By Jen DiMascio
The same week Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) called for an increase in the size of the Navy’s fleet, members of the House Shipbuilding Caucus mulled over ways the service could better afford its current plans.
Discussion about shipbuilding comes as the House and Senate are reconciling differences between the chambers’ different versions of the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2008.
The number of combatant ships has declined dramatically since Webb served in Vietnam and since he was Navy secretary under President Reagan and resigned because his plan to retain Naval force structure was rejected by then-Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci.
But the war in Iraq also threatens to take a larger toll on maritime forces, he said.
Webb told Defense Daily that six months before the start of the war in Iraq, he wrote an opinion piece saying the war would cause the military to eat its force structure.
“One of the problems you have cyclically throughout history is when you get involved in situations with long-term ground operations, is you tend to eat up your budget and tend to lose focus on your strategic responsibilities,” Webb said. “What we need to do now is sit down with leadership and get their views on their global responsibilities.”
When Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was still the Chief of Naval Operations and appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his promotion, Webb asked him about the size of the fleet.
Mullen told him that 350 ships was a number to shoot for, according to Webb.
The idea is feasible, if it is executed responsibly over a period of time and as the nation draws down from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Webb said, adding that his idea should not be viewed as a force structure trade with the other services.
But affordability is a primary issue facing any plan to move beyond 313 ships, according to Robert Work, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis.
Discussion about moving beyond 313 ships in the Navy is “way, way premature” until the service proves it can build ships that it can afford, he said, citing cost overruns on the Littoral Combat Ship program and potential cost growth on the next-generation carrier and destroyer.
To move to a larger Navy, the service would have to repeat the success of the Virginia-class submarine program–which has followed through on demands to reduce its price to $2 billion per unit, Work said.
How the Navy can afford current and future platforms is already on the minds of lawmakers.
John Lehman, another former Navy secretary, recently spoke to the House Shipbuilding Caucus, stressing the need to limit the number of change orders added to a shipbuilding project, which can cause the cost of programs to escalate, lawmakers said.
Reining in spending on other shipbuilding programs is just one of five things that need to happen for the Navy to execute its current plan to get to 313 ships, according to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report.
The plan also assumes that the Navy’s overall budget does not decline, that its operation and maintenance spending does not grow, its personnel budget stays the same and that research and development spending decreases over the long run, wrote Ronald O’Rourke, a defense specialist for CRS.
Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Armed Services seapower subcommittee, said he supports Webb’s idea of a larger Navy and included language in the House version of the defense authorization bill that moves in that direction.
The Senate did provide additional funding to begin buying long-lead parts for a second Virginia-class submarine but did not follow the House in providing the go-ahead to fund an additional LPD-17 and three TAK-E cargo ships.
Those differences that are currently being sorted out in a conference that might run through the Thanksgiving recess.
According to Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), the ranking member of the HASC seapower subcommittee, the number of ships is not important–rather the mix of ships is where focus is required.
“We need to take a serious look at what the fleet should look like,” he said, adding that in the future the number of carriers might need to be reduced.
Similarly, former Navy three-star admiral Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) said that the number of ships or aircraft carriers should not be the metric. “The measuring stick should be the capabilities,” he said.
According to Sestak, the Defense Department should place a joint priority on funding information networks for all of the services. In a time of finite resources, that would mean sensors and networks would carry more weight than weapons or platforms, he said.