The House Appropriations defense subcommittee on Tuesday questioned several moves proposed by the Navy and Marine Corps in the fiscal year 2015 budget request that would shrink the size of the fleet even as the sea service rewrote its ship-counting rules to include several that were not counted as battle force ships before.
Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) was particularly vocal about changes to the fleet size, asking about the plan to take half the cruiser fleet out of the water all at once for modernization, to stop procuring Littoral Combat Ships early while the Navy seeks a new way forward for its small surface combatant fleet, and to delay a decision to either refuel or decommission the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73).
To save money, the Navy has repeatedly asked Congress to decommission seven of its cruisers, including one that ran aground in 2009 and others that had not yet gone through midlife upgrades. Congress instead provided a pot of money specifically to man, maintain and modernize those ships. Crenshaw said in the defense appropriations subcommittee hearing that “we were pretty clear in our intention, and I think that your proposal probably is within the letter of the law but I’m not sure it follows the spirit of our clear intention to say, here’s seven cruisers, here’s the money to modernize them, and proceed. “
“My concern and the concern of the subcommittee might be that, is this kind of a way to phase in the decommissioning as opposed to actually modernizing and upgrading?” he said. Subcommittee chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) added that, “we need some answers here, this is a focal point…Before we leave here, we need to know how we’re going to have this forward presence with a lot of ghost ships that are a part of that [ship] count.”
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus stressed that the Navy only needs 11 cruisers in the fleet at any given time but currently has 22. Rather than all the ships staying in the water now and decommissioning by the end of the 2020s, the plan the Navy proposed would lay up the newest half of the fleet for modernizations, which would be complete as the older half begins to retire within a decade. All told, the Navy would have cruisers in the fleet into the 2040s, he said.
Mabus added that the cheapest way to pay for the modernization effort would be to purchase 11 sets of materials all at once, which it would do if Congress accepts this proposal. Crenshaw, however, still opposed the idea of laying up half the cruiser fleet–though today’s Navy leadership may plan to finish the modernizations and return the ships to the fleet. He worried that the next secretary or next chief of naval operations could seek savings down the road and decide to stop the modernizations and scrap the ships instead.
On the aircraft carrier, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) reminded the witnesses that Congress may only get to appropriate one year at a time but that it needed an idea of what to expect in the outyears.
“In this budget you’ve put $46 million for defueling the ship, but it’s going to be a billion dollars if we actually decommission it,” Moran said. “In prior years, this subcommittee has provided over half a billion for the planning and advance procurement for lead items like the reactor core and for refueling, so we got an issue here,” he said, unsure whether the Navy would ultimately ask for more money to keep the larger carrier fleet or less money to break the legally mandated 11-ship floor.
“I know you do as well, but we need to be able to plan. What are you going to do? It’s an enormous cost if we change our mind, as you know,” Moran continued. “We don’t know whether this ship is going to be inactivated for a billion dollars. We know that this small amount of money is not even a placeholder. Are you going to ask for the additional $800 million to deactivate it, or is it just a situation where we haven’t made a decision yet?”
Mabus insisted that no decision had been made yet and no action would be taken during FY ’15 that would push the Navy toward one course of action or another. But, he added, “having said that, we very much want to keep G.W.”
By waiting until this time next year to decide a course of action, “we will not have an impact on the cost of the refueling or defueling, and we will not have an impact on the next carrier coming in to be refueled,” Mabus said. “And that’s why we did this, to give us a little more decision space, to give Congress a little more decision space, because as you pointed out, the bill for keeping G.W. and her air wing and operating her is about $7 billion over that five years.”
Mabus told Defense Daily after the hearing that making a decision this year would cost $800 million, if Congress decided to force the Navy to pick between refueling and defueling now.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert added, ”the work doesn’t start until fiscal year ‘17, so the work is one thing. But there’s advance procurement, so you’re buying materials, government furnished materials and commercial materials. That’s what we’re talking about. And like the secretary said, we have that year before you could do that and still meet the…the timeline of the overhaul or defueling.”