By Emelie Rutherford
The Navy’s top officer said yesterday the service must proceed with plans to retire frigates so it can pay bills tied to manpower and new littoral ships.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead was asked at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space conference if, when weighing total ownership costs, the service should consider extending the lives of 30 FFGs nearing the ends of their service lives.
In Congress, House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) has pushed the Navy to keep using two of three frigates set to be retired, to bolster the size of the service’s fleet (Defense Daily, April 22).
“It has become a bit topical lately,” Roughead said yesterday about FFG retirements. Yet he emphasized the “budget realities” facing the Navy during the U.S. economic downturn, including high manpower costs tied in part to “operating a fleet that’s very, very active.”
“To not be able to remove ships on plan, there’s only one place where you go to get that money, and that’s procurement,” he said. “So if you want to extend the ship for a couple of more years, you have to make the decision, are you not going to build anything new.”
He said even though the FFGs “have served us very, very well, it is time to take them out of service.”
“We have a good replacement in the form of the Littoral Combat Ship, regardless of which variant is selected” in a current contract competition between Lockheed Martin [LMT] and General Dynamics [GD], Roughead said. “That’s where we need to be focused. Hanging on to the old stuff will preclude us from getting to the new.”
Taylor has talked about trying to help the Navy with manpower costs–which greatly concern Roughead–to delay some frigate retirements.
Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen, who spoke with Roughead at the National Harbor, Md., conference, added his service would not have a use for the FFGs. That’s because the Coast Guard needs ships that travel without oil-carrying vessels, which the FFGs require, and instead uses ships that can carry more fuel, Allen said.
“The FFGs in their time did exactly what they needed for the Navy, as will the Littoral Combat Ship,” the Coast Guard leader said.