few years,

But the alternative engine has its own supporters, including Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. The alternative engine would be built by the General Electric Company and Rolls-Royce in Ohio, Indiana and other states.

"We have to step forward, we have to cut back on areas, and this is an area that the secretary of defence said we need to cut back on," freshman Rep Bob Dold, R-Illinois, said Tuesday night in debate over the proposal.

The engine battle divides along regional rather than party lines, in contrast to the partisan warfare on the underlying bill, which sharply cuts domestic programmes and foreign aid and earned a veto threat from the White House budget office and a warning from President Barack Obama against unwise cuts "that could endanger the recovery".

House debate on the bill is expected to take all week. A frosty reception awaits the bill in the Democratic-controlled Senate, which won't take up its version until next month. So it will require passage of a separate short-term government funding bill by March 4 to prevent a government shutdown that neither side says it wants.

- AP