Shrinkage: Navy Won’t Build as Many Ships as It Planned

Shrinkage: Navy Won’t Build as Many Ships as It Planned:

A shipyard worker in San Diego reattaches a funnel drain to the U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard, 2011. Photo: U.S. Navy

President Obama wants the U.S. Navy to patrol the vast Pacific Ocean and build itself up in the Middle East. Which is a nice dream. But the Navy is conceding it won’t build many ships to make it a reality — especially over the next five years. The Navy’s acknowledged as much — tensely, defensively, and always with a retort — for months. But now it’s officially revised its long-term shipbuilding plan downward and provided details about what’s effectively a five-year shipyard freeze.
According to the new shipbuilding plan (.pdf), released Wednesday by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the Navy won’t build any new ballistic missile submarines until 2021. It won’t build any big-deck amphibious assault ships, key for the Navy and the Marines to fight as a team, until 2017, when it will build… one more. After next year, the Navy won’t fund the construction of ships above replacement levels until 2018. All told, the Navy’s downgrading the total number of ships in 30 years it wants to maybe 300, a drop of at least 13 ships. And all this will occur as the Navy surges in the Persian Gulf and the Western Pacific.
“It makes little sense to be shrinking our Navy just months after the announcement of a strategy that would shift emphasis to Asia, the Pacific, and the Mideast — areas where a strong naval presence is an imperative,” Rep. Todd Akin, the chairman of the House subcommittee on seapower, said at a Thursday hearing. The likely presidential nominee of Akin’s political party, Mitt Romney, is proposing a big (and expensive) increase in shipbuilding. On Navy issues, U.S. voters will face a clear choice.
The last time the Navy set its long-term goals, in 2006, its plan for the mid-2030s was to create a fleet of 313 ships. That was the target number the Navy set for meeting the anticipated threats of the future. But since January, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of Naval operations, has talked instead about getting to “approximately 300″ ships over that time frame. Aboard the U.S.S. Wasp that month for a huge Navy war game, Greenert told reporters that the Navy would hold steady at 285 ships until 2018 — with a bit of a dip in the next two years — only to start enlarging the fleet again afterward.

The reason is financial. The military has to cut at least $487 billion from its ledgers over the next decade as a matter of law. Navy ships are big ticket items. And since the military budgets for five years at a time, punting the Navy’s shipbuilding surge another five years is, effectively, an accounting trick — and one that makes the current defense budget look small enough to be legal.
But that doesn’t satisfy members of the congressional committees that oversee defense. (Yes, even though many of those legislators voted for the budget constraints in the first place. Don’t try to apply logic or consistency with Congress; you’ll get a headache and nothing will change.) The moneymen on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense were incredulous that the Navy’s leadership came to them earlier this month to ask for a slightly smaller fleet that has to do more around the world.
Greenert and his civilian counterpart, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, have a response at the ready. The current Navy strategic plan envisions stationing more ships permanently outside U.S. ports, reducing the strain on the rest of the fleet for rotational deployments. Over the next few years, four Aegis cruisers will call Spain their home. Singapore will host two of the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships.
That’s too clever, says seapower blogger Raymond Pritchett, who’s facepalming over the Navy’s new shipbuilding plan. His problem is that he’s seen this movie before: the Navy promises that someday it’s going to ramp up its ships, only to scale back its expensive plans as the date for the ramp-up approaches. Meanwhile, the Navy takes on more and more global responsibility — and struggles to keep up with technological advances in propulsion and design, which drives up the costs of shipbuilding and fuels a repeat of the whole sorry cycle.
“The Navy is now officially doing the same thing again and again with their shipbuilding plans in the 21st century and expecting everyone to believe the result will be different this time,” Pritchett blogs. “The new plan — same as the old plan — is to meet a specific number of ships determined by requirement (313 or approximately 300) by loading all of the construction of the ships needed to meet that number in the budget years beyond the [Five Year Defense Plan]. If the new ‘approximately 300-ship’ shipbuilding plan is doing exactly what failed in the old 313-ship shipbuilding plan, then how can the Navy claim to have a plan — or for that matter — how can the Navy claim to have a valid ship requirement that needs a plan if the Navy doesn’t have a legitimate plan intended to meet that requirement?”
Pritchett might actually be understating things. If Congress doesn’t come up with a way to balance defense cuts and entitlement cuts by January, then according to the very law it passed in August, the defense budget will have to lose another $600 billion-plus over ten years. There is no evidence Congress will do so. The Navy’s “approximately 300″ ship fleet might be more “approximate” than the Navy brass is letting on.
In fact, buried in the new plan is a warning about precisely that. “If the [Navy Department] is unable to sustain average annual shipbuilding budgets of $19.5 [billion] over the course of the mid-term planning period,” the plan states, “plans to recapitalize the Nation’s secure second-strike nuclear deterrent [i.e., subs] and the Navy’s conventional battle force will have to be dramatically changed, and the overall size of the battle force will drop below the levels needed to meet all naval presence and warfighting requirements.”