By Carlo Munoz
Navy shipbuilding accounts will hit a tipping point when production begins to backslide over the next decade, unless the service can secure increases in future topline budget requests, senior Navy leaders told Congress this week.
The sea service is on track to hit a base fleet size of 313 ships over the next few years, with that number reaching closer to 325 in 2020, Navy acquisition executive Sean Stackley said at a March 9 hearing of the House Armed Services seapower subcommittee.
That ramp-up, according to Stackley, will likely peak in the 2020 time frame but after that point shipbuilding numbers will begin to plateau and eventually drop off from that 325-ship high. While planned retirements of legacy ships will contribute to that decline, the introduction of the SSBN(X) submarine will have the biggest impact.
“It is such a substantial program that it really does suppress build rates during that period,” Stackley said of the sub development effort. “We have a mid-term issue of having to, one, ensure that the Ohio replacement program does not escape in terms of cost, and…within our top-line work priorities and to the extent possible affordability to minimize the impact on the longer term. We don’t hesitate to describe the concern and the impacts to meeting our requirements in the long-term associated with that.”
The new submarine will replace the 14 Ohio-class boats currently in the fleet. The first of the expected 12 SSBN(X) subs will enter the service around 2029. Those procurements, along with the need to fill the gaps left by the retiring ships, will put Navy procurement in a precarious position, service secretary Ray Mabus said the same day.
“The issue will be is once we begin to build the SSBN(X) in the 2020s [and] with the retirement of so many ships that were built in the ’80s–is how to bridge that gap,” he told members of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, “It’s not a decision we have to make this year or even next year, but it will put a dent in the fleet in the mid 2020s if all the money that is used to build these SSBN-Xs come directly out of the Navy.”
To help close that spending gap, 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 said.
Service officials are already working to trim costs on SSBN(X) production, taking lessons learned from the development of the Virginia-class submarine and applying them to the SSBN(X) program, Vice Adm. John Blake, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, said at the House seapower subpanel alongside Stackley.
“We specifically looked at not only their…hull maintenance and engineering, but also their combat systems suite” on the Virginia class “and we leveraged off those programs in order to apply them to the SSBN(X),” he said.
Moreover, Blake noted work on the SSBN(X) was well ahead of the Virginia and Seawolf class subs when those boats were at the same level of development. As a result, program officials have been able to shave nearly $1 billion per ship.
“So when you take all those factors into effect, I think what you see is that we think we are in a good place when it comes to both the cost and scheduling, and to deliver that ship, because there is no alternative,” Blake said.
Issues over escalating costs for the submarine’s development have caused concern on Capitol Hill. Last September, Pentagon acquisition chief Ash Carter personally assured lawmakers that DoD was taking steps to pare down the program’s price tag (Defense Daily, Sept. 30, 2010).
At a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Carter said Navy and Pentagon efforts to trim development costs on SSBN(X) were well underway.
“It’s more a question of ‘how’ than ‘whether,'” he said at the time. “On the other hand, if you don’t get the ‘how’ right you’re going to get the ‘whether’ wrong….So, we don’t want to get ourselves in a situation with SSBN(X) where we design a submarine that we know we don’t be able to afford.”