By Emelie Rutherford
Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) said in an interview last week that Navy shipbuilding could benefit from anticipated cuts to defense programs within the Pentagon’s lean defense budget.
Courtney, a member of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee and unflagging supporter of Virginia-class submarines, has joined 42 House members and 18 senators in calling on President Obama to boost Navy shipbuilding to 12 ships per year (Defense Daily, Jan. 7).
The congressman said requests for increased naval ship funding are not out of the question during these austere fiscal times. He noted how Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified two months ago before the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) about making targeted cuts, instead of across-the-board reductions, to defense programs within the fiscal year 2010 budget that will be detailed in April.
“The question is whether this sort of scenario where there’s vertical cuts instead of horizontal cuts…whether or not that’s going to create a space for other ships and boats that could theoretically get us to (a) higher (funding) number,” Courtney told Defense Daily in his Capitol Hill office.
The two-term congressman pointed to HASC Seapower subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor’s (D-Miss.) advocacy for ending the line of advanced DDG-1000 destroyers and building more of the older DDG-51s.
“That shows that there are other paths here in terms of getting to a larger fleet, it’s just you’re not going to have a larger fleet with the absolutely top-shelf programs necessarily,” Courtney said. “But a lot depends whether or not this sort of cost-benefit analysis talk that Gates broached at the hearing really plays itself out.”
The Obama administration last Thursday released a budget outline calling for a FY ’10 defense budget of $533.7 billion, which represents a 4 percent increase over FY ’09 levels yet also includes some war funding that was not in the FY ’09 base budget (Defense Daily, Feb. 27). Programmatic details are expected to be announced in April.
Courtney said he is encouraged by support for accelerating the growth of the Navy’s fleet from key lawmakers including Taylor, HASC Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), and House Appropriations Defense subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.).
“I have been struck in the two years that I’ve been here that the feeling is pretty wide about the fact that (HASC members) feel that our Navy has shrunk to an unacceptable level,” Courtney said.
Lawmakers who support increased Navy shipbuilding, he said, aren’t “walking into a complete uphill battle or an unwilling audience as far as the key decision makers.” He added he believes lawmakers “really have kind of absorbed the talk and the analysis that we really have seen a pretty unacceptable decline” in the size of the Navy’s fleet.
Asked about his top shipbuilding concerns before the budget-approval process begins, Courtney noted that this country has “a new administration and a president who’s from the Midwest, he’s not from a maritime state.”
“I don’t say that disrespectfully at all, but it’s obviously not been part of his life experience in terms seeing up close the issues that surround shipbuilding,” Courtney said. He added that since entering Congress he has “advocate(d) and educate(d) people about the merits of” supporting Navy shipbuilding, because he said some people “just don’t have a perspective on it.”
The congressman said he is encouraged by Obama’s perceived support for maintaining a strong manufacturing base for this country, and said he hopes to hear more discussion about boosting commercial shipbuilding as well.
Advocating for the Virginia-class submarine program is a key part of Courtney’s job, with contractor General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat in his district, and was a significant issue when he ran for Congress in 2006.
The lawmaker and 27 co-signers sent Obama a letter in December seeking continued support for the current Navy plan to double production of Virginia-class submarines to two per year starting in 2011, a year ahead of the service’s previous schedule (Defense Daily, Jan. 7).
Courtney has become closely identified on Capitol Hill with the effort to move up the date when the submarine’s production would increase to two each year. Taylor even gave him a commemorative license plate that says “2 SUB JOE.”
“Certainly I am going to tell everyone to stay on guard (regarding Virginia-class submarine plans) until we see the actual budget document in April,” Courtney said.
Courtney has asked Taylor to hold a HASC Seapower subcommittee hearing on submarines this year. Plans for the next-generation SSBN ballistic-missile submarine will undoubtedly be discussed, Courtney said.
Analysts including Robert Work from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments have said the cost of the SSBN(X) program will be a major factor in future Navy budget deliberations.
“It’s certainly starting to get more talk through our office as well,” Courtney said.