Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
2/6/2015
Coupled with a tight funding environment, the Navy’s Feb. 2 release of its Fiscal Year 2016 budget request, which contains $10 billion in programmed funding over the Future Years’ Defense Program for research and development and advanced procurement of the Ohio-Class Replacement Program (ORP), has raised questions about whether the service may be forced to trim its ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) posture. The Obama Administration this week requested $1.4 billion for the Ohio-Class Replacement for FY 2016, about $200 million more than the FY 2015-enacted amount, and officials have recently suggested that the programmed FYDP funding could eat up half to two-thirds of the service’s shipbuilding budget.
ORP Could Occupy Two-Thirds of Navy’s Shipbuilding Budget
The 2011 Budget Control Act, combined with the projected cost of the Navy’s No. 1 priority—estimates for ORP submarines hover around $8.3 billion apiece—has left officials, industry and Congress wondering about funding strategies. While Congress authorized a set-aside Sea-Based Deterrence Fund account to collect up to $3.5 billion for unobligated balances from FYs 2014, 2015 and 2016, appropriators have not put money into the account. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that ORP could take up about half of the service’s shipbuilding (SCN) budget over the next five years, and Rear Adm. William Lescher, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget, noted similar concerns during a Feb. 2 Pentagon budget press briefing. “Our new construction SCN averages about $15 billion per year, and these boats are, once past the lead boat … about $10 billion per year,” he said. “So it will require about two-thirds of the SCN, absent relief. And they are the top programmatic priority at the department. They will get built. Very much a concern on the impacts to the broader shipbuilding approach, absent the relief that we feel is required to do this.”
Will DoD Change SSBN Posture Requirement?
The FY 2016 ORP request was released at a time when arms control advocates are calling for program reductions and three months after the Congressional Budget Office released a report that presented reducing the deployed SSBN requirement from 12 to eight as an option to alleviate the national deficit. “The savings under this option would total $11 billion in outlays from 2015 through 2023,” the report states. “During the 2030s, this option would save an additional $30 billion by avoiding the purchase of four more Ohio Replacement submarines.”
Peter Huessy, a nuclear weapons expert and president of the defense consulting firm GeoStrategic Analysis, disputed the credibility of the CBO report and cautioned that cutting the SSBN posture could leave U.S. forces exposed to potential adversaries, but acknowledged that reinstated BCA caps could prompt the Navy to reconsider its 12-SSBN posture requirement. “You cannot do the shipbuilding, including the Ohio Replacement, if you go through sequestration,” he told NS&D Monitor. “You’d have to delay a whole lot of ships. And then what you’re going to do is, given the whole life of the current [SSBN], the Navy is either going to have to say, ‘Oh yeah, I can continue to steam out there,’ or say, ‘We just can’t deploy the 12 ships we put the subs in….We’ve got to go down.’”
During the last 13 years of the Navy’s transition from the current Ohio-Class to its replacement, from 2029 to 2042, only 10 ballistic missile submarines will be deployed, according to officials. “But now you’re talking about going down to even less than that probably,” Huessy said. “That’s not good, because you can’t fulfill your targeting then.” Fewer submarines would equate to fewer hittable targets. “So you’d be basically saying ‘I cannot implement the strategy we now have for deterrence,’ ” he said. For at least the next fiscal year, the Defense Department will continue the current posture requirement of 14 SSBNs, Mike McCord, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), said during a Pentagon budget briefing this week.
Simple ‘As the Stroke of a Pen’
Changing submarine posture requirements would be as simple as “the stroke of a pen in the hand of the President,” said Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “That’s always been the case.” Military officials obey and follow the President’s U.S. nuclear war plan, the Nuclear Employment Strategy of 2013, which directs the location and number of SSBN patrols. SSBN posture requirements are based on those directives. “The issue is not, ‘Should we do it despite the President’s guidance?’ The issue is how do you change the President’s guidance so it’s possible to reduce it?”
