The House Armed Services Committee would reject the Navy’s plan to lay up 11 of its 22 cruisers for modernization and instead allow only two ships at a time to be in the yard for overhauls, HASC readiness subcommittee chairman Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said Thursday.
In its budget request, the Navy asked to keep 11 cruisers in the fleet and put 11 in the yard in 2015 for hull, mechanical and electrical upgrades. Those ships would then wait around until the in-service cruisers neared retirement, and then one at a time they’d receive a weapons system upgrade and replace retiring ships on a one-for-one basis. The Navy has said this will keep cruisers in the fleet into the 2040s instead of using up all their service life in the 2020s.
But Wittman told reporters Thursday that “our concern was, we need that capacity at sea. So what we said was that we’ll phase in the modernization to kind of be able to manage the cost but not lay them up at the dock.”
Because funding touches both his readiness subcommittee and the seapower and projection forces subcommittee, the language won’t be introduced until the full committee’s National Defense Authorization Act language is released next week. But Wittman said he was pleased with the compromise plan.
On Tuesday morning, before the subcommittee language had been released, seapower subcommittee chairman Randy Forbes (R-Va.) told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast that “I am not real comfortable with the Navy’s plan. I think that it’s important we keep those cruisers alive, I think it’s important we begin to do the modernization of some of those cruisers.” In hearings earlier this year, Forbes expressed skepticism, saying there was nothing preventing the Navy from retiring the ships instead of modernizing them once they were in reduced status in a shipyard.