By Carlo Munoz
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.— The Navy will need roughly $14 billion in shipuilding investments per year through 2020 to support the service’s goal of a 313-ship fleet through 2025, according to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
That figure would allow the Navy to stay on pace to replace the large number of legacy ships set to retire by 2020, maintain current shipbuilding priorities such as the Littoral Combat Ship and the DDG-1000 and support the Ohio-class submarine replacement program, Mabus told reporters during a briefing shortly after his April 11 speech here at the Navy League’s annual Sea, Air and Space symposium.
“What we have set forth is an average of $14 billion a year [for] building ships, [and] that is based on history,” Mabus said. “We can get the ships we need for that amount of money.”
Despite the common assumption that defense spending will shrink in the coming years, the service secretary said the level of confidence among service leaders that the Navy could hit that $14 billion mark within its shipbuilding accounts was “very high,” adding that the figure was “absolutely realistic” given the current fiscal environment.
“Increasing the size of the fleet is so important, but it is also a relatively small percentage of our budget that we are devoting to [shipbuilding],” he said. “We are going to get to that.”
The $14 billion figure, according to Mabus, was fomulated by service requirements and procurement personnel “being realistic about how much ships ought to cost, should cost and about how much money Congress has historcially appropriated,” Mabus said.
When asked how the Navy intended to achieve its shipbuilding goals under that $14 billion cap, the service secretary responsed that increased discipline in acquisition decisions and contract negotiations with industry will ensure that service officials get the best bang for their buck.
Navy Undersecretary Bob Work reiterated that hard-line approach to procurement that service leaders believe will be integral in keeping shipbuilding accounts in line.
“Not everything we want to do we are going to be able to do, [so] we ask ourselves ‘how much does it cost, what capabilities does it buy us, can we afford it and how can we make it more affordable,'” Work told reporters shortly after an April 13 speech here by Navy acquisition executive Sean Stackley.
“The companies that can prove that they can deliver a good product…[and] speed it to the fleet, they are going to get more contracts,” Work added.
The sea service’s longstanding shipbuilding plan has the Navy hitting a base fleet size of 313 ships over the next few years, with that number reaching closer to 325 in 2020, according to acquisition officials. That buildup will likely top out by the 2020 time frame, when at that time acquisition will taper off from that 325-ship high, due to scheduled retirements of legacy ships and the introduction of the SSBN(X) submarine program.
That said, Navy officials have been in talks with the Defense Department leadership on a plan to marginally increase the service’s topline spending figure for shipbuilding by $2 billion annually, beginning in 2020, to support the SSBN(X) and other recapitalization priorities, Stackley told members of the House Armed Services seapower subcommittee on March 9.