The fiscal year 2017 budget, the last for the outgoing Obama administration, is still a week from officially going public, but Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) is predicting the spending plan will reflect a shift in strategic thinking toward a larger Navy, to include support for a special fund for future submarines.
Forbes, who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, told reporters Tuesday that both Pentagon officials and lawmakers have undergone an “intellectual shift” toward increasing the Navy’s ship count.
As an example of the shift away from cutting ships and toward “rebuilding” the fleet, Forbes offered the “overwhelming” bipartisan support for the National Seabased Deterrence Fund created as a depository for investments in the Ohio-class replacement. Bipartisan support for the fund was representative of a “momentum shift” toward recognition that the Navy needs to be larger, Forbes said.
The fund was created in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act to separate advanced funding for 12 Ohio-class replacement nuclear ballistic missile submarines from the Navy’s base budget. It was preserved in the current fiscal year and has enjoyed wide-ranging support on Capitol Hill primarily because it is designed to shave per-sub costs by allowing bulk purchase of long-lead time materials.
Photo: U.S. Navy
“We know we are going to buy 12 of those boats,” he said of the Ohio-class replacement submarines. “Do we want to pay for 12 or would we like to buy 12 and only have to pay for 11? That’s what the seabased deterrent fund actually does.”
Some lawmakers are concerned that setting aside funding for advanced materials purchases might be a waste if the Navy ends up buying fewer submarines than currently intended. Forbes said there is no doubt the Navy will end up with 12 Ohio-class replacement nuclear submarines.
“This thing is going to save a lot of money. They’ve talked 10 to 15 percent. So essentially, here is our question: We know, we know, we know we’re going to build 12 of these boats, so that gives a certainty that takes away any of that risk,” he said. “This program simply lines up because of the clarity of exactly what we know we need, we know we’re going to build them.”
Support for the fund is part of a larger, broader paradigm shift in thinking both on the Hill and in the Pentagon toward funding necessary national defense instead of designing a national security strategy within available funding, Forbes said.
In 2008, none of the presidential candidates were focused on defense spending as a priority, he said. Then in 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney championed the cause of increasing the Navy’s fleet size by parroting the technically correct claim that the surface fleet was smaller than it was before World War I.
“Virtually every Republican [presidential hopeful]…they’re not just talking about increasing national defense, they are talking about rebuilding the Navy and increasing the number of ships we have and the size of the Navy,” Forbes said.
“The thing that I’m most excited about is this new kind of understanding that we need to rebuild and increase the Navy,” Forbes said. “Now it’s a question of how big we do need to rebuild it to.”
A tug-of-war remains between those that believe the Navy should strive for capacity–more ships–and those that favor capability over sheer size. Romney’s argument that the Navy has fewer warships than it did in 1916 ignored the fact that modern destroyers and carriers are vastly more capable than their steam-driven Dreadnought predecessors.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has directed the Navy to focus on capability over capacity at least in buying Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). Carter ordered the Navy to buy 40 LCSs instead of the planned 52 with a focus on modularity and multi-mission capability rather than fleet size.
As a result, the Navy in fiscal 2017 likely will focus on increasing its carrier-based aviation capabilities by purchasing Boeing [BA] F/A-18E/F Super Hornets as a bridge to the fifth-generation Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35C, according to analysis by Katherine Blakeley, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“In shipbuilding, this means keeping the Virginia-class attack submarine on track, probably increasing the number of Virginia-class subs to receive the Virginia Payload Module, and protecting early funding for the Ohio-class replacement program,” Blakeley wrote in a recent report previewing the fiscal 2017 budget to be released Feb. 9.
Forbes warned that balancing capacity and capability is a “false choice.” The same goes with compensating with “surge capacity,” the idea that forces and equipment can be rushed to the field in an emergency.
“I think this is a huge false choice. If you ever start saying ‘Do we want capacity or capability?’ you miss what national defense is all about,” he said. “We definitely need more ships. Every analysis that you have, every laydown that you have [says] you’ve got to have more ships…We don’t get to beam [troops and equipment] one place or the other, you have to sail them there.”