A senior defense-focused senator cautioned the Navy yesterday against growing its fleet to 313 ships by purchasing what she views as too many less-advanced vessels, expressing concern about the service’s rate of buying large surface combatants.
“Building a large number of ships with limited combat capability at the expense of increasing the number of ships with higher capability could well be a Pyrrhic victory,” or one that comes with huge costs, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told the Surface Navy Association at its annual symposium in Arlington, Va. yesterday. Her state is home to the General Dynamics [GD] Bath Iron Works shipyard, which builds DDG destroyers.
Collins noted that since the Navy set a goal of having 313 ships, the makeup of different ship classes has changed. For example, the sea service in recent years cancelled a next-generation cruiser and boosted plans for, as she put it, “smaller classes of ships with little or no combat capability.”
While she said both the “quantity and quality” of vessels in the fleet are important, she warned: “We must not allow a fixation on absolute numbers of ships to overshadow another critical metric, and that is the number of combat-capable ships in each warfighting area that possess the capabilities necessary to fulfill high-end combat missions.”
Collins, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee (SAC-D), lamented that the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plans shows the service having the targeted number of surface combatants for only seven of 30 years. “At its worst,” she said, the Navy’s cruiser-destroyer force will be 25 percent below the required number.
“If this administration is committed to maintaining high-end combat capability, this shortfall must be significantly mitigated or better yet eliminated in the administration’s future plans,” she said.
The Navy has set a requirement for having 94 large surface combatants in FY ’24. Yet the service’s 30-year shipbuilding plan projects it will reach that goal in 2020 and 2021 before the levels drop to 92 large surface combatants in 2024, and then down to 65 such ships in 2034, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s (SAC) report on the fiscal year 2012 defense appropriations act.
“The longer Congress has to wait for a plan to address the gap, the more questions will be asked about the validity of the 94-ship requirement,” Collins said yesterday. “To put it plainly, if 94 ships is the minimum, how many ships do we have to be short of that goal before someone in the Navy or the Pentagon sounds the alarm that the risk for our country’s security has reached a red line?”
The SAC report directs the Navy secretary to include with the FY ’13 budget proposal a report on options for closing the large-surface-combatant gap. The committee report notes that the Navy’s plans for pursuing a multi-year procurement contract for DDG-51 destroyers in FY ’13 could spur “significant” cost savings.
Collins said yesterday she “welcomed certain parts” of the new Pentagon strategy President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta unveiled last week. She views the Obama administration as having made three commitments to surface warfare: to shipbuilding and the shipbuilding industrial base; to “maintaining a high-end combat capability;” and to emphasize the Asia-Pacific region as a strategic priority.
“As I continue to scrutinize the strategic review and when I examine the president’s budget request, I will be looking for evidence that the administration is honoring its promises with the resources necessary to fulfill these commitments, so that they are not hollow commitments,” she said.
“The last two commitments are among the greatest justifications for maintaining a strong and capable surface fleet, but this fleet can only materialize and be sustained by making good on the commitment to shipbuilding and the fragile industrial base that supports it.”
She questioned if building one and a half destroyers per year “is adequate to preserve the skills and the number of production workers needed for a secure and cost-efficient industrial base.” She further maintained this procurement rate does not allow for adequate competition between shipyards.