NATIONAL HARBOR, Md – As the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee begins to look at its markup of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget request, some members are discussing language that would push the new ballistic missile submarine program out of the Navy shipbuilding and conversion account, as well as language that could lead to the Navy receiving a slightly higher share of the Defense Department budget than usual to ensure key projects stay on track.
Speaking at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference, HASC members Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) and Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said the seapower subcommittee this week had begun looking at ideas for the markup, and key among the topics of discussion was how to keep the Ohio-class replacement submarine on track.
“The Armed Services committee, and the seapower subcommittee–again, Rob and I were together yesterday–actually talked about this year’s [National Defense Authorization Act] to try to start using that platform to drive the visibility of that issue up, and there’s some discussion about different language that we can incorporate into this year’s bill.”
Courtney said they faced an uphill battle because budgets are so tight, so lobbying efforts by the Navy League and others would be key to carving out a separate strategic forces funding line for the submarine design and production to keep the submarines on schedule without devastating the rest of Navy shipbuilding.
After the panel discussion, Wittman told Defense Daily that the language had not been finalized, and the Ohio-replacement program had not formally been moved to another pot of money yet.
“What we’re talking about in the NDAA is to make sure that we clearly state it needs to be funded, that it needs to stay on track, that timing is an issue here because we have to have production and availability of SSBN(X) as close as we can to Ohio retirement” in 2031.
Wittman said it is important to state in the law that the funding must come from elsewhere, because HASC cannot be the one to make that actually happen.
“I think it has to be not only the Navy but I think it also has to be Congress in general, especially the appropriators and the budgeters to say this is a big item, it has to be done, let’s figure out a way of getting money there,” he said.
Another topic of discussion during the pre-markup talks has been whether to put more money into the shipbuilding account than it has had in recent years–more specifically, taking a recent high of about $16 billion and then adding an additional $2 billion to help the Navy build and maintain the fleet it needs to support the Defense Strategic Guidance and its emphasis on naval power in the Pacific Ocean.
“We’re just beginning that discussion. We’re talking about it there at the markup level to say, how would we express that, how do we encourage that discussion?” Wittman told Defense Daily. “I don’t know that it will end up necessarily in the policy piece in the NDAA this time, but it is going to be part of our discussion of, shouldn’t we be thinking about the strategy, what the strategy projects?”
During the panel discussion, Wittman told the audience that there has typically been an agreement in HASC to fund the Army, Navy and Air Force at approximately equal levels.
“I would argue that looking at the strategy, the [Quadrennial Defense Review], the emphasis is not equal among those three areas,” he said. “That means we ought to have a discussion about should we devote more resources within the topline of defense budget to areas like shipbuilding. Think about this: if we just added $2 billion additional, which is about 1.6 percent of the defense budget, to shipbuilding, we could get to where we need to be.”
He said that relied on the Ohio-replacement being funding under strategic forces and not Navy shipbuilding. But if the extra money were secured, the Navy could move forward with the LX(R) to replace the aging LSD dock transport ships, the TAO(X) to replace aging oilers and the new Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with the Air and Missile Defense Radar.
Accomplishing all that this decade can only be done two ways, he said: “You can either raise the topline, and in the foreseeable future that’s probably not going to happen; or we can say, within the dollars we have, shouldn’t we be making priority decisions, tough decisions.”