Senate defense appropriators offered a peek into their fiscal 2008 spending package Sept. 11, including efforts to fully fund the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) and significantly encourage quicker dual annual production of Virginia-class submarines.

But the panel, whose subcommittee markup comes before the full Senate Appropriations Committee Sept. 12, also sliced into the Bush administration's missile defense request, especially for proposed facilities for an Eastern European branch of the ground-based midcourse missile interceptor system.

The subcommittee cut $310 million requested for missile defense, namely $85 million from the proposed Czech radar and Polish interceptor missile requests.

"The funds can be used better in other areas," Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said, commenting generally on several changes made to the February request.

The legislation supports funding above Bush's budget for increasing pay for military and civilian employees and for strengthening military health care, for instance, while cutting funds for "dozens" of weapons programs suffering setbacks.

The $459.3 billion bill also would allocate an additional $1 billion for the National Guard and military reserves to address "severe" shortages resulting from deployments to Iraq, which have made it more difficult to respond to natural disasters here at home, according to an official subcommittee statement.

Few legislative details were provided at the Sept. 11 hearing except for remarks made by Inouye and congressional staff. Inouye said the subcommittee often followed the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose bill could return to the Senate floor next week after stalling in July over Iraq policy issues.

For missile defense, the senators would fully fund near-term missile defense programs, including Alaskan and Californian ground-based missile defense efforts, Aegis ballistic missile defense, Theater High Altitude Area Defense and the Airborne Laser program. They further provide an additional $100 million for test and training range upgrades and support and ground-based missile defense upgrades, and add $75 million for Arrow co-production, the Arrow System Improvement Program and Short Range Ballistic Missile Defense.

By contrast, they cut funding for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor by $30 million and offered no funding for the Space Test Bed and the Space Experimentation Center.

Meanwhile, the panel called for a prompt global strike initiative with $125 million, which would consolidate "disparate" efforts across the Defense Department. The group also fully funded Joint-Air-to-Ground-Missile research and development.

In shipbuilding, the subcommittee added $470 million to the request for Virginia submarine "economic order quantity." But the panel reduced funding for the Littoral Combat ship program by $950 million -- although still funding the first two hulls in the class -- as well as mission module funding by $65.3 million due to shipbuilding delays.