Key funding request killed for Pentagon’s blimp radar program

WASHINGTON — Two U.S. senators with sway over federal spending have dealt a crippling bipartisan blow to the Pentagon’s troubled $2.7 billion program to use radar-carrying blimps to search for enemy missiles.

Thad Cochran, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who holds the Democrats’ No. 2 leadership position in the Senate, have refused a request by the Obama administration to shift $27.2 million to the program to keep it alive.

The request for the $27.2 million was sent to Congress last month by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who wanted the money to restart an operational exercise in which two JLENS blimps were supposed to stand sentry above the Washington, D.C., area.

The move suggested that the dramatic breakaway last fall of a JLENS blimp from its mooring at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland was a final straw for congressional appropriators.