Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
3/6/2015
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) on March 4 nudged fellow lawmakers on the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to bankroll the Navy’s National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund (SBDF), which was included in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act as a separate fund from the service’s general shipbuilding account. “We’re now in the beginning of reconstituting our seaborne deterrence, and I would hope that this committee will look very favorably in providing funds through that mechanism which could be applied to … the need to supplement the shipbuilding fund,” Reed said during a Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on Navy and Marine Corps FY 2016 budget requests. While the SBDF is authorized to receive up to $3.5 billion in unobligated balances from Fiscal Years 2014-2016, it remains unfunded.
Navy Could Face Future OR Funding Challenges
Reed spoke in response to a warning by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus that the service could sustain “very harmful” service-wide effects if Congress does not plus up the SCN account or fails to prioritize funding for the Ohio-class Replacement (OR) as an SCN-independent national asset. “I can’t stress how harmful the effects will be on either the fleet or everything else in the Navy,” Mabus said, adding that, over time, the Ohio-class Replacement would siphon about 40 percent of the service’s shipbuilding budget if federal funding levels remain the same. In written testimony, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said he was becoming “increasingly concerned” about his service’s ability to fund the Ohio-class replacement past 2020 within current and projected funding levels. “The Navy cannot procure the Ohio Replacement in the 2020s within historical shipbuilding funding levels without severely impacting other Navy programs,” the testimony states.
In response to a question by Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) during a March 4 hearing of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said the Ohio-class Replacement should be funded within the defense budget, and said the program is one of many national priorities in DoD’s FY 2016 funding request. He echoed the funding concerns of his Navy colleagues. “The Ohio class ages out in the decade of the ‘20s to ‘30s. There’s nothing we can do about that. It has to do with hull life and the number of times it has contracted and expanded as it’s submerged and surfaced, so it has to be replaced,” Carter said. “It’s so big during the period of 2020 to 2030 that it threatens other aspects of the shipbuilding program that the Navy has. That is a big problem for all of us going forward, because this is a critical need.”
Senators and Congressmen on March 4 gathered in decrying sequestration and expressing support for the submarine industry during a Capitol Hill Congressional breakfast sponsored by the Submarine Industrial Base Council. Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said busting DoD’s discretionary spending caps was the only way to fund the OR. “You can’t do it by accounting tricks,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘Well, don’t worry about that, we’ll find some money in the OCO [Overseas Contingency Operations] budget.’ Folks, OCO is just what it is. It’s a contingency budget. Don’t fund long-term needs of this nation in a contingency budget. That is ridiculous. People that suggest that aren’t serious about the long-term national defense needs of this nation. It can’t be funded by that. You can’t play games with it. You got to be truthful about what it takes to fund this nation’s military.”
Speaking during the breakfast, Reed said he and his colleagues were working hard to fund OR. He cited the need for top-line relief to “reinvigorate” the nuclear triad, and challenged the FY 2016 defense funding request, calling it “good, but not enough.” He also said the OR program was the “best shipbuilding program in the Navy, no doubt about it.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said the U.S. needs to keep up with and prepare for other powers such as Russia and China. “Russia is not slowing down,” he said. “You know that they are pushing out the envelope of sub patrols, such that we know that we’ve seen one within 200 miles of American shores.”
Historical SSBN Procurement
Mabus pointed to what he called a “dramatically” increased Navy shipbuilding budget during the 1976-1992 procurement for the current Ohio-class submarines and a funding boost for the “41 for Freedom” ballistic missile submarines in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mabus said those funding hikes did not shield the shipbuilding budget from monetary impacts, and he told reporters after the hearing that those examples illustrate a strong OR funding case to make to Congress. In the early 1980s, “Navy shipbuilding was almost doubled,” Mabus told reporters after the hearing. “But even that wasn’t enough to halt the rest of the fleet going down about 40 percent. So you’ve got two issues here—we’ve got to have strategic deterrence. It’s the most survivable leg of the triad. It is a national program, and you have to recapitalize it from time to time. But on the other side, you’ve got the Navy outside the strategic deterrence, and we’ve got to have a balanced enough Navy to do the missions that we do. And those are the things in conflict, and that’s the reason why we think either a separate fund or plussing up the Navy shipbuilding budget” will help secure OR procurement.
Most Recent Cost Estimate
A statement submitted to Congress on Feb. 25 by Sean Stackley, the Navy’s Assistant Secretary for Research, Development and Acquisition, indicates the service currently estimates the total inflation-adjusted OR cost at $139 billion, about $60 billion more than the Navy’s most recently held previous estimate stated during a 2011 service briefing to House Armed Services Committee staff. During the budget hearing, Greenert said under New START, the Navy will carry about 70 percent of strategic nuclear warheads by 2020. Speaking to House lawmakers, Carter said that SSBNs were high-cost, but nonetheless a key leg of the nuclear triad. “These things are expensive,” he said. “We are trying to get the cost of them down, so that it’s not as big of a bill, but it’s going to be a substantial bill.” The Navy plans to deliver the first OR in 2028, sending it to its first patrol in 2031.
Additional FY 16 Money for Navy Strategic Forces
Greenert’s testimony indicates that in addition to the $10 billion his service has programmed toward the OR through the Future Years’ Defense Program (FYDP), the service will require about $2.2 billion from FY 2016-2020 to boost civilian end-strength in shipyards and Nuclear Strategic Weapons Facilities, to accelerate investments in shipyard infrastructure, fund additional manpower for nuclear weapons surety and pay for nuclear weapon training systems. The November-released independent Nuclear Enterprise Review described a rapidly aging civilian shipyard workforce, and recommended the Navy hire about 2,450 civilian shipyard and refit facility workers as well as update Strategic Weapons Facility infrastructures.
