Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) addressed the elephant in the room at the House Armed Services Committee hearing last week — or, more accurately, the elephant in the Navy’s shipbuilding budget: the Ohio-class replacement submarine.
[Note: See the full text of Courtney’s and Hagel’s comments at Virtual Analyst’s Ohio-class replacement program report here.]
With the shipbuilding budget already capped out at about $15 billion per year and not likely to grow much, if at all, the Navy is going to somehow have to find a way to add a sub that will cost — optimistically — $5 billion per copy beginning in the 2020s.
“We’re going to hit a point when we have to start building these, that the strain on the shipbuilding account is going to be a bulge,” Courtney said. “And something’s got to give here in terms of, you know, whether we can continue to maintain a 300-ship Navy and obviously meet this critical requirement.”
Hagel didn’t have much of a response for Courtney, indicating that the Defense Department doesn’t yet have a realistic idea of how to handle it yet. The idea that the Navy would sacrifice any significant portion of the program seems unlikely; Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert told Congress last September that the Ohio-class replacement is “the top priority program for the Navy.”
Greenert proposed that Congress could provide a total of $60 billion over 15 years in supplemental funding for the program, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Anything less than that, he argued, and the Navy will have to start cutting into its ship buys. Not getting any supplemental funding would cost the service 32 ships from its 30-year shipbuilding plan, according to Greenert.
The CRS report indicated the Navy had a few options — all of them painful. It could cut SSBN(X) buys, alter the procurement to allow for supplemental funding, or fund the ship outside the Navy budget.
Hagel didn’t have any answers at last week’s hearing. But he at least appeared to agree with Courtney that this budget cycle marks the time to get some hard answers.
“The budget that we are presenting this week and the QDR [quadrennial defense review] that was brought up this week is going to generate some considerable interest and dialogue as we go along, as it should,” Hagel said. “It’ll come out of this committee. It’ll come out of the Budget Committee. It’ll be out of Appropriations. Everybody will have a hand in giving their opinion as well as all the think tanks and all the writers and everybody who has something to say about this.”