Over the last decade, the annual number of deterrent patrols has declined by about half, Kristensen said, and the President could direct further patrol cuts if he wanted to. Today, about four or five SSBNs are in a launch-ready posture spread between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, he said. “It’s just to say that there’s a portion of the submarines that are out there that have to be, under current guidance, within reach every day, and then there’s most of the submarines that are not in that requirement,” Kristensen said. “They sail around, do other things, are moving around to and from the patrol area to replace the ones that are out there, so there’s that kind of cycle going on all the time.” He said if the President reduces the patrol number requirement, revised standards for SSBN posture could follow.
Increase Shipbuilding Budget?
Huessy proposed increasing the shipbuilding budget as “the only way” to accommodate ORP and sustain the Navy’s conventional fleet, and pointed to the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, which boosted funding for Navy ships, he said. “Is the 11th Commandment ‘Thou shalt not increase the conventional ship budget?’ ” Huessy said. “I don’t understand. Who said the shipbuilding budget of the United States is set in stone and you can’t increase it? We’ve increased it and decreased it in years past.” ORP plans call for construction of 12 subs to be deployed starting in 2031, with a full force from 2042 until the 2080s. The vessels will require fewer mid-life refueling overhauls than their predecessors.
NAVSEA Commander Says $10 Billion Will Keep ORP Afloat
The $10 billion earmarked in the FYDP for ORP research and development and advanced procurement would keep the program on track, Vice Adm. William Hilarides, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), said Feb. 5 at the Naval Future Force Science & Technology Expo in Washington. Asked whether the BCA factored into budget considerations, Hilarides said, “I don’t believe, to my knowledge, there was any gaming. It was all about system.” The commander’s words fall within the framework that Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work laid out during his Feb. 2 FY 2016 defense budget request briefing, which Work said was a “strategy-driven resource and forward budget,” designed to support key priorities of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, including “key modernization efforts.”
The Navy’s programmed advanced procurement funding for the Ohio-Class Replacement starts in FY 2017, according to budget documents. General Dynamics Electric Boat has been doing research and development work on the program, with B&W and Huntington Ingalls serving as subcontractors. NAVSEA is expected to award for ORP’s engineering and manufacturing development phase (Milestone B) in FY 2016. Lescher said that the Navy’s “2-4-6 Plan” could alleviate some of the peak SCN costs that could be seen in tandem with ORP procurement. “That is very much a focus and a concern of the department,” Lescher said. The “2-4-6 Plan” involves extending the service lives of 11 cruisers by five years, he said. The process involves long-term phase modernization of two cruisers per year for a period no greater than four years and no greater than six ships in modernization at any given time.
Technical Superiority
Also speaking at the Naval Future Force Expo, Sean Stackley, Navy Assistant Secretary for Research, Development and Acquisition, said he did a “technical deep-dive” this week exploring mostly classified Ohio-Class Replacement capabilities, but emphasized the need for the SSBN follow-on to achieve acoustic superiority, among other capabilities, throughout the submarines’ life cycle. “We’re being very careful to project what signatures we believe are necessary for that submarine and its various operating profiles, what technologies are necessary from stem to stern to deliver that signature profile,” he said. “It will manage those signatures.”
Also speaking at the Naval Future Force Expo, Adm. Michelle Howard, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, agreed with Stackley that acoustic superiority “across the decades” would be important to ensure the sea-based leg of the nuclear triad retains its superior survivability. “The cornerstone of this [nuclear deterrence] proposition is that … if we are struck, we will have the ability to strike back.”
Quieting Alone Might Not Be Sufficient
A report released last month by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) entitled “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare” notes that current SSBN stealth capabilities are based on making the submarines quiet, and also underscores high costs associated with reducing noise. “The ability of submarines to hide through quieting alone will decrease as each successive decibel of noise reduction becomes exponentially more expensive and new detection techniques mature that rely on phenomena other than the sounds emanating from a submarine,” the report, completed by CSBA Strategic Studies Senior Fellow Bryan Clark, states.
Clark told reporters last month that the Ohio-Class Replacement subs would need to incorporate stealth capabilities that account for areas outside of acoustics. The report notes that slight environmental changes caused by submarines can now be detected in real-time by “big data” computer processing.
