Several lawmakers slammed the Navy for its plans for the aircraft carrier fleet in the fiscal year 2015 budget request, and the Chief of Naval Operations asked for unrequested “seed money” to look at turning the more expensive LPD amphibious transport dock into a less costly option for the LX(R) dock landing ship replacement, during a Wednesday morning House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Navy budget that focused largely on sequestration’s impact to the ship fleet.
Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) asked about the aircraft carriers early on. The Navy has said if it doesn’t get $115 billion above the legal spending caps set by sequestration from FY ’16-’19, it would have to decommission the carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) instead of refueling it. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told McKeon that keeping the carrier in the fleet during that time period would cost $7 billion, “and there are very few places that you can find $7 billion in any budget. So if we go back to this sequester level [in FY ’16], that would be one of the options we would almost certainly have to put on the table.”
CNO Adm. Jonathan Greenert added that the U.S. Pacific Command commander alone has requested two full-time carriers in his area of responsibility and a third carrier for three or four months of the year. In a fleet of only 10, that level of presence would be impossible, making the Defense Department’s stated mission of “deterring” aggression very challenging.
While the Navy officials said they wanted to keep all 11 carriers in the fleet, their five-year budget submission does not include funding for the carrier refueling and complex overhaul–DoD officials have stated several times that it takes a lot of time and effort to plan a decommissioning, so the department should assume the worst and could stop the decommissioning process if funding were available in FY ’16 to keep the carrier and its air wing.
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), chairman of the HASC seapower and projection forces subcommittee, however, did not accept that rationale.
“There’s a huge disconnect between the rhetoric we’re hearing and the actions that are being taken,” he said during the hearing. “We say we’re not going to reduce our carriers down from 11 to 10, but the reality is this: $243 million this committee put in to do the planning to get ready for that refueling, you’re taking it out. If you wanted to reduce our carriers from 11 to 10, you would take it out. If you wanted to leave them in and to delay the decision, you would leave the money in. $450 million for materials we need to buy for next year to get ready: that’s not even in the president’s budget, that’s taken out.”
Mabus insisted that the Navy was giving itself more “decision space” and that, if the decision to refuel or decommission were made next year, “we have exactly the amount of time, the right amount of time, to get the George Washington out and get the next carrier in” for its refueling. He said the impact to the refueling schedule was considered when deciding to delay a decision on the George Washington, and the department found the delay would cause no impact.
After the hearing, Mabus told reporters that “we’ve been very straightforward and very upfront, we’ve moved the decision a year. That’s it. No decision’s been made either way.”
Forbes, however, released a statement after the hearing blasting the Navy.
“By refusing to execute planning funds or to procure supplies critical to protecting our carrier fleet, this administration has undeniably made a decision that they will advocate to reduce our carrier fleet; they just lack the courage to admit it,” he said.
Also during the hearing, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) asked about a 12th LPD, for which Congress has provided advance procurement funding for the past few years, and whether the Navy and Marine Corps wanted to build that ship.
“I would love to have a 12th ship. We would love to have a 12th ship,” Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James Amos said. “But quite frankly, there’s little to no money in the budget to be able to do this, which goes back to my original statement–we need capital ships, the Navy needs them, but there’s no money to do this.”
If money were provided, though, Amos said having another LPD would help as the services work through the design process for the LX(R) program to replace the aging LSD dock landing ship fleet. The Marine Corps has long advocated for using the LPD design, but due to cost-constraints, the Navy is considering other alternatives. Something similar to the Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), which would have the same ability to project Marines by sea and air but would be less survivable in a hostile environment, could cost 25 percent or less of the LPD’s pricetag. The AFSBs cost about $500 million, and the LPD ships have cost about $2 billion each, though LPD builder Huntington Ingalls’ [HII] has already developed a scaled-down design that takes out some of the higher-end command and control equipment and other features the LPD needs that the LX(R) wouldn’t to lower the cost of the ship.
“Experience in shipbuilding has shown that new programs are always more expensive to design and always take more time to plan,” Palazzo said. “And I think it’s vital we support maintaining the current program that is building these ships and receiving excellent marks from the operating commanders and delivering a vital capability to our Marine Corps.”
“If I may be so bold,” Greenert responded, “as Jim said, we are building an amphibious ship to replace the LSD, and we want to get that thing going, and we want that thing to be affordable. So if there’s a feasibility of taking seed money and looking at what could we do to help industry, to help designers. We’ve done this with the Virginia-class [attack submarines] and it got us down, it saved us $200 million per copy, we estimated on the Virginia-class.”
Asked later in the hearing why the existing LPD design would make such a good LX(R) candidate, Greenert added, “if it is the most cost feasible for the capability–I’m very sensitive, Jim Amos is my customer, so I have to understand that, we need to bring the Marines the capability they need–we already have the infrastructure in place to repair it, to maintain it, to train people to it, to buy stuff that goes in it,” he said. “So that would be very nice if that moved in there very eloquently and we could afford it …If we could get a transitional piece, seed money or something, we did this with Virginia-class, hey that might work. We’ve done it before.”
Amos reiterated Palazzo’s earlier point, saying that the existing design would simplify the acquisition process.
“Developing something brand new costs more money than we think, it takes longer than we think, and its fraught with more danger than we think,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t develop, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.”
After the hearing, Greenert told Defense Daily that the seed money for the Virginia-class sub program came in the 2009-2011 timeframe when the Navy was looking at how to get from producing one to two a year.
“With the cooperation of Congress, about $600 million were put in order to enhance design and to get prototypes in place to help drive the cost of this submarine,” he said. “I was suggesting that in the interest–since there’s clearly interest in amphibious–we have a whole new class of ship, amphibious ship that we’re looking toward, and so cost is a huge issue as the commandant and I referred to. So there might be a synergy here, there might be a similar initiative that we ought to look into. That’s all I was suggesting.”
He added he had not looked into how much seed money he would need to produce the same programmatic savings he saw with the attack submarines.