During the 1990s, the Navy bought just 6 ships per year, enough to sustain a long-term fleet of just 200 vessels. The fleet has bottomed out at around 280 ships as procurement rates have increased slightly. But the Navy and Congress want more hulls: 313, to be exact. Why? Because in naval warfare, numbers matter. Ships can only be in one place at a time, and peacetime diplomacy requires a lot of popping into foreign ports and working out alongside friendly navies. Plus, the major threat going forward isn’t another large-ship navy — it’s elusive enemies in swarms of smaller craft. To fight those, you need numbers.
To get from today’s fleet to tomorrow’s larger force, the Navy has a plan. It might look complicated at first glance, but basically the Navy is trying to do just four things:
* Maintain today’s workhorse force of (eventually) 62 DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyers out to 40 years.
* Directly replace all the current aircraft carriers, attack subs and amphibious and cargo ships with similar (albeit larger and more expensive) vessels.
* Replace current frigates, minesweepers and patrol boats with as many as 55 inexpensive corvettes (aka “littoral combat ships).
* Re-introduce battleships, only this time they’re armed with missiles and they’re called DDG-1000 “destroyers” and CG(X) “cruisers.”
The plan isn’t working. Some of the Burkes have surprise structural flaws. The new carriers and amphibs are over-budget. Worse, the corvettes are a disaster. The Navy botched the design and watched costs double.
Just as seriously, the battleships just don’t jibe with the rest of the plan. The key to boosting the fleet is sticking to proven, affordable designs while adding larger numbers of smaller ships. But the DDG-1000s and CG(X)s are mostly experimental designs that concentrate more power and more cost into fewer platforms, not more — and carry significant risk of major price increases.
Overall, the 313-ship plan looks to cost maybe $20 billion per year, but the Navy is budgeting just $15 billion.
On Friday the House seapower subcommittee called a hearing to remind the Navy of these problems. Rep. Gene Taylor got in some good jabs:
The current shipbuilding plan for the 313-ship fleet is pure fantasy. It is totally unaffordable with the resources the Department of Defense allocates to the Navy for ship construction.
And:
I asked Admiral Keating, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, on Wednesday if he would rather have two DDG-1000s or five DDG-51s — he told me he wanted the DDG-51s. This proves to me that the Navy in Washington does not always listen to the Navy which actually operates the Fleet.
Ron O’Rourke from the Congressional Research Service had the most interesting testimony:
The Navy’s apparent ship recapitalization financing challenge appears broadly similar to the Air Force’s aircraft recapitalization financing challenge. But while the Navy and Air Force may be similar in terms of facing major financing challenges for recapitalizing their primary platforms, the two services are strikingly different in terms of how they are responding to that situation. The Air Force is responding by stating directly and repeatedly that the Air Force budget needs to be increased by about $20 billion per year for the next five years. The Navy, in contrast, has studiously avoided asking for an increase to its programmed budget in recent years and stated instead that it will be able to finance its recapitalization goals by reducing other costs and operating more efficiently.
O’Rourke seems to think bigger budgets are the answer for the Navy. I’ve got a radical alternative: strip off the gold-plating, make sure designs are rock-solid before you start cutting metal and write a 10-year production plan and stick to it.
Related posts:
I still maintain that as long as Mullen is CJCS the Navy won’t do anything about 313.
Mullen wrote 313. That is why Congress must blow it up for the Navy.
[...] War is Boring – Takes a pretty gloss as to the issues facing the replacement of our current fleet and getting the US Navy up to the planned 313 ships. [...]
[...] Every admiral associated with the DDG-1000 “battleship” program [...]
[...] Last week the invite appeared in my in-box to talk to Navy Vice Admiral John Morgan, the service’s top strategist. I went into the tele-conference with what I thought were smart questions about the Navy’s inability to match shipbuilding and strategy. But good Admiral Morgan talked circles around me. The inestimable Commander Salamander called Morgan’s mil-speak laden response “verbal jujitsu,” and helpfully highlighted all the jargon in the tele-conference transcript: Hi. This is David Axe from War is Boring. [...]
[...] Weekly Standard editor P.J. O’Rourke recently spent a day aboard the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier. It was a great opportunity to write about the Navy’s role in counter-insurgencies or the struggle to build a bigger fleet. Instead, the piece turns the Lincoln into — get this — a metaphor for how awesome John McCain is. Ugh: Some say John McCain’s character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what [former pilot] John chose to do — voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer’s or a half gallon of Dewar’s. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?” [...]