By Emelie Rutherford
A major driver in costs of the Obama administration’s overseas missile-defense architecture will be the types of ships the Pentagon uses, according to congressional budget experts.
Several lawmakers on armed services committees, including Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have talked of the possible need to buy more Navy ships for the sea-and-land-based European missile-defense setup the Pentagon unveiled last month.
The new arrangement, which scraps Bush administration plans for ground-based interceptors and radar in Eastern Europe, heavily relies on the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system and Raytheon‘s [RTN] Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptors.
“This (missile-defense effort) is very much a program that’s in flux, and we don’t know where it’s going, (but we know)…the big driver in costs here is going to be in types of ships in the ship-based option,” Matthew Goldberg, acting assistant director for national security at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), told lawmakers yesterday.
The Pentagon has three options for coming up with nine ships–the number CBO said is needed–to provide continuous missile-defense coverage in three overseas locations, Goldberg told the House Budget Committee.
One option is the Navy’s current plan: to covert an increasing number of existing Aegis warships for the Ballistic Missile Defense mission. The sea service is waiting for Congress to approve its fiscal year 2010 budget request for $200 million to convert six ships.
“So that’s six out of what may ultimately be, in CBO’s estimation, nine ships to do the mission,” Goldberg said. “That’s the lowest-cost way to do the mission…to take existing ships and convert them. The problem then is that you have nine ships dedicated to this mission, (they) can’t do something else. That’s the tradeoff.”
Goldberg said if the Pentagon were to build nine new ships dedicated to the BMD mission, either DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyers or Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) could be used.
Nine new DDG-51s could cost $19 billion. Taking nine LCSs and adding AN/SPY-1 radars and vertical launch-system cells would cost much less–approximately $9 billion, he said.
The Obama administration’s new missile-defense plan brings some savings. Eliminating the previously planned radar in the Czech Republic and ground-based missile interceptors in Poland saves a total of $1.5 billion, Goldberg said. Yet he added the “biggest element that you put back in is the cost of your ships,” which CBO estimates could run as high as $19 billion.
For overall defense spending, the CBO found a disconnect between the administration’s current budget and plans. The budget office estimates carrying out the plans proposed in President Obama’s FY ’10 budget request, excluding war funding, would annually require $567 billion, in FY ’10 dollars, from FY ’11 to FY ’28; that’s 6 percent more than the administration’s $534 billion base defense budget request for FY ’10.
Factors contributing to higher long-term resource requirements include likely growth in military pay growth; projected operation and maintenance cost increases for existing and new equipment; plans for advanced weapon systems; and investments in capabilities such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems to address emerging threats, Goldberg said.
The CBO found additional scenarios where long-term defense costs could exceed current projections, including increased war funding for deployed troops and higher costs for developing and buying new weapon systems.
Thus, the budget office also calculated “total unbudgeted costs” for the Pentagon, which have an annual average of $624 billion through FY ’28, or 17 percent more than the administration’s FY ’10 base budget request.
The House Budget Committee plans to hold another defense-budget hearing next week, which will include Pentagon comptroller Robert Hale and Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn.