By Emelie Rutherford
The Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer program is poised to breach cost-controls set by Congress requiring it to be canceled or recertified process, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday.
The cost of the future ships has grown since the Navy decided two years ago to reduce the planned buy of the warships from eight down to just three, Gates told the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) during a hearing on President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget.
The ships’ costs have risen to the extent that the Pentagon will have to detail to Congress why the program should be continued, per the Nunn-McCurdy statute, or kill it. Under the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, which Obama signed last year, programs that breach Nunn-McCurdy cost-growth limits are presumed to be canceled before such recertifications.
“The issue that has come up…and has raised concerns, is that the (DDG-1000) program is going to breach Nunn-McCurdy,” Gates said. “But it is going to breach not because of performance issues, but because of the reduction in the buy. And as far as I know our plan is to continue to go forward with it.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen added that Pentagon officials are looking at the DDG-1000 program and at termination costs tied to ending the program.
Gates and Mullen made the disclosures after HASC Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) said he receive notice on Tuesday that “due to the termination” of some of the DDG-1000s that the program “will suffer a cost-growth (requiring that it be) recertified.”
The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding, sent to Capitol Hill this week, refers to the Navy has still planning to buy three DDG-1000s.
After acting to truncate the DDG-1000 program at three ships, the Pentagon last April announced General Dynamics [GD] would build all of the three DDG-1000s, and Northrop Grumman [NOC] would restart the older DDG-51 destroyer line. Before that time, the two shipbuilders had planned to share the DDG- 1000 work.